Hey Folks! Got a special treat for your today. I decided to try and get a video recorded to show off both the course plotter I've been working on, as well as some of Josh's latest music!
Hopefully there are some interesting bits in there for everyone to check out. And if you have any questions or feedback, feel free to let me know!
Hey Folks! I spent most of the day working on the system/course plotter UI today, in my continued attempt to make it reliable and usable enough to get from point A to B.
Hey Folks! A bit of a slower day today, as a chunk of it was spent tackling public relations type tasks, and a bit of admin. I did get some coding done, however, aiming to address precision issues in the sim.
Yesterday, I talked a bit about precision and time. As it turns out, single precision floating point variables can only store 7-significant digits of info. And when we're talking about the number of seconds in years (months, even), we quickly get large enough numbers that individual seconds are ignored by the CPU.
Hey Folks! Another mostly coding day today, slightly more productive than yesterday. Today's focus was mostly on time.
Initially, it was just some minor changes to make the player's life easier. I added code to make sure the plotter couldn't reverse time into the past, and it just "bottoms-out" at the star system's current time if you rewind.
Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. A lot of manual labor and handyman type stuff for us, as we tie-up some more loose ends around the house.
Back at the office, it was off to a bit of a slow start as I went through several emails and other admin tasks. And I suspect at least one more round of this later in the week, as month-end approaches.
Hey Folks! We're finally starting to get somewhere with the navigation console. (Pun intended.)
Today was still a lot of behind-the-scenes type work. Fixing bugs in the code, improving functions, exposing data in one class that I need to reference from another. All with the aim towards letting the player direct an AI to the nav console, open it, plot a course, engage, and then continue on around the ship doing stuff.
Hey Folks! It's a code day today, and most of my day looked something like the screenshot above (taken from the Navigation Console UI).
The main thrust of today's effort was getting the star system simulation to be a separate thing from the navigation console's simulation. There's a lot of overlap between what the navigation station and star system need to do. Things like keeping track of ship positions, planets, moons, gravity, and updating all of this over time.
Hey Folks! A bit of a split day, today. Roughly half spent on admin work, and the rest on the space prototype.
The nav CPU was the focus of the dev work, as I continued yesterday's attempt to get it installed on a ship and able to be raised by crew. And the good news here is, that finally works!
Hey Folks! I was able to spend some more quality time with the space prototype today, trying to bring together the orbital plotter, voxel nav console, and crew sim.
First order of business was to get a voxel model done for the console, and I decided to just get a basic captain's chair for now. It's missing the screen and some other decorations, but it's enough to get the point across. And for me to see how voxel models look in engine.
Hey Folks! Hope your weekend was better than mine. The whole family here was hit by some sort of uber head cold, and we're all a coughing, sniffling mess. Needless to say, it was neither a productive nor enjoyable weekend. Though, it appears we are all on the mend now, more or less.
Hey Folks! We may have a patch to address the Android crashes and save issues introduced in v1.2.5. Tiago put together a new build this afternoon which uses a more reliable way to find a good save path, and we're currently testing it with a few beta users. If this works, it should make saving crash-free on all Android device+OS version combos, and we think that's the main cause of crashes folks are experiencing.
Assuming the tests come back successful, we'll proceed with rolling the patch out asap! (Fingers are crossed!)
Hey Folks! While Tiago works on the Android save patch, I decided to try and get some more prototyping done on the plotter. And it's getting pretty close to usable.
One of the most obvious changes today was switching the line renderer to use colored solid lines instead of textured lines. I like the visuals slightly less, but it allows me to prototype a lot faster if I can just plug color values in rather than making new textures for each new color.
Hey Folks! Still working through the recent Android issues resulting from patch v1.2.5. Though I did get a little prototyping done, as well.
The save issue looks like it might be a result of the new file path we're using. It looks as if the path we chose works on some devices (such as our own testing devices), but not others (see the app reviews). Furthermore, there was a discrepancy between the save path and the load path, which probably made things worse. Again, some devices resolve both paths equally, others must not.
Hey Folks! Hope you had a good weekend. Among other things, yard work featured in mine. I discovered just how ineffective a spade can be in hard clay. And to make matters worse, there appears to be a gas line somewhere near where the hole needs to be. And tree roots. Oof.
Hey Folks! With yesterday's mobile build v1.2.5 still rolling-out, and no apparent fires to extinguish yet, I turned my attention back to the space prototype. And it was a fairly productive day!
One of the first things I added was human-readable velocity and distance info to the current point of reference. This way, we can see things like m, km, Gm, or AU instead of gigantic (or tiny) numbers all in AU. Apart from simply making the user's life easier, it's making my job easier as I can now get a better feel for how accurate it is at-a-glance.
Hey Folks! NEO Scavenger mobile has just been updated to v1.2.5 (build 4405). Builds should be available soon on both Android and iOS pending store approval.
Hey Folks! Mostly mobile patch work today, and a minor UI bug fix.
Tiago was able to check-in his save system upgrade, so we began testing the patch today. Currently, updating the app wipes saves, and this is one of the things we are trying to fix. There appear to be some special places on Android and iOS for saving files that don't get wiped on updates. And, as you might expect, both are completely different :)
Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Ours involved a lot of cleaning poop and pee as we potty trained the little one. Progress is being made. But so much poop and pee... Good research for NEO Scavenger 2, perhaps.
I spent pretty much the entire day trying to reproduce the PC save corruption bug. And at one point, I thought I had it! But alas, no luck yet.
Hey Folks! Finally got into a rhythm working out the DMC map bug on iOS, and I think I've fixed it.
It took several tries, and a lot of guessing and checking via compile->simulate iOS device->tweak->repeat for various devices, plus a few build-toactual-iPads thrown in for good measure. And most of a day later, I think the fix is checked-in for Tiago to verify on his iPad.
