8Dromeda Blog

Implementing things

In the previous post I said something like this: 1) modify world, 2) implement placement of tiles, 3) implement access-controlled storage facilities, 4) profit!

It's actually missing the real "4) ..." step. It's the step that is always between each of the other steps.

I'll start from right after where I started after writing the blog post.

First, as Danagen Industries is made in C++ and as I need to compile it on a VPS with very limited memory, I occasionally have to split large files into smaller ones in order to make them compilable on the VPS. So I had to do this for one file before continuing. Yeah, it was slightly too large anyway. But there's that. Took 2.5 hours.

1) modify world

Next up was the actual "modify world" step. My approach was porting over the world generator from Intrusion Underground and integrating it with a custom overworld generator. Took 4 hours. Not bad.

The next 30 minutes went into tweaking the end result and fixing up some things in the client.

While playtesting the world, I realized it's not possible to mine many of the ores at all because Danagen Industries doesn't yet have the craftable cutter types that exist in Intrusion Underground. I ended up just making the default cutter handle everything, albeit slowly, for now. Also I tweaked ship movement speeds. 30 minutes.

So now you could drive around and mine stuff. One problem: Previously Danagen Industries had a very slow movement speed. This allowed it to simply pile up every ore as multiple items into the cargo of the ship. This wasn't feasible anymore, so I had to add combining of the same types of ores into single items. 30 minutes. This was surprisingly quick but did result in some issues afterwards.

Next up: I noticed a player might have hard time guessing what items to get for crafting more things, so I added a dynamic suggestion list in the crafting UI when the player isn't able to select enough items. Also, I added an "own" button to entities, as a counterpart to the "disown" button. Also, I changed entities to not be owned by default when picking them up or placing them. 30 minutes.

Yard trade entities were broken, so I fixed them. One biome I added didn't yet have ores, so I added them now. Pre-generated sites had kind of broken positions, so I kind of fixed them a bit. 30 minutes.

2) implement placement of tiles

First I implemented placing of single tiles/ores (tiles and ores are the same thing really). Then I created more UI to allow easily placing multiple tiles. 1 hour.

Testing this by crafting walls and placing them would be fancy. Now, what was that crafting thing I was talking previously about? Oh it doesn't support ores as source items at all. Better add some kind of support because otherwise crafting things out of scratch isn't going to be possible. Did that. 2 hours.

Next morning.

3) implement access-controlled storage facilities

So... let us split this thing up -- storage facilities? Okay, that took 8 hours. Access control? 5 hours. EDIT: Note that you can't get these from anywhere yet in the game.

While playtesting, I noticed that Interplanetary Hub Offices weren't accepting many of the ores in the reworked world generation, making the ores so far pretty much useless. I settled on a system to automatically update the instantiated hubs to new configurations and updated the buy/sell lists to contain all the ores. 2.5 hours.

4) profit!

Now it's a new day again and I need to make some breakfast.

(As usual, the game is running at play3.soilnar.net.)