ponedjeljak, 20. lipnja 2016.

Preview release v0.4.5

Now that the biggest features for version v0.5 are implemented it's time to apply much needed polish. A lot of incomplete stuff is finished and stubbed stuff unstubbed, see below for more info. There is one new feature: game over screen.

Download Stareater v0.4.5

So far the game had no ending condition, one could destroy all colonies of other players and game would happily go on. Now at least there is a game over screen. Currently there is only one victory condition but I plan to add more down the road as well as some sort of game retrospective and more compelling victory screen.


As I mentioned in the last post there is new star image. Graphical work was and still is a low priority but this one was in the work for a long time and even low priority tasks get done eventually. I also changed starlane visual a tiny bit and plan on adding back old planet images. They are not meant for large surfaces but still better then current placeholder.

More colony related mechanics got implemented. Space construction penalty is back, it reduces industry points for ship construction and other objects outside of the planet. It incentivizes space projects on low gravity colonies and asteroids and allows improving space industry with space lifting technologies without penalizing colony development. Planet traits are implemented. Instead of having fixed set of attributes like atmosphere density rating and mineral abundance rating in previous version planets now have list of traits which detonate high or low rating of certain attribute or presence of special resource. For now there is only one test trait which increases farming efficiency but other traits can be easily modded in without touching the code.

Construction logic has been revisited and stockpile mechanic has been redone. Now construction projects have stockpile groups instead of each one having their own. When building an item which takes multiple turns to complete industry points are accumulating on the stockpile until there is enough to cover the item cost instead of being immediately spent. If you switch to another project within the same stockpile group then accumulated points would count toward that project and be spent when that project is completed. There is no penalty for switching projects and unused stockpile stays there forever.

While working on stockpiles I've fixed construction time estimation. It's was a bit messy and stockpile data sometimes made faulty situations like second queued item taking stockpile points accumulated from the first one. Colonization logic is also fixed and finished, colonization projects go away when colony is established. Colony ship arrival is handled a bit differently, instead of gradually landing on a planet as they come now they hang around the star system until there is enough of them to establish the colony and land together. Reason for it was to remove hidden ship pile and help with colony ships without colonization mission in the future. Theoretically I can now make idle colony ships count towards new colonization project if their star system is selected as colonization source.

Ship designer got revisited too. I finally ironed out how ship variables are organized and how resulting numbers are plugged in to both attribute used in combat and values displayed in ship designer. Now all numbers affected by special equipment are visible on GUI. Equipment amount input is fixed, both slider and textual input field work for normal and special equipment. Design list now shows design info when moused over. Unfortunately other design list features like number of built ships and deleting design are still stub.


Finally applied first aid for an issue when multiple fleets occupy same or almost the same location on the map. Instead of being able to select only"topmost" fleet player can now choose which fleet to inspect before getting the list of ships in a fleet. This works even for opponent fleets. Better solution where multiple fleet marks don't occupy the same position is postponed for next version where I plan to reorganize how visible objects are tracked and displayed, something like scene graph from popular game engines.

Stealth and detection in combat got implemented. It took me some good thinking for how to calculate distances on hexagonal grid but this awesome post helped me about it. There is a simple nice trick to convert square grid coordinates to hexagonal, visually simply shift every other column (can work for rows too just switch roles) by half tile size and under the hood treat each row as having two neighboring tiles on each side. The problem with that trick is having to constantly check and adjusting if tile is in even or odd column when calculating neighboring tiles and checking parity of both tiles when calculating distance. Before I only had a function which tested if a tile is inside a "circular" hex grid of certain radius and used it for simple distance checks like testing if target is in weapon range. It turned out it didn't work correctly if "center" tile was in odd row and converting it to distance calculation turned out to be way more complicated then a method proposed in aforementioned post. I was reluctant to use that method because it required representing positions with three coordinates, one along normal up-down axis, and others along left-right tilted up and left-right tilted down axes. It turned out it's easy to calculate those coordinates from usual horizontal and vertical coordinates and final solution ended up being fairly brief and clear. I wholeheartedly recommend reading the article for everyone working with hexagonal grids.

And finally, I've improved error reporting GUI. It should now catch more (if not all) unhandled exceptions and display them in copy friendly manner. Happy testing and feel free to comment the game!