Development Log Week 85

Another week comes to an end. This one was clearly dominated by Asteroid Day for which our very own Mac once again prepared a great asteroid-themed artwork. You can find it on our blog or on the forums in case you missed it. But that's not all that happened this week!

Material Tree Editor

This will be the last time for a while that this topic shows up in the development log. I added a few additional fields to the data structures which aren't needed (yet) for the editor itself but will become necessary once we want to export data from the editor into the game. I also expanded the definition of population needs quite a bit to make it more powerful. Last but not least, I implemented an algorithm which computes the minimum "complexity" of any material based on the material tree. This is merely a rough estimate of how hard it is to produce a unit of any given material in the game. This information is useful to NPCs to determine what default prices to charge for an item, for example, especially when no market prices are available yet.

Everything else left to do to finish the material tree editor will have to wait until Michi is back in the office as some of the changes affect parts of the game as well as the editor that he's more familiar with than I am.

Interface Polish

I had a bit of time left to work on PU this week, but not quite enough to get started on a major new topic. Hence I decided to get a lot of small stuff ticked off the list that has been bothering me for ages but that I never got around to address:

• One can now finally resize buffer windows.
• Screens are bookmarkable now which is especially useful when working with more than one browser window.
• I built a little debug utility that shows any pending requests to the PU server.
• When new buffer windows are opened, they are not stacked exactly on top of each other but have a little offset. Tiny stuff, but a real improvement :-)

Besides these improvements, I also fixed several client- as well as server-side bugs. So all in all, quite a productive week for once!