Year 12 - Day 357

I just returned from a 9 day trip out of state including a week in Disney World, so work on the game has been on hiatus for about two weeks.  Fortunately, a friend has started doing some play testing for me, so I'm getting a lot of feedback and finding some serious bugs that never would have shown up without multiple people playing at the same time.  The fact that someone is actually willing to spend some time playing the game is exciting to me also, since it means it's close to being a real game that people will be interested in playing.

My focus for the next few days will be to get colony pickup orders working, so I can transfer some material to the test accounts.  This will let me avoid having to create items directly in the database and transferring them over, which should save some time and also get important functionality up and running at the same time.

Then I'll get back to the combat program.  It's progressing nicely so far, and actual damage is being done to ships.  Ships aren't quite being destroyed yet, but that should be in soon.  I'm hoping to reach a point in the next week or so where I can let combat run past the hard 5 turn limit I have now and end programmatically instead.

Year 12 - Day 324 - Armor

Work is still progressing on the combat system.  Today I finalized some values for armor and ship speed calculation is now taking into account the armor a ship may have.  I'm borrowing the names of most of the armor types from one of my favorite 4X space games of all time.

Armor Types
1 = Durasteel  100 hps 2.5 weight per layer
2 = Tritanium 200 hps 2.0 weight per layer
3 = Zortrium  300 hps 1.5 weight per layer
4 = Neutronium 400 hps 1.0 weight per layer
5 = Adamantium 500 hps 0.5 weight per layer

The next big step in the combat code is having the damage actually being applied to ship modules, then I'll work on the consequences of that damage.

Year 12 - Day 313

I made more progress on the combat system today.  Actually, it involved a lot of code remediation and ripping out whole sections for a rewrite, but I've almost got the friend vs. foe functionality finished and soon there will be multiple ships involved in combat.

Year 12 - Day 312

Progress on the combat system is moving right along.  It's taken me so long to even get started on combat that it's really fun to see it start taking shape.  So far it's still just 1 ship vs. 1 ship, but they are maneuvering and firing Beam Lasers so far.   

Each turret gets to fire once a turn if the target is within range of the weapons installed in that turret.  Damage is being calculated based on the weapon's stats, but damage is not being applied to ships yet.

Here's a sample combat screenshot.  Click it to enlarge.

Year 12 - Day 293

I'm making some progress on both the market system and ship combat at this point.  I've been switching between them when one gets too frustrating.  Both are very complex and are going to require a lot of coding, testing, and debugging.

At first I thought I was just going to do 1 ship vs. 1 ship to get things started, but so far I've been putting in a lot of the code to handle multiple ships in a battle, so it looks like multiple ship combat will be available right from the start.

Year 12 - Day 276

I'm currently working on the Colony market screen.  By tomorrow a colony owner should be able to enter new market orders and have them show up on the list.

Year 12 - Day 193

I continued some work on the colony Market screen today.  I added the market orders table to the database and have orders displaying on the screen.  I found I designed myself into a slight corner, so I'm going to have to rework a little bit of stuff around items, but it's nothing major.  I'm thinking by the end of the weekend most of the buy/sell functionality should be finished off.