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.