July started with lots of minor additions to the game, I tidied up the sector star graphics, and fixed a number of bugs. I implemented the auto refueling systems into the equipment and commodities ports. This allows players to have their ship automatically refuelled whenever they dock with a port. Adding this feature meant that I needed to get the user settings written too, this allows each player to set various preferences within the game. I plan for their to be a lot of different settings available to the player, allowing them to customise a lot of the default settings. Once the auto refueling was written, I also added manual refueling, for those few times when money is tight, and the player doesn't want the auto refueler kicking in all the time. Other user preferences include a 'Display' setting to control the graphical quality of the game, and various settings to control how the ports interact with the user.
Galaxy map and Stoker gates
| Aeonian Development Diary: July / August 2002 |
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| Written by Vex |
| Thursday, 24 October 2002 03:06 |
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Yet another installment... And again the project is late, but such is life... We're definately getting there though....
Deadlines I keep setting myself deadlines to get release out by, but it never works, they all seem to happen at least a month behind schedule (even when I've added a month to the date... :). I think I'll give up on posting deadlines for when things are going to be completed, it'll save a lot of time. As I write this september is coming to an end, and this marks the first full year of Aeonian development. Yep! A whole year has gone by since I started this project, it really doesn't seem that long, and in many ways it feels like I've done very little in that time... But in actual fact quite a lot has been written, it's just there's still quite a lot to be done! Anyway on with whats been happening for the past couple of months... Minor Tweaks
Damage and Repair With the combat now in the game, it became necessary to add routines for handling the repair of the ship, and ship modules. This included adding damage information to the various ship displays, such as the modules listings, and the cargo screens. Ship repairs are performed at the ship equipment ports (and eventually at the shipyards, once they're implemented). Initially the repair options where very basic, only allowing for 'all or nothing' repairs, towards the end of August this was all re-written, so that the player can perform percentage based repairs.
Newsbot One of the things that really annoys me about many of the current space/combat/turn-based web games is the sterility of the news reporting within these games, the same news report duplicated multiple times with a different player name in it. I decided to write Aeonians news reporting in, hopefully, a more realistic way. Aeonian uses a number of different 'news companies' to report on the news, each of which has a different 'personality', along with their own publication speed and accuracy of the reporting. The newsbots provide various types of news reporting, they report on combat occurances, ship movements, random event occurances, and will eventually provide news on trading, and planet colonisation/combat.
Around mid July I took a break from the main code and started looking at the implementation of a galaxy map. Initialy I wrote a test routine to show the basic linkup of all the stoker gates between systems. It became obvious from these tests that the gates weren't linking up the way I had planned, and this along with reports from players regarding the lack of two-way gates meant that a rewrite of some of the setup code was needed. Combat, rewrite... Various problems had been identified with the initial version of the combat code, and so I decided to rewrite a number of the key routines, to make the code a lot more intelligent, and to overcome some of the problems we found in testing. Some far this new version of the combat seems to work really well, with the defending ships acting a lot more intelligently when they come under attack. It will probably be necessary to do some more tweaks to it in the future though.
Front end update The front part of the site (i.e. the non-game bit), has always been a bit messy, so I decided to get that sorted out and spruced up a little. I also installed a temporary forum for the current players to make use of, eventually Aeonian will have it's own custom forum, this will allow each alliance to have it's own forum within the game and so forth, but that's a long way off. I also managed to get the forum integrated with the game player database, so user don't have to reregister with the forums..
Spit and Polish We're building up to a public release (about damn time), so a lot of time was spent tidying up lots of little things, tweaks here and there. The release at the end of August (version 0.45) proved to be major milestone in the game development, with the whole thing feeling a lot closer to a finished product. There are still a load more things to do, and many features missing, but it's really becoming a playable game now, with all the basic features that you would expect. After a year of development, we're getting close to opening up the game to a lot more players, hopefully release 0.5 will occur before christmas, and we should be inviting around 200 players into the game at that point, and if all goes well, a lot more will get added soon after that..
Comments (16)
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| Last Updated on Thursday, 24 October 2002 03:06 |
. Its taking quite some thime but hey lets hope its worth it (judging the screens it will be)
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Im glad to hear that the work is in progress!
But just 1 Q..
How are you going to prevent multi-accounts?
me and my brother signed up, under the same IP (we got ADSL). So i just wanted to know how you are going to prevent them.
The graphics looks nice btw, hope it loads fast