Development Log Week 72

Sometimes technical problems appear out of thin air and keep you awake at night. We still managed to get quite some work done: the community forum software is set up, the world editor got a facelift and we started a new feature!

Martin

Due to a technical emergency over at our other game, I didn't have quite as much time for PU this week as I had hoped. Nevertheless, I continued work on our authentication app and implemented a basic working version of the single-sign-on interface required by our forum software.

Speaking of which, I also managed to install said software. It still needs a lot of configuration and a bit of polish in the design department, but it's working and it's already hooked up to our authentication app. So as soon as the the latter is completed and has received it's final UI, we are ready to open the forums to the public. I'm very much looking forward to finally start building a community around Prosperous Universe!

Michi

When Martin and I met two weeks ago in the simulogics HQ we also spoke a lot about the game's content and especially about the factions in the game. We created background stories for them, decided with how many colonies they would start when the game begins and other things. Since the players have to choose one faction to join when they start the game the factions are a quite integral part of the game. I spent Monday and Tuesday to integrate them into our world editor, so we can later integrate them into the server code. While at it, I also did a small refactoring of the world editor since it has evolved and grown quite a bit.

I then started a completely new topic in the second half of the week: blueprint editing, ship performance and production. This is a huge topic and will probably keep me busy for weeks so I'll go into the details as I implement them. Nevertheless here's a quick intro into what we are trying to achieve:

Ships are an essential part of the economy in Prosperous Universe. Since the players don't play fictional characters like in role-playing games with stats and abilities to identify with, we want the ships to fill that void. To be able to do that we cannot have off the rack ships but rather modular ships that the players design and build themselves. It will basically work like this: A player creates a new blueprint for a ship. In the blueprint editor she can design the ship by placing components and modules and will see its performance parameters like mass, slower than light speed, cargo capacity, faster than light speed etc. Once a blueprint is finished and is valid it can be used to produce the ship in a shipyard.

This week I started with the creation of blueprints. I wrote UI and server code to create blueprint, show a list of all blueprints and open a specific one for editing.