Indie Log Jam '94


Anyhow, I'm testing a new LJ program called LogJam... Hope this works.

@p More progress. I had to change some of the city layout stuff to get the senate to build properly. The galaxy now has a galactic senate, which is a central city that contains some very important buildings. They include a senate building which is where the galactic senate, high council, and supreme court meet. Not actually sure what these will do, they aren't as important.

@p There is also a few ministries. The basic idea is this. You have a spaceship, say it's L5 and you want to buy a new ship. You can a) traverse the galaxy endlessly looking for a shop that sells one in your price range that you want or b) visit the Ministry of Transportation and peruse the registry. The registry will tell you where all registered sellers are. There will be some unregistered sellers I guess, and other ways of getting ships, but that's the very basic way. So you can visit there and see, aha, here is a special ship and it's sold at such-and-such a store on whatever planet.

@p The other ministries are war (for weapons), guilds (for finding guild rooms), culture (for finding information on cultures), economies (for commodities), commerce (for items and so forth).

@p Meanwhile I have also put in small updates, each culture has a colour so you can look at the planet map and see what cities belong to what culture, just by the colour of the city. I'm in the process of putting a star around the capital or a double star around the senate, so you can tell those places. I altered the atmosphere shader a bit so the transition into the atmosphere looks more natural. Been bugging me for a long time. I figured out how I'm going to get nice looking water by checking WoW screenshots (neat looking game btw, but who has time? =) Oh yes, and I changed hugely the way the galaxy is laid out. It is /nice/ now. Uses a cool annealing algorithm yadda yadda bottom line is the galaxy stars are laid out nice. I also am getting close to where I may start putting color-coordination code in. First step there is convert everything to hue-normal (e.g., centered around red) .pngs, and then modify the loader to know how to do hue rotations on textures.

@p I also solved a memory leak, this was a pretty major thing =) But, it's solved! This was a cool one. In the game, you can specify coordinates a few ways, but one of them is planet-relative. So i have this world::zone_coord structure with a ref in it for if it's planet-relative. What happens when there is a drone or something that uses a zone coord that is a planet, and then you go to delete the planet but it's referenced by the drone which is ref'd by the planet and you have a loop, voila memory leak. A bit of a pain to track down but it's done.

@p I have to get a GF4 or something sometime soon, so I can implement some nicer effects.

2004-11-26


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