Daniel
Hi Everybody! (Hi Dr. Nick!)
This week I’ve worked on the graphics for more social sections. It struck me that we had an abundance of really useful super practical areas, like reactors and command and sleeping quarters.
However, what we lacked was somewhere for the crew to spend their time off. Not even in the more militaristic sci-fi settings (Battle Star Galactica and Babylon 5 comes to mind) do they avoid the types of activities that make up normal every day life.
Of course these areas might not be the first thing you build but they are definitely are important to the on-station life. If you imagine it from the view of a survivor of a civilization after a cataclysmic event the comfort in being able to do something like go to the gym would be immense.
Adam
Hey everybody! My work this week is more non-sexy programming stuff. I’m in the process of gutting our GUI back-end to replace with one that plays nicer with Unity (the game engine we’re using). This’ll make it a lot easier to manage the 3D GUI components and won’t cause nearly as many visual glitches.
I’ve also been working with Daniel to get some of the coding problems of character appearance sorted for the models you’ll see walking around the station. He’s provided beautiful art for them as well as tech to stitch all the parts together. We just need to get the animations working with the merged version of that character.
Dave
I recently finished getting all the data that encompasses procedural text generation from my design spreadsheets into sensibly structured database tables, and I’ve moved on to writing the back-end data repository classes that loads that data from the db and stores it in code. Because ultimately the AI needs to be able to make heads or tails of the data, everything needs to be stored/structured in the correct manner to make that happen.
My workflow is something like: spreadsheet design->table/stage organization in excel->write exporters->table organization in SQL->export data from excel to SQL->write code-side data structures->load data into those structures from the DB->write AI that uses the data->output/test loop. Many of these steps happen in parallel.
For example, if I know the AI needs X,Y and Z then I want to build that into my tables and ultimately my design. There’s a lot of going back-and-forth to make sure I don’t accidentally paint myself into some corner by constraining the data in some way for some step that ends up being stupid for some future step.
TTDR (too technical didn’t read): the progress bar on procedural text moved from about 50% to 75%. (100% is working, integrated, and playable).
