Year 17 - Day 284

I set out to just add a simple feature on the ship screen to show what a square with a purple outline meant. The purple outline means you've done a mineral scan on that square and there was nothing on the screen to indicate what it meant to the player, so I was just going to add a purple square off to the side and put a label that said "PSMS Peformed" next to it.

I realized that's not really exactly what I wanted to do, so I was off down a rabbit hole adding new functionality before I knew it. I already had a popup area that showed when you were over a colony on the planet, so I wanted that same popup to show the results of lack thereof for a PSMS (Planet Square Mineral Scan). While I was doing this I realized I had designed the database tables badly with too much overlapping information, so I ended up dropping several columns and adding some to other tables and then had to go back through all the other screens to see what that broke.

In the end, when you scroll over a planet square with the cursor that has been scanned, the information will now show up, as seen below. I think it worked out much better than just putting a purple square on the screen and then you having to go to another screen to see what was up.

Year 17 - Day 263

Lots of bug killing going on the last day or so. It turns out that when you start actually testing your game like you were a player you find all kinds of problems. Who knew?

I recently created a new mining outpost and transferred some human colonists to it and it has generated zero ore, so there's something I've missed in the outpost setup or the mining code.

Still, there's some good progress going on, even if my Trello board is starting to get pretty crowded with work to do.

Year 17 - Day 26

The last few days I've been working on various small items and polishing off some defects. I have taken some time to re-examine the colony mining code that I completed last week and decided to make some changes.

I had originally planned for a colony to have a Mining Module that could be upgraded to Level 10, and at each level a new Automated Mining Unit (AMU) could be inserted. Each AMU would basically produce the effective deposit yield, which would be affected by things like colony morale, damage to the AMUs, and the Mining skill of the Mining Administrator.

I realized this was just over-complicating things a bit, so I changed it so that each time you upgrade the Mining module it will take one AMU to do so. The damage multiplier will then be determined by the damage level to the complex as a whole instead of individual items making it up. This will also simplify the combat code later on when I add colonies to the combat system.

I also started coding the basic framework of Manpower Hours for colonies and realized I needed to rethink how I was handling colonists. Colonists are basically treated as "items" in the game as far as the code is concerned, but I don't want them to take up space in the warehouse of a colony.

So then I started thinking "do I want them to take up space in the cargo hold of a ship?" So now I'm trying to decide if I want to change it so that colonists and other life-forms have to have a specialized ship module and can't go into a Cargo Module. So it would be something like a Passenger Module, which is where any lifeforms besides the Crew on a ship would be stored.

One consequence of this would be that a newbie ship, which can only have one module, would not be able to carry both cargo and lifeforms, other than the crew in the Command Module. I'll be pondering this one for a bit.

Year 17 - Day 24

Wow, I didn't update at all in 2016. That's mainly because I made very little progress on anything. I've been back at it for a few weeks since the Christmas holidays and I'm beginning to make progress again.

Today I finished up a major component of colonies: Mining.

Any colony can build a colony module and upgrade that module to a maximum of Level 10. For each level you can install an Automated Mining Unit which will allow you to harvest the yield of the deposit the colony is sitting on. So if your colony is sitting on a Metals deposit that yields 10 / hour and you have a level 2 Mining module with 2 amu's installed you would be mining 20 metal ore per hour.

In the screenshot the deposit shown is much larger than it would be in the game. I want to make a conscious decision that it will be extremely difficult if not impossible for a colony to be self-sufficient just on the deposit it is located on. This should encourage trade and exploration. 

I still haven't implemented the Manpower functionality for colonies, but eventually you will have a certain amount of Manpower Hours based on your population and the morale of the colony. You can then assign those hours to various modules and their efficiency will be determined by how well they are staffed. 

Year 15 - Day 43

I've been pushing at least some code every day for the past week or so. In the last day or so I've mostly been working on Admin functionality. I added the ability to randomly create asteroid fields based on the density given when I create them. This leads me to needing to be able to also randomly generate mineral deposits at the same time, so that functionality is coming next.

I've also been doing a lot of pondering on the current Combat code. I'm going to go ahead and integrate the current combat into the game after I figure out how to make ships surrender. I'll still have to tweak weapon accuracy and damage to shorten things up a bit, but it's getting close to being ready.

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.

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.

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.

Loading Up the Ship

My focus this week is on the ship's cargo hold. I'm still relatively inexperienced at database design, so I originally had a table that consisted only of the asset ID and the cargo ID. This was a waste of course, so that table had now been dropped and items will be installed on an asset (ship, colony, ground party), or assigned as cargo to assets.

In other news, Jake the wonder artist has sent over the Water planet tile sets and it looks insanely great, just like the others he's done so far. Next up he's working on the asteroid tile set and I'm anxiously awaiting the outcome. The great thing about Jake's artwork is that it gives me other ideas for the game, and has directly influenced the game design already.

Once I get the cargo areas set up, I'll add the ability for ships to transfer cargo between ships and colonies owned by the same player. This will set things up so that I can add the Scoop Gas Giant action for ships, and will take me one step closer to implementing mining deposits on planets and asteroids.