Development Log Week 48

A short but productive week has passed. And that’s about all I can think of that’s noteworthy enough for the introduction this week. Find the details below as every Sunday :)

Martin

I continued to stroll around refactoring wonderland and finally completed the server-side part of the restructuring. Besides the positive side-effect of getting rid of old testing code (as mentioned last week) this also resulted in a much more robust „start-up sequence“ of the server. While the server is still „booting“, especially for the very first time when it’s essentially creating the game world, it now won’t accept connections yet.

After the server-side part I got started on the client-side rewrite of the sign-up process in which players create their company after logging in for the first time. This step is slowly growing into something that can be used in a public test, allowing players to actually pick a starting location in the game world, among other things.

Since I’ll be leaving for a long overdue two-week vacation in a week’s time and won’t have much time for Prosperous Universe before my departure, it was crucial to get all of this into a state in which Michi can work with it. It required some overtime, but now he’ll be able to work with the new server-side code and convert the ship-related code he’s been working on to the new identifiers...while I enjoy the Azores ;)

Michi

Monday was a public holiday this week and on Tuesday I was busy estimating a client's project. That left only three days of Prosperous Universe development. I continued to work on ships and especially ship travel. I re-enabled the faster-than-light travel and rewrote the code that displays the routes on the star map. Finally I added a button to abort a FTL flight. While there was nothing wrong with the old code I still decided to restructure some of the parts. The component managing the flight feels a bit less cluttered now, which is good :)

I also started to work on a loading screen that might as well become the new login screen. It basically loads a lot of the game data after the player logged in and waits until that data has arrived at the client. We hope that the pre-fetching improves the overall performance on the client's side.