Skill Ups

Mostly odds and ends taken care of today. I did finally add the code to give ship crew members a chance to gain skills upon completion of actions. So far I've added it to Planet Square Scans and Asteroid Scans.

Here's a screenshot of a report after a successful scan that shows the Science Officer increasing his skill.

I'm currently using the following formula to determine if you get a skillup:

ran(1,200) < (10.1 - Current Skill)*10 = + 0.1 skill increase

For example, if your skill is 0.1, then you have a 100 base chance to get a skill up. The system then gets a random number between 1 and 200. If it comes up less than 100, your skill goes up. I may make some skills harder than this, and will likely make it so that some skill can only go past 5.0 by participating in combat.

Using this method, it will take an average of roughly 800 to 1000 attempts to reach max skill level. This should translate into literally years of real time before a character maxes out the skill, especially with some actions that take a long time like Jumping to a new star system, which is the only way to raise the Astrogation skill.

Weekend Update

The good news is I'm over my blah feelings from a few days ago. I just needed some time vegetating on the couch and some extra sleep and a few games of Axis and Allies : War at Sea with my son to clear my head.

No major updates in the last few days, but I have been working on a lot of small stuff that will eventually lead to some major changes.

One thing I did add this weekend was a new position to the ship's crew called Specialist. This position will be used to check for skills like Mining that will allow for better Gas Giant Scooping or Comet Harvesting. My vision for now is that most skills can only be raised during "field work" on board a ship, so if you want your mining outpost or colony to have a better mining administrator he's going to need to get some experience out in space first.

I also started getting the framework ready to implement Morale for ships and colonies. Morale on ships will decrease at a steady rate, likely 0.1 per 24 hours, but there are other things that can affect it in more drastic ways like a Misjump or being involved in combat. Ships will need to visit colonies and issue the Shore Leave command to raise morale. Ships with lower morale will face penalties in using the skills of their personnel, and ships with very low morale may face mutiny. This will basically be a way of removing unplayed ships from the game without the GM having to intervene. I'll probably have it so that 0.1 class ships that go to 0 morale just disappear from the game so there won't be too many of them clogging things up.

Asteroid Fields and UI

Lots of work today on the ship interface for asteroid fields. I'm pretty much done with landing on an asteroid and scanning asteroid squares, other than adding a check to see if the crew member associated with each action gets a skill bump.

I also did some work on adjusting the layout for the ship screens, since I wasn't really happy with it yet. I'm still not completely satisfied, but it's better. I generally like to go with a nice clean interface that isn't cluttered up with a lot of noisy objects, and sometimes I have to remind myself of this like I did tonight.

I've also made myself a major to-do item to harden the code around setting new actions for ships, since I discovered several security holes that would let someone get their ship severely out of whack in the database. Mostly this just involves not trusting the input coming in via the GET or POST actions.

Slow Progress

I'm all over the place on development work right now. There's so much to do that I often just log into the game and start working on whatever I come across first. I am working off a short "to do" list, and my next goal is to get to the point where I can let a few people create new accounts and start doing some very early testing in the game. I don't want to work in a complete vacuum so getting feedback from some others would be helpful at this point.

I'm almost finished with the basic new player setup. At this point you'll just choose a name and gender of your captain, and name your ship. Everyone will start at the same colony in the same star system for now. The captain will have the basic skills needed to run the small ship by himself unless the player chooses to hire another crew member with the few credits they'll have leftover.

Eventually I want to make the new player setup a bit more complicated, where you'll choose a career path for your captain which will determine his starting skill set and where he and your new ship appear in the game. This will let you specialize your starting ship to be a miner, trader, military, etc.