Development Log Week 64

After six days of meeting, reading, talking and experimenting our simulogics ops meeting is over and the quietness of our offices feels eerie.

Martin

Not much to report from my side this week. We started with the final days of our long ops meeting and, as we had hoped, managed to actually get a physical cluster of three machines running. Well, kind of. There are still a few teething problems, but those were to be expected. Part of the reason we start running this kind of infrastructure way ahead of any actual launch is to get to know its quirks and pitfalls.

We also spent some time integrating our newborn test cluster into our existing Continuous Integration pipeline. So once the final issues are worked out, we will be able to restart our development game worlds after every new build without any interaction on the part of the developer.

But that's about it...the rest of the week I had to take care of non-PU stuff. Lot's of that will be going on over the coming weeks, so I hope to be able to squeeze in as much work on PU as possible despite having to earn some money :)

Michi

After the quite successful and fun ops meeting at simulogics HQ I traveled home and continued my work on the client. Right now there are a lot of issues regarding usability and polish we want to address until the first release.

If you are a regular reader of our devlog you might know how our interface works. If not here is a introduction in a couple of sentences: The main area is divided into smaller tiles that can show a certain content of the game. These tiles can be opened, closes, moved, resized and a layout of tiles can even be stored. Usually if you clock on something, say a ship, a new window (we call it a buffer) opens up with the ship details tile in it. You can then either close this buffer, get back to it later or drag it onto a tile.

There is another way to open specific content in a tile: the commands. An empty tile will just show a command line where the player can enter commands to open the corresponding tiles. For example to open the before mentioned ship dialog the player has to type SHP id where id is the beginning of a valid ship id. Up until now only one parameter was supported. This week I generalized the concept and now multiple parameters are possible.

For example: To display your fleet you can type FLT and you'll see a list of all your ships. To show only the ones at a given system use the s parameter like this: FLT s-id.

The commands are a nice way for experienced players to get things done very quickly in Prosperous Universe. Of course we will add buttons and links to be able to use everything without using commands.