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.

Radiation

I made a decision today to drop Radiation as an overall stat for a planet, moon, or asteroid field. I think it will be better implemented as an individual "hazard" for a specific square of those objects. So if you're scanning a planet square you may discover while reading the report from your science officer that the square you just scanned has "higher than normal radiation levels" or somesuch techno-babble. This means more work for the world builder (me), but I think it will be better in the long run.

Year 17 - Day 268

As I peel the layers of the onion back while working on the colony design and coding, I tend to come to a point where I need to go and work on something else in order to fully develop what I've been working on.

I recently came to this point with colony population growth. I need to figure out what the survivability factor is for a given colony on a given planet, and I realized I never finished putting in all the descriptors in for planets. I had only added Atmosphere type and neglected to add Gravity Rating, Radiation Rating, Temperature, and Tectonic Activity. I may leave that last one out from the general planet description and just add tectonics to certain locations on the planet for the sake of simplicity. I'm also going to add a rating for the amount of sunlight or luminosity that is reaching the planet's surface, but that will be a calculated value based on the distance from the sun and the atmosphere and will require more research.

I did some research looking for planetary temperature ratings systems and found this site:

A Thermal Planetary Habitability Classification for Exoplanets

which offered a great system for rating the temperature of planets that is very authentic and geeky at the same time. So I lifted it whole hog and added it to the game.

Here's a screenshot of what I have so far. I still need to add the other values and I'm toying with the idea of doing a redesign of this screen where I move the top info container over to the left side.

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.

Progress

I cleaned up some code on the Planet display screen tonight to use the new tile system and some small gui improvements.

I've also been slowly adding more tiles to the database.  I'm probably averaging about 100 a day, so in a month I may be finished.  Then I'll have to create default descriptions for each.  The fun never ends.  Heh.

Tusks and Toes

So I've finished off the majority of the code rewrite.  The game now correctly displays planet squares in the new system in all three screens that show them.  Now I just need to add a few more things to the planet editor and test it a bit.

I've still got thousands of image tiles to go through and get into the database, so that's still going to be a real chore.  I can just dribble those in for now though.

I also realized that I've got to do all of this again with the Asteroid Squares now.  Sigh.

Bite Two

I made more progress on the planet tile rewrite tonight, although I don't have much to show for it in the game.  Tonight I concentrated on learning how to use local browser storage and implementing it on the planet edit page.  Now when I load this page, the tile information gets stored locally in my browser so I can rapidly display different sets of tiles by changing dropdown values. I also had to brush up on my javascript skills since it's been a while since I've added and removed elements from the DOM that way.

This has no bearing on you as a player at all, but it will let me create planets faster and easier, so there will be more content for you to explore.

I did import some more tiles to the database also, but I've still got a LONG way to go on that.

First Bite

So tonight I finally started Eating the Elephant on the planet tile rework. In the last couple of days I had to figure out what exactly it was I wanted to do, since I didn't leave myself very good notes the last time I expended a lot of brain power on this. There are several phases for this that I'll be going through.

1. Create new tile db table and add all 3000+ image tiles to it.

     Actually, I haven't even finished uploading all of the graphics that my artist sent me in the first place. This is the part I'm dreading the most since I'm going to have to actually eyeball each tile and add the topology and terrain type for it's entry in the database.

 2. Rewrite the Edit tool.

      This won't be too bad since the point of this whole rewrite in the first place was to make this easier. This may be the first place I use some real HTML5 for the game since it's an Admin tool and I won't mind storing data in a local db.

3. Rewrite the planet and asteroid field display code.

     This shouldn't be too bad.  I'm saving this for last though.

 4. Wipe all planet/asteroid data and make new ones.

     I think there are only about 5 planets and moons in the game anyway that have any real design to them. Once I get this all together I'll be able to make a random planet generator, which should be a lot of fun to work on.

 So as of tonight I've done a small amount of Step 1 and a small amount of Step 2.  Hopefully I'll have some screenshots to show off by this weekend.

The Big Dig

Well, I seem to have convinced myself that my next big project on the game is to finally rework the code that generates planet displays. This is going to involve moving more information into the database and reworking the engine that displays planetary surfaces. I'll probably be working on this for at least a week, if not more. This will make it much easier for me to eventually create a random planet generator, and since I'm going to need hundreds of planets eventually, I'll need to generate them randomly first then modify them. The new system should also allow more flexibility so I can put mineral resources and anomalies and other nifty stuff for players to find when they're down on the surface. Usually when I start working on this much code it leads me in another interesting direction also, so I may even dream up a new feature or two.

Planets

I've been working on the planet screen a bit, but I'm really just avoiding the fact that I need to tear apart how I'm doing planets and make some major changes. I'm not currently storing enough information about each planet square to make it interesting at all, so I need to be able to store the terrain type, secondary type, and a short description if there is something there besides the default terrain. I also need to rebuild the GM tool used to build planets, since it's currently not user-friendly at all and eventually I'll need help building the hundreds of planets the game will have to start with.