News

Hey Folks! Still discovering a fair number of bugs as I test this plot functionality.

One of the first bugs found was when I returned to the test mode without any planets loaded. Since that only has one chargen station loaded, and social contacts was explicitly trying to avoid that station when spawning new people, I ran into a null pointer bug.

I also noticed a few save/load

Hey Folks! A pretty wide range of coding work today, as I tackled a series of smaller tasks that should hopefully add-up to more stability, speed, and easier game testing.

Earlier in the day, work mostly involved fixing bugs. I set the docking range to 4000km so I could dock more easily to test plots, started a new game, and immediately hit a few bugs. First, I had to add code to

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Ours was made more exciting by regular B-17 Flying Fortress passes overhead, and (I think) maybe a German Stuka. We're not far from the Boeing Museum of Flight, and I suspect this is the season for air shows and historic aircraft tours.

Back at the office, there was a flurry of email and forum catch-up across various sites, and then it

Hey Folks! Finished-up the first draft of the social contact list UI and returned to plots for more testing today.

The social contacts UI now has a more legible format, with each contact listing their current relationship, and past events that led to this. The event list used to be really wordy with lots of redundant info, but not it's more like "Met during: Hulk salvage.

Hey Folks! Continuing work on the game's social/plot system again today, and fixing things along the way.

The social debug UI now lists line items for each person the player knows. Name, relationship, and current location. In the process of doing this, I discovered a bug in the save/load system that caused NPCs to be loaded twice, with the second copy being completely different

Hey Folks! More work on performance optimizations today, along with some orbital plotter and social contact work.

Early in the day, work continued on the optimizations. And I was able to find a fairly big one: pathfinding. It turns out that my pathfinding code was using a fairly expensive array IndexOf operation, since the type was an object (Tile) that required boxing/unboxing. (

Hey Folks! I decided to do a bit of code cleanup and performance optimizations today.

I started out fixing a few bugs, and managed to fix a pathfinding issue I introduced fixing another path bug. So far so good, but as I transitioned into testing the plot system again, I realized I was dreading loading the full game. It takes close to 13 seconds to go from the main menu to a fresh game

Hey Folks! I finally had a chance to record some footage of the main menu in action. It's an otherwise slow news day, so perhaps this makes up for it :)

Thanks, Rovlad, for reminding me!

Hey Folks! After wrapping-up a decent ATC chatter and audio for the main menu, it's time to return to the plot system.

My first task today was to finish getting the encounter screen hooked-up to data. I could spawn it based on a context menu click, but all the UI fields were placeholder text. Getting the current encounter description was pretty easy, so that was first. The choices

Hey Folks! The ATC is sounding much better today after some additional code and content work. Plus, a splash screen!

I decided to record an additional 4 lines to increase variety, since the original 2 lines get old fast. And Rochelle agreed to read a version of them too, so now there are both male and female speakers.

On the code side, the additional lines now form a queue of