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.

Year 17 - Day 73

Spent some time tonight working on comets and the Comet detail screen. Below is my current layout for it. I plan on adding some more information other than monopole density, but need to do some more game design around that first.

Currently comets are not seen on the star system map unless you've discovered it or bought the discovery from someone else. To discover a comet you'll need to be within one square of it when you perform a scan.

I'm toying with the idea of having comets also provide small amounts of He3 along with magnetic monopoles. This will make them a bit more interesting.

I'm really toying with an idea of having comets have periods in which they disappear and reappear from the system map. I need to game that idea out some more and see how it's going to work. Currently I don't have ships orbit a comet to interact with it, but may consider changing that. My only issue there is that it may give ships a sort of hidden base to orbit where other ships can't see them.

Year 17 - Day 33

I've been drifting about working on some of the content design items recently. Tonight I got busy and after fixing a few bugs I created a screen to help me track IAPs and then created a routine to randomly generate comets for a given star system. Below is a test run for one corner of the Marvin(1) system. I've got a small bug on the Details section in this screenshot, but it shows results nicely.

I'll probably tweak the code a bit so that two comets won't show up directly adjacent to one another.

Comets will be places to harvest Monopoles and possibly contain anomalies and other adventure nodes. Comets will not display on the screen until you've discovered them by performing a scan within one square of a comet, or you purchase a copy of a scan someone else has done.

Comets

There are certain parts of the code I haven't looked at or tried out in quite a while, and tonight I found that comets were just barely in the game. There was only one comet in the database and it was displaying on the system map, but it had no other data to go along with it and ships couldn't interact with it in any way.

So I fixed that, and now comets can be orbited at least. Next you'll be able to scan the comet to determine some characteristics about, with the most important being the density of Monopoles. Comets are the other object that a ship with a Mining Specialist on board can harvest, resulting in the extremely rare Monopole.

My inspiration for this item came from an old, old PBM I played back in the early 1990's which I can't remember the name of for the life of me. It involved running a colony in a big circular asteroid belt and one of the items you could mine was monopoles.

I'm not sure exactly how monopoles are going to fit into construction yet, but I don know they'll be extremely rare and needed for some of the more powerful items, probably things such as certain weapons or Jump Drives or anything needing something exotic. Whereas scooping a gas giant can net a ship several hundred units of He3, it's likely that harvesting a comet will only result in a handful of monopoles.

One of the things I greatly want to avoid in the game is a runaway economy where colonies have piles and piles of unused materials laying around. I want to err on the side of being too conservative in ore deposits and other raw materials and I want to avoid as much as possible letting one single player have everything they need to build whatever they want without having to interact with other players to get any materials.