Space stations are in. But my initial station is ugly as hell. Anyone want to do art for cheap?

Anyway, on the economy, I’m figuring out that it can be quite a complex system. I started down a path that would allow each item to be built from “components” that would provide various properties and abilities to those objects, and while it sounds useful and nifty, I’ve had trouble wrapping my head around what each part of that system does and how it works as a whole. Not to mention that it doesn’t really solve the essential problem of having perhaps hundreds of thousands of items lying around essentially unused, as the system really only works on actual objects.

I need a way to keep track of hundreds of units of bread and thousands of units of ore without making an object out of any of them. Essentially, I just need a database, or databases, that tells me where each and every item is and what it’s ID is, and then an object description. I think what I’m going to go with is an inventory table for each entity that can have inventory, that will have the id of the item, a quantity, and a price paid. I may allow that table to have multiple entries for an item type if they bought the item multiple times at different prices.

For any items that would need to be objects so they can be attached to ships (like weapons, etc…), they will be converted to objects upon being fitted to the ship, and converted back to an inventory line item when removed.

That’s where I’m at right now. I’m working on multiple things, trying to keep visible progress going, while working on the economy code. The economy stuff is tough to work through, as, at least for awhile, it won’t result in much visible progress. No new nifty buttons, no new spaceships, no lasers… but it’s probably one of the most important parts of the game, and in many ways, it services the rest of the parts of the game. You can’t buy parts for ships without the economy, you can’t trade without goods to buy and sell, there’s no reason to do anything without the ability to get something for it.

So I’m slowly working on the economy, while taking time out here and there to do other things, like right now, I’m gonna add the space stations.

You’ll see a new link to a simple forum off to the left, right under the wiki link. I will probably change this to a more complicated forum as I get nearer release, but this was quick to set up and is part of the system I’m trying out for tracking the project, which means, once this gets to beta, I can quickly add any problems reported their to my todo list.

You can now jump from system to system via a jump gate. It took quite a bit of time doing this because I had to get the galaxy a little more organized. Originally, the systems didn’t have any positions at all, so I had to give them a position so it could be determined how far apart they were. This matters because if they are too far apart, you will need to use a jump gate to jump between them, instead of just using your jump drive.

So anyway, I had to give them a position, and then I had to figure out if they were all linked together, which required a map, so I built a map and found out that, no, they weren’t all connected together nice and neat, they were linked all over the place, because of course, the links were totally random because the systems had no position.

So… I spent a day and a half figuring out how to link them to their neighbors in a way that they didn’t link to everyone, but you could navigate the links from any star to any other star. I had to redo parts of it three times or more before I got it right. Hell, even today I had to fix a bug in it where it was making multiple jump gates between the same two systems (like – eight of them!).

Now, they’re all linked, and they’re linked in a satisfying way. So I spent this evening (and part of this morning) doing art to make a gate sprite (man I suck at art), so that I could find the jump gate in order to pass through it. Once that was done, the code to jump through was almost trivial, though not completely.

But it sure is satisfying to be able to DO something, even if it is just traverse the whole galaxy doing nothing but jumping from system to system.

Woot – Now you can land on a planet. You can’t do much while you’re there, other than launch back into space, but there you are. It’s a little nifty. The scene fades a bit, and then the option buttons slide in from the right. When you launch, the buttons slide off, and then the haze lifts. I’m going to try to find a way to make the ship appear like it’s landing (probably shrink it to nothing, or some other device). I hate it when they just sit there and hover in orbit.

In other news, you should see a wiki link to the left. Right now, it’s pretty sparse, but I’m going to keep it updated as a sort of design doc. Eventually, it’ll end up looking a lot like a help manual, since I’m only going to describe the player perspective in it.