Research! Research!

Work on the New Research Project screen continues, there is still a whole lot left to do but I finally did finish one of the “Weapon Systems” Project Category. Every item in that specific category now works fully. There are a total of 10 Project Categories;

1) Weapon Systems

2) Ship Tech

3) Station Tech

4) Unit Tech

5) Planetary Tech

6) General Research

7) Resource

8) Composite

9) Robotics

10) Custom

I should be able to knock them down pretty quickly as I can re-use a lot of code that I did in the Weapon Systems category. The easiest no doubt will be the “Custom” category as that will be nothing more than a blank text field for the player to fill in their idea. This category will be used for designing things that don't fall into the other categories and will therefore require some code be added to the software.

All project ideas done in the “Custom” category will first need to be approved by the GM and then it could take between 2 weeks to 3 months for that project to become available depending on the amount of coding that will be required. The player will be able to begin assigning labs to this project the following turn but it will never go to the final stage of research until the coding is completed.

Players will be encouraged to only use the “Custom” category sparingly, the research project system will be very versatile and nearly everything a player can imagine will be able to be created within the system so the “Custom” category will not be required as much. Which is a good thing for me. :-) The only down side is that it's taking a lot of hours to get the research system completed. But if it saves me coding time later on, it's gonna be worth it.

The Blog is Back.

So I decided to re-tool this little blog, seeing as it was just sitting around doing nothing. It shall be the new development journal for the Client Software.

These past couple of weeks I've been hard at work on the New Research Project window, the whole research system is being re-designed with standardization in mind while still keeping the spirit of player customization of the original game. This has proven to be somewhat complicated and very labor intensive. I have attached a screen shot of the window as it is now, you will notice that there are a few new options.

First thing you might notice is the Difficulty Rating, essentially this is chance the project has of being successful the first time. Once the project has been completed, this will be checked...if it's a fail the project will have to return to the Research Phase for additional research. The Difficulty Rating will go up and down based on the options you select. So for example increasing damage will increase the difficulty rating slightly.

Tonnage is also new, the whole game will be switching to a tonnage system; I've received many emails about changing to a tonnage system that I've finally decided to go for it. Now with the client doing all the calculations it's easier to implement, basically the tonnage will work as follows:

0.001 = 1 lbs
0.010 = 10 lbs
0.100 = 100 lbs
1.000 = 1 tonne

Budget is also new, this will be the cost in equipment and supplies for the project. Also new is Automation Level which will lower the amount of crew needed for the component, miniaturization level which will cut the component's weight.

There will be General Research topics, which can be seen as a tech tree of sorts. Researching these topics will open new avenues of research as well as open up abilities such as the Shield Disruption, Shield By-Pass, etc..

This window is easily becoming the most labor intensive work I've done on the software to date. I'm estimating I'll be working on this window for another couple of weeks. There is still plenty to do...

GUI design and implementation continues, I've been having some trouble finding the perfect interface.

Anyway that's it for now, I gotta get back to work now.

~Peace~