Year 20 - Day 142

Sorry for the dearth of updates recently. I've been a little busy with other things but I have managed to do some coding almost every day recently. The vast majority of the recent work has been on colonies and colony management. The biggest deal was implementing colony morale and having it affect things like the amount of manhours available to run the complexes. If your people aren't happy, they don't work as much, so you may not have enough labor to go around.

I've also been shifting some screens around and trying to consolidate them to provide more useful information about the colony to the player, as can be seen in the following screenshot.

Right now Morale modifiers are only being affected by certain complexes and the Management skill of the Governor of the colony. As you can see, each level of Mining, Factory, or Processing complex will reduce morale. Eventually I will also add a negative multiplier for having more than one type of these complexes. So if you have Factories and Processors, you will have a penalty. This is to encourage colonies to specialize and not try to do everything at the same colony.

Eventually there will be "Effects" that can also alter colony morale, such as giving them certain items or if certain events take place. So if you give them a Euphoria drug then it may give you a week of +5 morale, as long as you've given them enough for the population.

I've also started buying more artwork from a talented artist I hooked up with in Argentina. I'm not ready to show it off yet, but I think it's really going to make the colonies look good once he's done.

Year 20 - Day 116

I've been working on a lot of stuff recently and still making good progress. What I've actually been working on has been all over the place, but the last day or so has mostly been concentrated on colonies.

I decided to rename Colony Modules to Colony Complexes to better differentiate them from Ship Modules. That was more involved than I thought and along the way I've finally gotten around to implementing some things that haven't been there yet.

In the screenshot you see a colony that has two Manufacturing Complexes. One is level 5 and the other is Level 2, so this colony would be able to produce 7 things at once. Unfortunately, this colony does not have enough colonists to produce enough manhours, so the second complex is operating at a much lower efficiency. So each one is building the same item, but the second one will take much longer to do so.

Available manhours at colony will be a fairly complicated affair, and will depend on what complexes have been built, where the colony was built, morale boosting items given to the colonists, and even what type of colonists are present. It should present an interesting challenge to colony governors.

Year 20 - Day 105

So I haven't posted many screenshots recently so here's a look at what you might see when you're getting ready to do something with one of your ships that is On Station in Star System. The green square indicates where you are, which is in the same square as a terran type planet. The red square is where the mouse is hovering over a Ferrinian type planet and you can see some information about it near the middle of the screen.

On the left is the list of actions you can do at that moment, including a quick list of major things in the system that you can quickly set a waypoint to. It does not include minor objects like moons or asteroid fields or comets.

Each star system is 75 by 75 squares and is divided up into 9 sectors for reference purposes. The map is draggable with the mouse or you can click on the smaller sector grid to quickly scroll to that sector.

Last night I completely wrapped up the Comet Harvesting code and tested it out. You first have to find a comet, after which it may go out of phase, but they are usually in phase for 25 to 35 days before they go out again. Then you move to the same space square and initiate Harvesting from the action panel as long as someone has the Piloting skill on the ship. You can also have the Captain, Science Officer, or Specialist with the Mining skill to help out, but that is not necessary.

At the end of the 8 hours, a skill check is made for Piloting and Mining. A critical pass on either one will boost how many Monopoles you find significantly, while a Pass on the mining will boost it by 10%. A critical failure will cause a 10% loss but no damage to the ship since this is considered more of a low level risk activity. Below is a sample report from a comet harvest.

Pagination on Ship's Log Page

Today I added Pagination to the Ship's Log Page so you can scroll through all the events at your leisure without slamming the database too hard on each page load.

Year 20 - Day 103

After many years of being on the ToDo list, I've finally implemented Misjumps for ships that are attempting to jump to a different star system via IAP. There are many factors that influence the chance of a Misjump happening, which include:

• Size of Ship - the bigger the ship, the more likely it is to misjump.
• Stability of IAP - some are more unstable than others
• The Astrogation skill of the Navigator or Captain of the ship.
• Damage to Jump Engine - this can be bad, very bad.

Depending on how bad your chances of mis-jumping are, the misjump is rated from Minor to Catastrophic. Consequences can range from much longer jump times, damage, and ending up nowhere near where you thought you were going. Damage can be enough to blow up a ship.

Speaking of blowing up ships, I've added another item to the list that when a ship blows up because one section has been destroyed, it won't just disappear. A "wreckage" asset that belongs to no one will be created that can be found by scanning and scavenged. This can result in finding damaged modules and cargo.

Year 20 - Day 92

Been a rough start to the year. Got divorced. Had triple bypass surgery. Covid-19. I've been stuck at home a lot for the last 11 weeks so I've gotten back to work on the game after another long break.

To start with, my host upgraded the PHP version so I've had to remediate thousands of lines of code just to get back to basic functionality. Add to that not seeing the code for several years and I've been balls deep in my own crappy PHP code for weeks now. I've even found lines of comments where I was trolling myself from years ago.

Anyway, I've finally got just about everything remediated and I've been cleaning up the code as well, trying to save myself some technical debt down the road. I've actually started working down the huge list I keep on Trello and adding some new functionality to colonies and to ships.

Most of it revolves around building new colony modules and exploring comets. I've also started pondering the way I want to implement the tech tree again and have made a few other decisions around combat, but I haven't started touching that mess of code yet.

Anyway, no idea when/if I'll finish, but it helps keep me sane and distracted in this crazy ass year 20.

Year 18 - Day 174

Way back when I was first designing this game I knew how I wanted the planet surfaces to look, but I was still struggling on how to display asteroid fields. I wanted them to be rich and complex, and it finally hit me that I should display them in a similar way to how I do planets. Unfortunately, I didn't take the idea far enough at the time and realize that asteroid fields were displayed exactly like planets, so I wrote two separate pieces of code and different database tables to handle them.

Now I'm going back and rectifying this situation, but it's involving a significant amount of code remediation. At the same time, I'm applying some of the better coding habits I've learned over the past 5 years or so and trying to beat this huge pile of crappy PHP code into shape. It's a lot of effort, but should make implementing the rest of the game and debugging it much easier going forward.