Well would you? Would you let just ANYONE build a base on your planet? A military base?
Bases are by themselves a military installation. They house ships, they have defenses… Would any sane populace invite potential war and destruction on themselves by allowing this alliance or that merchant to build a base on thier planet?
Maybe we have it the other way around, maybe we shouldn’t allow people to build bases on ‘inhabited’ planets but rather on ‘uninhabited’ or ‘non-habitable’ planets, planetoids, moons or asteroids.
Hmmmmm…
Ahh quiet time at last…
Daughter put to bed, wife out at night school, I can finally sit in my chair with my feet up and notebook on my lap and think a little bit.
Long day today, it looked like it would never end. Finally got written approval for by Project Management certification training course, it starts on Tuesday morning, I love going to school for free and getting paid to go to school :). Finally decided to branch away from Windows Server support into Project Management full time. With any luck I will be able to branch further into software development projects, my experience gained with APME will start to pay off.
We still need to gather some momentum in our own project, things are starting to slow down and it can’t be allowed to, but a balance needs to be achieved so we don’t burn out as well. So many little problems to fix, I have overlooked them for now since they are small and there are so many larger issues that make the small ones a bit insignificant comapred.
So I was so pleased at my deployable technology storage solution. It is possible to store any technology no matter the number of holds it takes to and from shared/personal to ship cargo…
What I forgot was that we transfer more than just technology to the hangar, and since all use the same code to remove, unload, store etc. my deplotable technology solution kind of messed up weapn storage. But all it required was a little change and all is working as it should.
So I didn’t want to code checks specifically for the mining station in ME_Base_Hangar class, so I did the next best thing… I added a field in technology_types for cargo_space and populated all the technology with a 1 and put 150 for miningstation. Then in the load_technology_array, I added the field to the query and array, then in the unload and store functions I just multiply the amount against the cargo_space and then apply that to ship cargo. It will work for any technology and even if we decide to make all technology take more than 1 hold of space.
I tell my wife that I am going ‘down’ (my ‘office’ is in the lower level of our split-level house) to do some work. She invariably calls what I do ‘playing’. Funny how I like to refer the stuff I do as work when it’s fun, which really makes it play, and she damn well knows that I am not ‘working’ :).
Today was a good day, I was finally able to push the combat changes to the server to test. It isn’t easy to test combat on your own, I had to ask Sultans to give me a hand. But the small design changes to the behaviour of ship based combat drones work just perfectly. I even got to test the tractor lock break function I wrote to break any tractor locks on pods when ships get destroyed.
Base hangar is bugging me, the mining station is an unplanned aberration that messes up the flow. The concept of deployable technology is a good one, but trying to implement it without properly designing how it will work within the system is just shy of being crazy. We can’t keep adding features to the system without properly planning thier implementation. Don’t get me wrong, the mining station is a great idea, but even the best of ideas need planning and design to implement. This system was not designed to be extendable. Too many repetitive bits and pieces of information and code all over the place.
Still working on project objectives and scope, I may have gone too far astray and need to re-factor it a bit. Everyday though, I think of something new that would mean another issue to deal with. Even tonight, WizardOne remarked that the Universe Server service requires more RAM than than the server it is running on has capacity to install. Which means if we are to realize the Universe Server service from more than a basic sector handling point of view, we will need to upgrade or replace that server. New servers cost money, money comes from donations and memberships, money is needed by WizardOne to pay bills (as we all know)… So we need a stable working game so a round can start and time to gather new players who will buy memberships or donate so we can procure equipment… It isn’t a vicious circle, it will just take time to get it all done right.
I go forth to try to get a sense on how the base hangar will recognize and handle the mining station…
Hawklan