Development Log Week 92

Work on the game continues more or less as usual and we're making steady progress on the way to first limited Alpha tests. But a lot of tasks remain to be finished until then, both in terms of development and on the business-side of things.

Martin

Michi paid simulogics HQ a brief visit this week. It was strictly a business meeting, which happens rarely at PU. But we need to get started preparing for an eventual launch of the game and everything that entails, including marketing, financing and so on. These topics are, by their very nature, very business-y and I'd much rather spend my time digging through code, but there's no way around it.

Besides the business-y business business, I spent the remaining coding time on polish for our embedded chat features. While the feature itself has been mostly functional for a very long time, it is not too well integrated into our tiling interface yet. And making a feature usable by typing a command instead of clicking a button has kind of become an obsession of mine. So I spent (and will spend) a surprisingly large amount of time on getting this to work the way I imagine it. To be continued...

Michi

Unfortunately there was not much time to write code this week, since there was a public holiday and I visited simulogics HQ for two days.

Nevertheless I continued to work on the Material Editor (more about this tool in last week's devlog) and finished one of the last missing pieces. We can now define various resources, like ores, gases, water, etc. and their abundance and the editor will place them on the planets accordingly. Additionally the editor allows to set certain restrictions on where resources can appear: For example some gases will only occur on gas giants, other resources might only be found on very hot planets and so on. So the basic resource generation is working and all that is left is to do some tests to make sure the results are okay and clean up the code. I don't expect that we have to change it too much though.

So what's next? Since the editor evolved quite a bit over the last weeks, we need to write a new exporter for the world data and a corresponding importer on the server side.