0.5 Dev Update: Buildings data Structure

Well the last SVN commits concerns mainly the data structure of the buildings, so in more details it include:

• the requirements in 5 categories: hydrosphere, construction materials, region's soil, resource spot and technoscience.
• the functions in 5 categories, including the specific data of each function: energy, housing, intelligence, miscellaneous and production.
• the energy and production modes. This concerns only the entry, not the calculations yet. There's 3 energy mode for now: fission/fusion and photon, and  7 production modes: Carbonaceous Ore Refining, Humidity Gathering, Metallic Ore Refining, Radioactive Ore Refining, Rare Metals Ore Refining, Resource Mining and Water Electrolysis.
• Some data structures concerning the technosciences are added too. 
• Colonization  Shelters data are expanded with the new additions.

Future additions will concerns again the buildings data structure with the addition of staff data and custom effects for add custom functions that are not included in the infrastructure's function. for example a Housing infrastructure could have a custom effect "Energy Generation" to produce energy or have a "Basic HQ" role.
After that i'll update user's interface with one main tree list to display settlement's infrastructures.
This version already take more than 1,000 lines of code yet and it's far to be finished.

0.5 Game Design Update

Okay the basics, in the game design documents, are complete now.

The Conversion/Assembling/Building rules are completed.
The CSM modules concerning food & water, oxygen and energy are also completed.

I just updated the infrastructures data structure tonight, and i'll begin the heavy coding tomorrow.

Design itself is far to be completed yet, but there's enough stuff for coding now.

NB: CSM= Colony Simulation Model
Sorry for all of those barbaric acronyms :D

0.5 Game Design Update

These last days i completed the infrastructures building system, in the game design documents, including:

• created the rules for the Conversion/Assembling/Building (CAB) queue 
• completed the calculations for colony's building workforce, including those when a new infrastructure is in the CAB queue
• completed the Building rules and calculations, for determine the building duration
• completed infrastructures' staff rules and calculations
• completed rules for infrastructures transition status and production delay
• completed the production processes rules
• added some production modes
• (Work In Progress) nearly completed the repartition of the production between colony's reserves and colony's storages  for industrial purposes, i working on it yet. This part include also the colony's reserves (food/oxygen/water) management rules and calculations. The Colony Simulation Model (CSM) data are also expanded with colony's reserves. New CSM events will be created too, especially in case of life support overload and reserves shortage

And... that's all for now concerning the game design. For information the main game document reached 104 pages yesterday.

In the dev itself, settlements are now displayed, and the surface is automatically updated when a colony is settled.
Look this screenshot, it's not much but it's a start:

The Surface in this example display 3 settlements

After the game design session is done, i'll implement the new infrastructure and colony's data and i'll begin to display the settlement's infrastructures in the colony data panel.
Lot of work...lot of work... :)

New Video and 8bits Funding

I just posted a new (crappy) video on youtube.

Shame on me i forgot to override the policy enforcement conditions to shows how it works...



Also i created a funding page for the project http://www.8bitfunding.com/project_details.php?p_id=140

Besides that, settlements data is now fully implemented and the colonization mission setup interface is updated for chose the settlement type (it's seen in the video).
I working currently on the display of the settlements on the surface by icons.
After that i'll do some refactoring and code audit, and more complete infrastructures data will be implemented.

A note for the Linux Users

today i seen the week stats and one thing popup clearly, that Linux/Unix users seems to be interested too (with 28% of pages by operating systems).

For now the game is win32 only, but someone reported me that it works under Wine.

Initially i began to dev FARC w/ FreePascal for make a portable code under Linux but for some reasons i switched back w/ Delphi. One of those reason is that my old laptop don't stand OpenGL and is now dead.

I plan to buy a 2nd PC in september, at this date i'll put Linux on my current configuration, and so will try to revive the Linux port of FARC (i say "try" since it will had some work and delay).

The only work for porting concerns the interface, i don't think there will be heavy problems for the game system, and the Linux code base already exists.

Just my 2 cents.

0.5 Development Started

Even if the game design of the infrastructures and production system isn't complete yet, there's now several parts done and ready to be implemented, so the development is started since february 8.
It concerns mainly the infrastructures data for now with some modifications and refinments and the addition of the settlements. The Colonization Mission setup is being expanded too, to be in accordance to the settlements.
I try to not develop too far the number of infrastructures, production modes and items for now and keep a short basic list needed to establish the colony and begin to play with it. It will be always the time to develop further in the future.
Anyway it's already an heavy work so stay tuned :)

0.5: Production System

I continue to making game design work about the production system itself.
The production concerns the items/products that can be extracted/refined and manufactured in the game.
There's 5 classes of items:

• Resources: regroup all raw resources, like water or Carbonaceous Ore
• Energy: regroup all energy-related items, like Helium-3 Isotope or Nuclear Fission Reactors
• Materials: regoup all materials, like Plastics or Nanocomposites
• Bioproducts: regroup all biological products, like Animal Food and Bioroids
• Equipment: regroup all hardware and equipment (out of energy equipments), like Fractal Building Unit or Scout Autonomous Rover

These items are generated by infrastructures which can have one ore more than one production mode.
For example an Ore Processing Plant has 3 production modes: Carbonaceous Ore Refining, Metallic Ore Refining and Rare Metals Ore Refining.
A Mining Camp has 1 production mode: Resource Mining.

Resources aren't really generated, but extracted from resources spots on an orbital object.
Resources spots must be found by expeditions doing resources survey.
One region can have one or several resources spots, and at the contrary to the rest of the orbital objects data the resources spots are generated in-game, and so the finding will never be the same from one game to an another.

That's my 2 cents of description, of course it's a bit more complicated, especially since the system, w/ the infrastructures and the items are separated in 3 documents.

Stay tuned, this 0.5 will be the bigger of all the other already implemented major versions :))