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 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.

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.

Asteroid Fields Continued

Today was mostly trying to completely finish up the Asteroid functionality with regards to ships. Ships can now land on asteroid squares and by tomorrow ships will be able to scan asteroid field squares that the player does not have currently in their library.

I decided to go ahead and make a player scan every possible square in an asteroid field to reveal the squares, as opposed to only making the player scan squares that actually have rocks in them. My reasoning for this right now is that I want the exploration of asteroid fields to be long and tedious, since these fields are going to yield the best rewards in the game for minerals. This also makes a complete scan of an asteroid field a valuable commodity. I may revisit this in the future, but for now I'm going to go with it.

I'm also trying to do some testing on the asteroid field code at the same time, and have closed up several vulnerabilities that would have allowed the player to cause mischief.

Scans

Not a lot going on today, but I did make some changes to the way ships find Interstitial Access Points (IAPs). IAPs are basically wormholes and are how ships jump from one star system to another. To find an IAP, a ship has to be in a space square and use the Scan System Square command, which will probably take about 20 minutes - the Sensors skill of your ship's Science Officer.

Once the scan completes, if you're in the same space square as an unknown IAP, your ship will discover it and it will be added to your company's library. If you're not in the same square as an IAP, the report generated will tell you approximately how far away you are from the nearest unknown IAP. This will allow you to triangulate in on the unknown IAP until you finally discover it.

Originally, I had it set so that the scan just told you how far away you were from the closest IAP, even if you already knew the location of it. I thought that might be too frustrating though, so I've changed it to this new method.