8Dromeda Blog

Implementing things #3 (days 6-9)

Development log from day 6, being 2015-02-24, to beginning of day 10, being 2015-02-28.

During the day after posting the previous post a player noticed that some of the more common ores were valued too high at the interplanetary hub office, which is a thing in the game that buys ores for money. I lowered those prices to almost a tenth of what they were. This should make it generally an inferior alternative to crafting, while still providing a backup plan in case you just need some quick bucks.

Then I actually did take a break.

I decided that the name for the access-controlled storage facility would be "Warehouse". I based it on a previous draft called storage_facility.1 and created warehouse.1. It simply utilizes the two systems I previously created. While doing it, I noticed that the Makefile-based build system didn't rebuild ship/building images when they were modified and fixed that.

Now the building existed, but there was no way of getting it, because it is too large to be put in a ship's cargo hold, which is practically required for crafting or buying something - especially something that isn't able to move by itself.

I made a construction kit system which allows having a small entity that can be later placed on ground and deployed to its final form. I made it so that the yard traders usually have one warehouse construction kit in stock.

Two miscellaneous bugfixes: While making the yard trade addition, I noticed there was no proper check for whether an entity being added in the game was an undefined JSON object, which happened when I messed up something else somewhere else, and added such check with a logged error. While testing, I noticed that the landing capsule cargo content was wrong as it contained cutter_packages instead of cutter_components, to which i had renamed the things earlier. Fixed that.

While designing a crafting recipe for the warehouse, I decided there has to be an ore that would resemble some kind of additive like zinc. I ended up renaming the t9_bd ore into hollowdank, and added the new ore as dinkdank to be found in hollowdank in smaller quantities. I added an intermediate crafting recipe that creates a composite element, which is used to craft the warehouse construction kit.

I had to decide what to do with the iron ore refineries that the world generator has still generated, and ended up removing them from the generation. Due to this and the addition of dinkdank, I will reset the world on play3.soilnar.net right before this post goes up.

I reworked crafting recipes to be internally formatted instead of this: "source": [ "hull_piece", "hull_piece", "hull_piece", "hull_piece", "hull_piece", "hull_piece", "hull_piece", "hull_piece", "hull_piece", "hull_piece", "hull_piece", "hull_piece", "drive_system", "drive_system", "control_system" ],

like this: "source": {"hull_piece": 12, "drive_system": 2, "control_system": 1},

At this point discovering some of the crafting recipes had already become unnecessarily difficult. An in-game crafting recipe browser was needed, so I created one. It's now there ready to be used!

Finally I added crafting recipes for the few ship addon parts that exist so far.

I have now finished everything I listed in The Soilnar plan of 2015.

I still need to fix the chat system to work properly, so that I have a good way of getting feedback from players. Once done, it will mark the largest alpha release so far and I think Danagen Industries is worth having a sustained playerbase from there on.

And this concludes the beginning of day 10. As usual, the game is running at play3.soilnar.net. IRC user? Come hang out on #8dromeda @ Freenode!