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[cerapa]

You can now click on regions, and it now understands what you clicked on. It just working without any adjustments or flipped plus/minus signs makes me paranoid though.

You might also notice that the dividing lines look a bit different. It's a bit of a hackish solution to the whole zooming out problem(just made em bigger), but it doesn't use any processing power and doesn't look too bad(I assume, not exactly an impartial observer).


And a (potentially placeholder) resource distribution. Still deciding if I should let a region have 2 different resources or not, but that's a decision that can be changed later.

[mastahcheese]

This looks flipping awesome!

[cerapa]

It seems I have stumbled into the realm of "important for gameplay".

I began to work on generating the actual resources and what they can do. Loads some data from a text file and everything. But the problem is, I'm not quite sure what I should do with them exactly.


^{The letter is the name of the use, the first number the refinement necessary, and the second number is the level.}

My plan so far was to generate a number of uses for the resources (mining level 4, farming level 2, etc..), that can be progressively unlocked through refining. The resources have a "main" use that it is more likely to have, but it's still random. I like the idea of that system, but the problem is the refining. If I make the refining consume resources (2 refine 4 -> 1 refine 5) then I could just scrap the refining idea and make higher level stuff cost more. If I make it consume or require a refining resource, then you could see some really interesting supply lines show up, but it would lodge the game firmly in the direction of a space economy simulator, which doesn't really go together with my other plans, especially in regards to spaceships.

Gah! Who knew making a game would require game design?

[Mephansteras]

Huh, apparently I'm not watching this. Posting to correct such an obvious deficiency.

[cerapa]

I have decided to make the resource generation(resources themselves, not the planet stuff) a bit better. With all sorts of fancy weights and stuff to make it easier for me to manipulate them. However since I want to take all that stuff in from files, I wanted some fancier file processing. So I made something that can read this:

Code: (resources.txt) [Select]

Egg
{
  Chicken 1
  Colour Brown
}

Chicken
{
  Egg 3
  Tasty true
}

SATAN
{
  HATRED INFINITE
  CANDY DELICIOUS
}^{The formatting is meaningless. It ignores extra line breaks and whitespace, but all the stuff still needs to seperated by a space or line break.}

This shows that resources can be used for Egg, Chicken and SATAN(whose candy is delicious). Which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever but is sufficient for debugging. There isn't really any particular reason to make the processing of this particular piece of data like this, but I need to practise reading files and processing text. I kinda skipped that part of C++ tutorials, and it would be a damn shame if I found out I have no idea how to read or write files when its time to implement saving.

[Anvilfolk]

As usual, I'm going to suggest you don't reinvent the wheel. Using either an XML or JSON parser, write your data files in that, and use a library that reads those things in your program. Otherwise you'll be spending time changing the parser over and over and over again, inventing a format that is very likely going to be less expressive than XML or JSON.

Just my 2 cents

[cerapa]

But reinventing the wheel is fun.

XML looks weird from a readability perspective. JSON looks like something I would write if I spent more time on it. Will see if I can actually get a JSON parser working.

[mastahcheese]

So far, this looks good.

[Anvilfolk]

But reinventing the wheel is fun.

I thought so too, and then it turns out you never finish a game

XML is fine It's used for tons of things, it's got tools that verify it is well written according to a specification... it is rather verbose, but hey, more verbose means more obviousness for modders

[inEQUALITY]

I... I think I'm in love. If this game ends up being CK2ish + Space, you'll have made my day. Nay, my year. Nay! My life. Seriously.

[cerapa]

Kinda stopped doing stuff for 2 weeks. I don't work very well without a specific plan, and development was slowly getting further and further away from the stuff I have figured out. So I needed some time to get ahead of the planning curve again. Got back to work again today.

Code: [Select]

{
    "Placeholder_ERROR": {
        "primary_weight": 0,
"create_weight": 0,
        "abundance": 0
    },
    "Placeholder_Non_Primary": {
        "primary_weight": 0,
"create_weight": 1,
        "abundance": 1
    },
    "Placeholder_Half_Primary": {
        "primary_weight": 0.5,
"create_weight": 1,
        "abundance": 2
    },
    "Placeholder_Primary": {
        "primary_weight": 1,
  "create_weight": 1,
        "abundance": 3
    }
}Say "Hi!" to the very nice json text files. I might change the names of stuff around, and I can add anything else I want, simply by writing UtilitiesIn[Name]["INSERT_STUFF_HERE"].

Actually, json_spirit is a bit of a pain in that I originally had to write In.get_obj()["whatever"].get_obj()["whatever_else"] whenever I wanted something two levels deep. So I added two lines into a header, and suprisingly, it worked. Was very easy to do, yes, but changing an external library like that was a new experience for me.


I decided to keep the refining idea around, with the resource requirement. But, refinement resources have a primary_weight of 0. This means that if a resource gets refining as its primary utility, it will not have a heightened chance of putting refining into its other slots, preventing chains of refinement.

The basic idea is that you will set up mining colonies to go up the refinement levels, and once they have served your purposes, leave them be. If everything goes right they should try to expand by themselves, reject your rule, and stage a revolution that crushes your empire.

[cerapa]

Staring at completely placeholder art was kinda depressing, so I made some better stars. Just a simple replacement of the images, but I think it looks a lot nicer. Still need to do something about the black background though. I have a few plans on that end, but it would require a tiling starfield texture that wouldn't be completely noticeable if you reduced its opacity in certain tiles. I am already calculating the density of star placement, so I might as well use it for other stuff too.

So graphics stuff. Any help on the drawing end would be appreciated, but I can make most stuff myself, even if it does take me an hour to put 2 pixels down.

[inEQUALITY]

So graphics stuff. Any help on the drawing end would be appreciated, but I can make most stuff myself, even if it does take me an hour to put 2 pixels down.

I might be able to help, if no one else better than I volunteers. What sort of things you looking for? It might only be a step above programmer art, but there are some things I'm capable of doing or else figuring out how to do. I can at least try, if anything, if it helps to move along the development of the project.

By the way, you may have mentioned earlier - I may even have asked before in this thread, absent-minded and lazy as I can be - but what language and libraries are you using to write this?

[cerapa]

What I mostly need at the moment is interface stuff: buttons, backgrounds, bars, icons, etc.

It's written in C++, using SDL2 for input and graphics and this for generating noise.

[mastahcheese]

This looks so cool.