Day 84

Sitting at home, waiting for my server....

Today I finished the mission flag system, at least so far as the unit tests are concerned.

It occurred to me, though, that all I'm doing is putting off the real work. Granted, mission flags needed to be done at some point, but they didn't need to be done right now. I have enough conditions and actions to put a basic mission together, in fact, I have for a while. The part I don't want to tackle yet is the editor. Making domain objects is easy. Making editors, in fact, is pretty easy with all the refactoring I've done. The problem is that the mission editor is probably going to be unlike anything else I've coded so far. Well that's not true; I could code it exactly like the other components, but that's a very clunky way of editing. Otherwise the scenario-maker is going to have to go through 8 button presses: edit missions, new mission, new condition, pick a condition from a list, accept that condition, new action, pick an action from a list, etc. And that's just to /get/ the mission. No, I'll need a better editor.

A lot of things could use a better editor. Adding weapons or cargo to a planet's stores, for instance, would be a lot nicer as two side-by-side lists with '<' and '>' button between them rather than the list of items, press 'add', pick from a dialog thing that's going on now. In fact, I'm making a bug for it now. Hello, #115!

I also found a new image to be the titlescreen background, which used to be based on this bit of astronomy. Turns out nebulae are far more impressive-looking, even if they aren't what the game is named after. Since the icon and trac logo were based off of that original photo, I had to change them, too. The trac logo is a part of the nebula now, and the icon is a little spaceship.

When I was debating if I should start this blog, one of my primary worries was that I wouldn't have anything to say. Looking back at this and other posts seems to contradict that, but part of me can't shake the paranoia that I'll run out of topics and every update will be "I added 4 lines of code. Yay me."