May the 4th be with you!
I thought I might as well use this opportunity to give an update on my progress so far, though in all honesty, I haven't really accomplished much since the last article.
In terms of my grandiose goals of creating a "fully functioning galaxy map", only about 10 systems have been added thus far. Which isn't necessarily a detrimental thing thinking about it now, since it has allowed me to make progress in other areas.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Random Things
In the past month, I've mainly been fooling around with random things, like adding spaceport propaganda. It's only there for aesthetics, but I thought I might as well learn how to add to other aspects of the plugin, rather than just adding planets, ships and outfits. At least it looks pretty cool though.
Another aspect that I spontaneously decided to work on is the addition of astromech droids, something that was far simpler to code than I initially thought. I have created both an "Astromech socket" outfit and an "R3-series Astromech Droid" so far, the latter of the two only being purchasable if the socket is already installed. The thumbnails are just temporary/non-existent at the moment, but the outfits themselves seem to work pretty well. Are they balanced? Not quite.
One final aspect of the plugin that I have worked on recently are some hails for the Galactic Empire, which again were pretty simple to code. The dialogue options are pretty limited at the moment, but since I know how they work now, it'll be easier from here on.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Balancing
Something else that I have been meaning to look at for a while is ship balancing, something that has been completely neglected in previous versions.
Now although I can't pretend that the new balancing for v0.4-alpha will be flawless (in fact, it's most definitely far from that), ship costs, hull values and shield values are already much better.
The foremost issue that I was facing was in regards to maintaining consistency with SW lore, particularly for ship designs like the Fang Fighter or the Eta-2 Actis-class Interceptor (both of which do not have shields at all). This gave them an immense disadvantage during combat, as they were unable to recover health. Now, I've tried to accomodate for this by giving these particular ships a much greater hull, so that their combined health is essentially the same as other fighters.
Anyway, that's all from me!
– Ember369
If anybody has any suggestions for me in terms of possible features for the plugin, I'd love to hear your suggestions (not that I will necessary add it, but I'd definitely consider it).
