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 12 - Day 175

I'm still working on the manufacturing system, and I also got side-tracked with a UI design overhaul.  UI design is extremely painful for me since I don't think I have a very good feel for what's attractive or what colors go with what.  Eventually I'll have to hire someone that is artistic to completely redo it, but for now I think it's better than it was.  See the screenshot below.

I've also started working on Mining, and the first deposit has been created in the database.  Next I'll have the colony that is on top of the mine extracting minerals from it, and then I'll work on the GM tools to place new deposits.

Year 12 - Day 169

So after what was pretty much a lost weekend due to Dreamhost screwing up the servers all weekend long I was able to finish off most of the Manufacturing functionality today.  I've still got to make it actually use up materials and do some more polishing, but right now I can pick an item from a list and have the colony start working on it.

So far I've worked it that you will build Factory Modules at your colony.  The module can have a number of build queues equal to it's integer level.  So a 1.2 module can have one queue, and a 2.7 module can have two.  Once you start building, any needed materials are moved into "Reserve" status, so they still take up space in the Warehouse, but can't be used for anything else.

If you choose to build 200 Structural Units, then it will build each one individually until they're all completed.  Partial builds will be available as soon as they're completed, so if you start building 200, then about five minutes later you'll have 1 new Structural Unit in your warehouse, and 199 left to build.

I've also nailed down the item hierarchy.  It will consist of four levels:

I : Raw Materials (example: Base Metals Ore)
II : Processed Materials (example: Processed Base Metals)
III:  Manufactured Components (example: Electronics, Structural Units)
IV: Manufactured Items (example: Jump Drive, Laser Cannon I)

Each level will be composed of 1 to 3 different types from lower levels.  So Processed Base Metals will take 2 Base Metals Ore.  There will likely be Technology that will lower this ratio.  Structural Units may take 1 Processed Base Metal and 1 Refined Hydrocarbons.

Here's a screenshot of some build queues in action.

It's Alive!

Earlier today, the colony Fort Jackson in the Marvin(1) system finished the first manufactured items in Project Libertine:  It created 26 units of Processed Metals Ore.

Of course, I had to manually enter the build order into the database, but it is currently chugging away on that build queue, creating a new unit every 600 seconds.  It's also not using raw materials yet, but that's just nitpicking, right?

I'm hoping to have the manufacturing code wrapped up by the end of the week, and then dive right into writing the Mining code, which should involve a lot of copying and pasting of code, so hopefully it will go faster.

I also created the first 1000 Human Colonists today, but they're not doing anything as of yet.  Eventually they will provide man-hours needed by the factories and mines.

Manufacturing Started

As I thought I might, I decided to start working on manufacturing today.  I made some good progress, but you can't build anything yet.  Colonies will be able to build Manufacturing Modules, which are rated from 0.1 to 10.0.  The levels from 0.1 to 0.9 are considered Under Construction and the modules are not active.  At 1.0, you gain the ability to use your first Build Queue to construct items.  So you can add a queue to process 500 units of raw ore, or have it start building 10 Jump Modules.  At 2.0 you get another queue, etc.

I got the queue table designed in the database.  At first I went one direction where each module would have permanent queues that hold build instructions, but I decided to go a different direction where you just add queues as you need them and they disappear after they're finished.

My current target is to have the first item manufactured by the end of this week, so stay tuned for news and screenshots.

Colony Modules

More general work on colony modules today. I created the Module page so you can look at details of any module at a colony you own, and from there you'll be able to upgrade the module if you have the right materials on-hand. The upgrade portion is going to be a good bit of work, but I'm hoping to have it operational in the next few days.

I also got the basic framework for Manufacturing modules into the game, although it's not functional yet either. A colony will be able to build one Manufacturing module per colony class, and each Manufacturing module can have up to 10 factories installed, depending on the Level of the module. Each Manufacturing module will have it's own Build Queue, and the more factories it has installed the faster it can build things.

Mining modules will basically work the same way, except each colony can only have one Mining module.

I know this sounds complicated, but I think it will be a bit more clear once I get the interface up and running for it.

I also spent almost an hour just going through all the different screens in the game and tweaking some of the layout and doing some code refactoring. The game definitely looks different than it did even just a few months ago. The UI is definitely not very fancy, but I can always get an artist to help spruce things up later on. I sort of prefer clean layouts anyway.

My current goal to hit by the end of the month is to have mining and manufacturing in the game and make it possible for a ship to find a mineral deposit and create a new outpost on that deposit and the outpost will start producing minerals. This is a huge step in the game, and will mean the basic core of the game will be done, other than combat, which I had intended to be in Phase 2 anyway.