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[PetSkull]

These last days I've added the police NPC. 8 different ship designs will be available to the different star systems


And the police REALLY hate it, when you shoot at them ;-)



Right now they only patrol the hyperspace portal and the landing pads. But soon they'll also patrol the planet as a whole, but only on fully goverend systems. They will intervene if they observe anyone shooting at other ships and they will attack you on sight if you have a Wanted status.

I've also started implementing the legal status of all ships (incl. the player). You can have 4 different states:
- Clean
- 1 time offender
- Offender
- Wanted - Dead or alive

Your legal status will change if you get caught shooting at other ships. Any survivors or witnesses will report you on landing on a landing pad. This will result in a change in your legal status and a fine with a set due date. If you don't pay the fine before this date, you'll be a free for all target and a bounty will be set on your head.

[Zireael]

I love your spaceship designs, anywhere I can try out a demo?

[PetSkull]

I'll release a demo, once my first milestone is done. No date set yet

[fearless_donut]

Hey, new ships design is really cool.
And there are some tough guys in your police. Not trying to arrest you, they just shoot you down. Hope i won't meet them in real life.

[PetSkull]

They REALLY hate it, when you shoot at them. Kinda like signing your own death sentence... The original Elite had the same behaviour, but you could lure them down to the surface, so they crashed to the ground. This isn't possible in my version *heheh*

[PetSkull]

Previously I had created a line of sight function by casting a lot of rays out in front of a ship, to see if it was colliding with others. This I have now changed to a much simpler "point in polygon" check, which works flawlessly

[PetSkull]

Remember to behave. If not, it can cost you!



Bribes: When paying a visit to the police to pay the fines, you can always try with a bribe, to make them go away. BUT if the guy behind the counter is one of those pesky types loving his job, you'll get fined even more...

Oh, and if you have to kill someone... Make sure to actually kill them. And leave no witnesses ;-)

[PetSkull]

Long time no hear from me. Life outside the coding basement caught up with me, and at the same time, I felt a little lack of motivation. But I'm back on my game again, still holding the promise to myself, that I really need to finish this! No matter how long it'll take me.

One of the reasons I felt no motivation, was because I realised, I needed to recode my entire GUI engine and that meant redoing a LOT of code and structure. Boring stuff and no progress

I've begun adding missions to the game, so far only goods delivery to other systems, but I've made it, so it's easy extendable with all the other mission types I want in the game.



Next up, is adding more missions to the message board and then I've planned the saving and loading of the game state. This I know demands some recoding and restructuring data objects, but it really is need for the game.

[fearless_donut]

Great you're still here.
There are already too much abandoned projects here and i'm glad you didn't drop yours.
Making game alone is really hard work, especially if you don't get much of feedback. Sometimes i feel like my inner motivation exhausted long time ago and i have only some crazy obsession to complete the game by all costs. Ha ha, when they talked about the indie way, i didn't think it would be like this. Great spirit-training way .

[PetSkull]

Hey Fearless, thanks for your kind words  It is a bitch at times to find motivation and energy to continue, when you're alone on a project. Luckily I found some inspiration to continue again, even though it looks like the list of tasks to do never decreases... Maybe itøs because I keep finding new thing I want to add to the game

But I did manage to cut down on the number of tasks I need to finish in order to create my first demo build - I moved a lot of thing to the next iteration.

Today I fixed a lot of small things to the game, and I found time to adjust my planet generator, so that it can produce suns as well. Here I present you with the 7 major star types



Not perfect but getting there

So far the game hasn't had any star systems per se. Only "systems" you could visit, but I found it to be a little too "thin", so I'm in the process of adding stars and orbiting planets (which are the ones you'll visit instead). This once again means I need to refactor some parts of my code and some of the AI, but I think it's manageable.

[PetSkull]

Great you're still here.
There are already too much abandoned projects here and i'm glad you didn't drop yours.
Making game alone is really hard work, especially if you don't get much of feedback. Sometimes i feel like my inner motivation exhausted long time ago and i have only some crazy obsession to complete the game by all costs. Ha ha, when they talked about the indie way, i didn't think it would be like this. Great spirit-training way .

And don't you give up on your game!! It's so beautiful and I love the athmosphere and style you've created

[Zireael]

That's some really nice stars I see!

[PetSkull]

I've had some time look into my city generation algorithm and have improved it with more population and better grow. Cities in lower tech worlds have smaller towns and high tech systems will have big cities.

Today I will go more into optimizing the generation algorithm and timing, utilitizing threads where I can. Unfortunately JavaFX can only handle image processing commands in its main thread, which gives some challenges creating the graphics for each planet. I got it working, but it's taking more time when running in a thread of its own... *sigh*



The landing pads (red blobs) also increases in size and available platforms as the tech level rises.

Also, I'm getting closer to creating a demo, showing off the main mechanics. Stay tuned for more 

[Zireael]

What are you using for the city algorithm? Grids? L-systems?

[PetSkull]

Mainly grids. But roads uses a modified subdivision routine, which places houses on end of roads or on the path it self.

[PetSkull]

Finally I nailed the implementation of the new city generation, complete with new graphics.



But I've had more and more "oh shit, I need to change this too"-moments regarding the current code, which means I haven't had any real progress for a long time. It's very discouraging and boring as well 

One of the reasons for all my refactoring is the addition of planets to each star system. This increased the number of objects and NPC's I need to create on the start of game, which still takes too long, making the player wait too long before being able to play. This is a delay I'm still working on decreasing, by using threads and only create some parts of the universe in the beginning and create the rest in a background thread running, while the player explores the first planet. Whether this will be a good solution or not, is still to be confirmed...



BUT! I'm stilling chucking away on my code, stille working on tweaking and improving and getting ready for a demo build, which hopefully will show the main mechanics

[PetSkull]

I also found time to edit the landing and takeoff from the landing pads - I think it gives a better insight to the height of wessels

[PetSkull]

Today I implemented a fast forward function, which speeds up time by a factor 20. This makes interplanetary travel and waiting times less tedious

[Zireael]

Fast forward is something that all space games should have <3

[PetSkull]

Fast forward is something that all space games should have <3

And it even makes debugging and testing a bit easier - I've waited many minutes before, to see if an NPC behaved like I wanted it to