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Monday, January 10, 2011

UI components nearly done

I've managed to tweak my scrollbar so it can be either vertical or horizontal, and it works without any problems. I'm in process of adding a bit more code so it can act like a slider if I tell it to.

I've also worked on the system display. It now lists the planets, and have a "system screen" on top right when a system is selected. When you select a planet that's owned by you, you see six sliders. The six sliders are for the following fields:

Construction (ships, defense, shield, etc)
Research
Infrastructure (get 1 unit of infrastructure per population unit for maximum output)
Revenues (Taxes, trade goods, etc, that pays for your expenses)
Agriculture (Need to feed your people, this slider cannot be adjusted)
Waste Management (All of the above fields generate varying amounts of pollution, this slider cannot be adjusted)

I've decided to change the ship construction from system-wide to planet-wide. This is less confusing for the players, and can prevent some kind of exploits against the AI players. My goal is to try and put both human and AI players on the same ground. in MoO 1, you could exploit the population growth (do one turn, then transport 2 or 3 people from your 50/100 homeworld to a new planet every turn) In Beyond Beyaan, people migrate on their own, so no population relocation exploit. Also, when you colonize a planet, it starts with no population, people will have to migrate there. So no free population from colony ships. They're just there to create an habitable environment for the people to move to.

Agriculture's slider cannot be adjusted because you must feed your people, and also to prevent any exploits that I may have missed over the AI players.

Infrastructure works like this: If a planet can support 60 people, it can have up to 60 infrastructure. Output works like this: (lowest of two fields (infrastructure or pop) + remaining pop, if any, default output without infrastructure)

So for example, if I have 50 pop and 75 infrastructure, I get 50 units of output. If I have 75 pop and 50 infrastructure, and the pop's default output without infrastructure is 0.5, then I have 50 + (25 * 0.5) = 62.5 units of output.

Those units of output can be applied to farming, revenue, waste management, construction, infrastructure development, and research. So it's better to have a full pop with full infrastructure for maximum output.

There will be technologies that increase the output of a particular field (construction for example) from each input unit. So if I have 20 units of production into research, without any bonuses or technology improvements, I'd get 20 research points. I research an improvement in research techniques which adds 0.5 output for each production unit, I now get 30 research points from 20 production points.

I should be done with planet development/sliders by end of this week, as well as End of Turn processing. Then after that, Fleet movement, exploration, and colonization, plus migration!

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