Development Log Week 13

Martin

Another week, another first: The cool thing about the early phase of development of new projects is that every feature you complete is a more or less big and important one. This week's big feature was production. This includes everything from installing the required machinery (which is based on Michi's work of the past weeks), over placing production orders and executing them, to consuming the required input materials and storing the output. The basic system is working but - naturally - is still quite rough around the edges. Nevertheless, the parts of the "endless loop" are starting to come together and it's amazing to see our vision slowly taking shape.

Michi

This week I continued my work on sites and modules. Storage capacity at a planet now increases by a little if a site is added. If there has been no site to start with that planet gets a planet wide storage. We decided that we don't want to give each site a store on its own to prevent players from not finding their stuff when the have lots of small sites. This would also only lead to inventory micro-management and that's a thing we don't want to have. Oh, and one can also build storage modules now that add a bit more to the planets storage capacity.

Later I started to work on a bill of materials component. That component lists each resource that is needed to build something. It also shows if one has enough materials in the relevant store to build it. If there are more than one relevant store there is a drop down box to select the right one. This can happen if you want to build a new site, but the planet has no sites yes, so there is no storage. If there are two ships in orbit you have to decide from which ship you want to take the materials for the site.

I started to work on a new star generation algorithm that is based on recursive cluster generation. It yields nice results so far, but needs improvement when it comes to connectivity.