Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Mostly move prep and baby time on this end, and I think that'll be par for the course in the next month. Getting excited, though!
Unfortunately, the string of non-gamedev days continues. Still a lot of web development today, but also some taxes and moving-house thrown in for variety!
The website is getting closer and closer to where it was, with the following fixes and features added yesterday and today:
Well, the site's been live 24 hours and hasn't exploded yet. So that's good! Though, it still has some teething issues to sort out, and thanks to everyone for their feedback so far!
One of the biggest comments is about the apparent downgrade of Forums features. This is largely due to the new site not using a special forums module I had installed before. I've started working on a local copy of the site to see how it works in this new version. It's not exactly the same, but it appears to solve many of the issues we're seeing. More on that tomorrow.
First of all, I apologize for the long delay in getting the site running again. I've been delaying a major CMS upgrade for a while because of the potential for long downtime, and figured I could wait until announcing either the mobile NEO Scavenger or new space game officially. However, reality doesn't always wait for convenience, so I was forced to just get it over with and upgrade to the new CMS.
So, we have a new site now! And as with anything, there are some pros and cons.
So! With that near-week-long interruption (hopefully) behind us, let's get back to data editing, shall we?
When I last left off, I was trying to get a visual editor setup for editing the game data. Specifically, the complex network of conditions, triggers, and interactions. Today, I made some more headway on that tool, resulting in this GUI:
Some of you may have dropped by in the past hour and saw the site offline. Not to worry. It was a planned outage today. I wanted to change the login and password for the database for security reasons, and the site became unavailable while I was making backups, changing stuff, then restoring.
I think we're back to normal now. But if you run across anything amiss, do let me know!
And thank you for your patience during this bumpy ride :)
As most of you noticed, the site was offline for an extended period of time. I apologize for the inconvenience. I usually try to give everyone a warning before it goes offline, and to minimize downtime. However, this situation was a bit different.
Hey Folks! Progress on the data-editing UI is actually pretty good. I got a bunch of features hooked-up today that have traditionally taken me weeks in other APIs, so I'm feeling hopeful.
Hey Folks! The rumination continues on the crew drama UI system. I'm getting lots of useful feedback and suggestions, and I think there are some new directions to try. So that'll be on the plate soon.
Before that, however, I need to make sure the interaction system is actually doing what I designed it to. I've been noticing some glitches here and there, and they're complicating my playtesting.
I made a few more tweaks to the crew simulator this morning, so the labels sit more tightly with their owners, and they stay out of each other's way when more than 2 crew are present. Once these were in place, it was a bit easier to watch the simulation and judge.
Hey Folks! I managed to get Unity's UI under control enough to move forward with hooking it up to data today, and it's starting to take shape. Here's a sample:
Using yesterday's portrait mock-ups, and Kaaven's suggested UI mock-ups, this is how the prototype's UI currently works:
Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. I think a lot of our catch-up from returning home spilled into the weekend, as it felt like we were still doing a lot of running around. And there's more to come, as we start getting our ducks in a row for the big move. We technically have two months to vacate, but that time's going to go fast between hiring a mover, finding an apartment in a distant city, getting the pets vaccinated/documented, and the other seemingly endless things that need wrapping-up.
