Colonies

I was staring at the list of what is left to do for ships and realized that I needed to do some work on colonies first. Ok, ok, I didn't really have to, but I've been doing stuff for ships for weeks on end, and I finally got tired of staring at empty colony screens.

I'm not ready to post any screenshots by a long shot, but colonies are slowing becoming more than just a place for ships to land. In the process, I've firmed up some of the design for colonies, which I need to update in the Wiki at some point. Ok, ok, I need to put anything at all in the Wiki at this point since it only really has one page right now.

My artist has been trying to cheat me on pixels lately, but after administering a light flogging to him I've just about got all the asteroid graphics into the game now and I've been working on the tools used to build asteroid fields to make them easier to work with. It looks like I spoke a bit too soon about getting away from Firefox, since Chrome doesn't seem to handle large numbers of small images on a page very well. After I submit, Firefox does not reload every image, but pops up almost instantly, where Chrome seems to want to download every image again.

New Employees

I updated the Hire New Personnel page recently, so that you can hire new employees using credits and they will have relevant skills depending on your choice. Right now you can choose Command School, Engineering School, Academy of Science, or School of Management, and the new employee will have 0.1 skill in whatever skills match those choices.

Later on, I plan to make this process a bit more complicated, and add a small amount of randomness to the process. I'd love to come up with a way to have the employee creation system be a sort of homage to the old Traveller rules and the character creation in Ultima IV where you had to answer a series of questions to determine what kind of character you started with.

I'm still pondering on how to do this without just ripping off the Traveller system. For now, it is possible to get the employees you need to run the various functions that ships need.

Asteroid Fields

I'm about 95% complete with the new Asteroid Field functionality, so I think it's safe to show off the first screenshot, featuring the view from a ship inside an Asteroid Field.



This screenshot features every type of asteroid except Carbonaceous. There's even an exotic asteroid hidden in there. This is just a small 13x13 section of a field, which can be up to 23x23 squares wide. I'll probably push that up to 25x25 before long since I'm just going to assume that most players will have good screen resolution and if they don't then they'll just have to use the scroll bars a bit more.

Ditching Firefox

I've been using it for quite a while now, but today I finally decided to stop using Firefox in favor of Google's Chrome browser. I probably should have done it a long time ago but the straw that broke the camel's back was a bug where Firefox ignores the CSS defined for Font size and uses the default size that you've set in Windows 7. Even Internet Explorer doesn't do this. Supposedly there's a workaround for it in FF, but screw that. I just want it to work.

So far there's been zero compatibility problems with Project Libertine and Chrome. It's also faster and the Chrome browser still uses the Firebug plugin flawlessly. Chrome also makes Google Apps like Gmail work better, so I'm pretty happy with the switch so far.

Asteroids

The Asteroid Field rework is coming along nicely. I've got the library view of Asteroid Fields done, so now all I need to do is get it working on the Ship View and add the necessary ship actions that will allow a ship to enter the field and land on asteroids and what not.

I've also got to import all of the asteroid images that Jake sent me. He went a little crazy and I probably have about over 1600 asteroid field images to get put into the system and setup properly. It's a little nutty, but the variety available means there will never be two asteroid fields in the game that look alike.

I'm not quite ready to put up a screenshot yet, but I'll get one out by the end of the week.

Weekend Update

Recent work has been mostly more cleanup. I've got the look and feel of the ship interface pretty close to how I want it, but I will let a real artist have a go at sprucing it up some in the future. Right now it's pretty plain and utilitarian, but that sort of appeals to me in a way.

I've also been doing some planning work and pretty much have the road map laid out to finish up ship functionality. It's a larger list than I thought, and will require some colony functionality as well, but I'm chewing up small chunks of the work at a fairly regular pace these days. I try to make myself commit at least a few lines of code each day, even if it's just fixing a bug or adjusting the look and feel just a bit.

The next major chunk I've started on is a total rewrite of the asteroid field functionality. I had originally intended each asteroid to be a separate small planet that you would orbit and land on, but I didn't really like the way it was looking and didn't want a huge list of 20 to 30 rocks that you had to choose from. After getting the asteroid graphics back from Jake last year, I had an "Asteroid Epiphany" and decided that I would make asteroid fields be just like planet maps.

Instead of "orbiting a planet" you can "enter asteroid field" and something like a 25x25 map will be displayed, with the asteroids being made up of squares on the map. A lot of the squares will be empty space that you can't interact with, but the others will be treated just like planet squares that you can scan or land on.

I should have a screenshot up later this week. I think it's going to look pretty sweet.

Update

I've been doing a lot of cleanup work and have slowly added a few new features, but it's mostly just steadfast avoidance of reworking the planet code, which is probably going to take several days of work to finish.

I have added a method for ships to detect when other ships are present to the game again. At one point I just generated a list in the Ship Actions area, but since I didn't want to have to implement a scroll bar if the list of ships was long, I decided to have a graphical proximity indicator that doubled as a link to take you to a new page that will show a list of ships that are present and give you options to attack or scan them.

Here's a screenshot of how it looks at the moment. I'm not completely happy with how it looks or the placement yet, so it will likely change several times before I settle on something.