Hello everyone, we had a pretty rough two months in the progress department. It all started back in May when I had my C drive fail. I got a new drive and got everything back up and made the update but then, a few days following that, when I went to work on SC I found that my IDE, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, was not working properly and would not compile any program what so ever. Now this is not essentially an issue with SC since we re far away from compiling but it did put the breaks on testing.
I have a two part process when implementing new ideas to my programs, well three really. First I flesh out what I want this new feature to do, I write down everything that I will need to make the feature do and how I can get it to accomplish things to that end. Then I make a test program as a proof of concept. This is where we were stuck at. I wanted to test out a new method of saving data and encoding and decoding it to remove or add spaces so we could fix the loading issue where the data is not properly lined up.
In order to do this though I had to make a proof of concept program to demonstrate to myself that my theory worked. Without being able to compile I am sure you can see what the issue was. So I put SC on hold until I could fix it and that turned out to be unwise. It took me all of June and about half of July till I figured out that VS2008 has to be installed on the C drive entirely, no questions asked, in order to work properly. I had installed it across several drives as my new C partition is only 50GB to accommodate only what is needed and to keep everything else away from my Windows install.
So with that fixed I was able to build the POC and test it, debug it, and include it. I also began to go through other areas of SC and work on those, like the Player functions and things. The majority of the work done is shared in the Player class and in the item database.
Here is the change log for the past two months, the log on the wiki site will be updated later today:
Saturday, July 23, 2011:
ItemSystem:
-Made changes to the descriptions of the following laser weapons: 150mm Prototype Lightron Blaster, 150mm Lightron Heavy Cannon, 175mm Lightron Supercannon, 175mm Lightron Blaster, 250mm Lightron Medium Blaster, 25mm Pyre Laser, 50mm Pyre Plasma Cannon.
-Changed attributes of the 50mm Pyre Plasma Cannon:
Min Damage lowered from 90 to 65
Max Damage lowered from 105 to 80
-Changed the description for the 50mm Pyre Megalaser, it was also renamed from Mega-laser to Megalaser.
-Changed the description for the 100mm Pyre Laser and 100mm Pyre Plasma Cannon.
-Changed attributes of the 100mm Pyre Megalaser, name was also changed from Mega-laser to Megalaser:
Uranium cost increased from 0 to 130
-Changed description and attributes of the 175mm Pyre Photon Laser:
Min Damage increased from 190 to 210
Max Damage increased from 230 to 240
Plutonium cost increased from 0 to 50
-Changed the description for the 200mm Pyre Megacannon, name changed from Mega-cannon to Megacannon.
-Changed description of the 300mm Lightron Ultra Plasma Cannon and the 300mm Pyre High-output Megacannon, which was renamed from 300mm Pyre High output Mega-cannon.
-Changed description for the Fleet Buster, Grand Hilzarat, and Grand Design.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011:
Player:
-Removed data encryption, decryption, and save, load functions from the player class.
-Added setting functions for the player name, rank, ship name, ship class, ship technology level, and current/max armor, shield, and hull points.
Game:
-Added the code for the data decryption and encryption to the implementation file. Currently only the attributes listed in the "Player setting functions change log entry" are being used in these functions. Later on weapon and planet names will be added to these functions.
-Fixed a few types and comments in the implementation file.
ItemSystem:
-Began laser weapon entry into laserDB matrix.
-Changed the description for both the Ion-Particle Blaster and 50mm Suspended Coil Laser Cannon.
-Renamed ‘Ion-Partical Blaster' to Ion-Particle Blaster.
-Altered the description and name for 50mm Omega Cannon Proto-Type, now called 50mm Omega Cannon Prototype.
-Description changed for 50mm High-Output Ion Cannon, 25mm Lightron Blaster, 50mm Compressed Lightron Blaster, 50mm Lightron Blaster, 100mm Suspended-coil Lightron Blaster, and 150mm Proto-Type Lightron Blaster.
-Renamed 150mm Proto-Type Lightron Blaster to 150mm Prototype Lightron Blaster and changed its attributes slightly:
Maximum Optimal Target Distance changed from 7 to 12
Wednesday, July 13, 2011:
New Classes:
-Added a new class; Game. This class will handle any wide scope game related functions such as saving and loading and data encryption/decryption. There may be other functions moved to here later on.
-Created a new class called menuProc (menu Processing) which will handle all of the menu option inputs. It will process the player choices and call the related functions. This is done in an attempt to move ALL player related choices out of the ‘main' game execution file and reduce the choices throughout the rest of the project files and consolidate it all into one class eventually.
-Added Story class to this build. It only has one function at the moment for the opening story.
File Renames:
-Previously called game.cpp file has been renamed to main.cpp. Started the basic coding here including class references and starting function calls for creating the game start menu and calling the story. Renamed in lieu of Game class, would have had a name conflict with that classes implementation file (game.cpp).
Player:
-Removed Loading and Saving, Decrypting and Encrypting functions from Player.h. These functions relate more to game data then just the player class. They have been moved to the Game class.
Game:
-Added code for save function and data encryption and decryption. Function will create save folder structure if it does not exist then create the .nfo file. This does not include destroyed planet data at this time. Loading function not yet coded.
ItemSystem:
-Finished coding Ship database and removed old code for ship settings. Replaced 2,425 lines of code with 43 lines of code.
End Changelog
I was able to finish entering the laser weapons into their matrix and will continue with the other weapons as well. I will also need to make some rail guns and heavy weapons as we did not actually have any at all in the 0.4A version of the game.
I would say we are currently at 8% complete for the total recode as it is going much slower then I had anticipated with all of the set backs and other things that we are having to deal with.
I am hoping to increase this number to around 15 to 23% by the next update, maybe even higher. We have cut around 3400 to 4000 lines of excess code out of the game so far, that number will only increase dramatically once we get the weapon matrices completely coded and recode the station shop menus.
Thanks for following us!
-SC Dev Team
