Less than a month to go and still a lot of things that need done. Luckily most of the major items are already programmed but there are enough small items that keep popping up to keep us busy for three months.
One of our major gripes about the original Millennium game was the amount of game time wasted just to manage the Grazer mining ships. You had to manually tell each ship to travel to the asteroid belt. Once there is would scan for minerals and then you’d have to accept/decline the find. If you accepted then you would have to manually tell the ship to return to base, manually land, unload, enter orbit and then start the process all over again. It was a major pain.
Rick and I discussed adding in the ability to assign mining duties to a Grazer ship so that it would do all of these things automatically for a set period. I was excited to have this ability available but kept putting off programming it because it seemed like a lot of modification to already well-working ship movement code. I decided to seriously tackle this yesterday and was plesantly surprised at how easy it popped in place. I still have a little tweaking to do (accept/decline job order screen) but the mechanics are in place and working great. Here’s a screenshot of the craft roster which shows an info popup for a ship currently on mining duty:
The data in the popup window tells what type of ship it is, what it’s ETA to destination is, that it is on mining duty and also tells the total amounts of minerals mined and transported so far.
Rick has just started working on the invasion of Mars aspect of the game. I want to keep this part of the game as a surprise so I won’t go into any detail here. Just let me say it rocks so far!
Rick has also been busy spicing up existing screens with the addition of 3D. Here are a few screen examples:
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The Syntax Error 