Login Page Redesign

I got tired of seeing my boring login page, so I spent a few hours tonight redesigning it.  I like it so far, but I need to buy some scifi artwork to make it look a little better.

I also enterer several hundred more planet tiles into the DB today, and I've got about 200 more to do plus whatever tiles Jake sends me in his next update, but I'm definitely close.  That will just leave the asteroid tiles, but those should go a lot faster.

Spaghetti Anyone?

Blarg.  I started looking into the code I've written over the last few years to display my star systems and it's just plain nasty.  I'm such a hack when it comes to coding.  Heh.  I've started ripping it all out and I'm replacing almost all of it.  At least it's more fun to work on this than to enter more db rows about planet tiles.

I have made a few decisions about how I'm going to use the Morale rating on ships and colonies.  It will act more like an efficiency rating for the most part.  So it will start at 100% and will affect things like how much He3 you scoop at gas giants, or anything else where an efficient, happy crew would be able to do things more effectively.  If morale reaches 0, the ship will mutiny and disappear.  This is how I'll handle accounts that stop playing.  The ships will disappear, but the crew will eventually show up at a colony and can be hired by another player.

The main way to raise morale will be to grant shore leave at a colony.  This is another way to make sure ships have to come back in from the wild every once and a while.  When you grant shore leave, you also have to spend money for the crew salaries, and part of that money will go back to the colony owner.  There will be a type of Entertainment complex that can be constructed at colonies, and the better that complex is the more Morale will be raised for a ship and the colony owner will collect more of the income.

Graphics Update

Things are still moving along slowly on the graphics rewrite.  I've entered over 2000 image tiles into the database and still have about 500 to go.  I've also ordered a new set of supplemental tiles from my artist Jake and will have to enter those as well.  That leaves the entire asteroid field tile set to enter.

I also got Jake to create brand new star system object images, and they look spectacular.  He went above and beyond the call as usual and I'm looking forward to showing off some new star system images very soon.

Code wise, I'm updating the tools to create star systems and planets still, but they're getting better every week.  I can create a basic star system in about 10 minutes, which is a lot faster than it used to be.  Hopefully in a few more weeks I can wrap this up and move on to adding more stuff for players to do in the game.