Development update

I got really distracted by a series of projects and didn't make a blog post about new upcoming features. I plan more of those in the future because I'm not done talking about new things that are already in the engine. However, the projects that have kept me very distracted for the last few weeks are worthy of their own discussion so here's a breakdown of everything I've been doing recently. It all started with...

...So I got an art asset for the hangar bay.

Remapped every station

It's nice and big and looks like where you would land your ship in order to have it packed into an item so that you might go and do some shopping. That means I got to spend a good deal of time remapping EVERY SINGLE STATION IN THE ENTIRE GAME. Which was loads of fun. Also created some new stations while I was in there.

I've now got all the stations that need to be placed by world generation ready to go. That includes:

• Single corp item shops

• Mining stations

• tier 1 mega mall trade hub station

• tier 2 mega mall trade hub stations

• university stations

• libraries

• habitat stations

• farming stations

• hospitals

• factories

• military bases

• etc.

Made shop categories

Having recently remapped every single station asset in the entire game I started thinking about the shipyards and the shops that would sell items in the stations I was mapping, as well as the trade goods that you would buy and sell at the trade depots. This lead me to spend some time making a whole lot of different shipyard and item shop categories tied to various corporations in the game.

• Tier 1 ship venders

• start station sells specific ships

• tier 2 ship venders

• faction reputation reward military venders

• specialist shops that sell tweaked and tuned ships with remapped interiors

• shops that sell turrets

• shops that sell consumables

• shops that sell tools

• shops that sell crafting recipes

• etc.

These shop categories are defined in sqlite database tables with the goal being to make it as easy as possible for mod makers to define their own shops.

World-gen algorithm

I also started thinking about how these shops would be placed into the world and came up with a fancy new system for actually filling world engine with content. if World Engine is a framework for streaming content into the session that is generated by stories, what I needed to make was a system for building those stories. Specifically my system had to solve some as yet unsolved problems like..

• what trade items are produced and what trade items are needed?

• how many mining stations should exist in a system based on population?

• how will mod makers design their own procedural star civilizations using only database fields?

That last one was the most interesting to me. Basically, I had made some hard-coded stories that would just place shops and mining stations and other items into systems, but what I really wanted was for players to be able to provide the input parameters that would determine how a civilization procedurally generated its space.

The system I came up with uses internally a deck of cards and some weighted priorities for different star systems and it basically works like this:

First you define which stars will be occupied by your star empire. This means putting some X and Y coordinates into a sqlite database table representing the coordinates of star systems that are owned. At the same time, each star is assigned a priority which is just a number representing how "developed" that star system