Facility building queue

I know it has been a while since I have posted. I have ran into a little bit of a road block. I had a great design for the facilities building queue. I was happy with it and had even started getting the db design in place. I then ran it by Dustin, and he showed me a bunch of flaws that I didn't see. So back to the drawing board I went. The answer came to me this morning in the shower. All good answers come there, I'm not sure why.

The other problem in my life has been a lot of sickness in my family. Everyone has gotten this 24 hour stomach flu. It has been bad. I hope we are over it and I can get back to writing this game in the evenings.

StarCraft 2 Pay to Play (Well new maps anyway.)

Today at Blizzcon it was announced that they will be launching a service that map makers can design maps and sell them online. Kind of like a iPhone apps store for Star Craft maps. I can't think of anything better for the map making community. Form someone that has done a few projects to have an outlet to make money at it is wonderful.

Tonight I finished up the rest of the resources in the db and gathering of them. the code is working great. I'm pretty happy with how it worked out. The resources in the game are minerals, energy and food. With money as a side resource. Got to have money.

I have been plundered by blizzard

It has been two days since I have been able to write any code. I have been working on story line and fraction names with Dustin. But no code yet. I have been doing a little bit of photography for people, which I love doing.

So tomorrow starts the end of my free time. Well, by start I mean that a year from now my free time will be eaten up by starcraft 2. Tomorrow is blizzcon and who knows what they will be telling there loyal fans like me. But like every fanboy I will be eating it up. Can't wait. I hope that you all are going to follow the fun.

Arrg I'm a pirate, time()

Today was a pretty great day. I got the tick system working in the interface and it seems to be great. To tell how much time there has been a between point a and point b, I store the last time I looked in epoch time and what time it is now in epoch time. I then compare the two times and the difference is how long. You take that times how much you generate per second and you got how many more resources you have gathered between point a and b.

In perl time() will return the servers epoch time.

Blast you mootools

It was a tough weekend for programming. I tried and tried to get mootools working. The biggest lesson I learned. That it is almost imposable to get anything done and be a dad at the same time. One of the two has to fall by the way side. Over the weekend it was the game that suffered. I did get my svn repository set up. I have been using beanstalk and I am pretty happy with it. For a small code base it works pretty good.

Tonight it was time to figure out what is wrong with mootools. I found a single test line to make sure that it was loaded right. That worked, but I still kept getting undefined from all my calls to do anything. The the lighting bolt hit me. (Man it has been a while since I have done javascript seriously.) You can call a element that hasn't loaded yet. I felt like an idiot. Two days development wasted on such a simple little thing. Oh well. So be it.

I be up all in your gril

Tonight I got the interface finished and cut up into html. I am now going to start working on setting up all the pages and resource tick. I have most of the code already written for that. I hope that it goes easy tomorrow.

I also had a great talk with Dustin about heros. The problem came up when talking about what to do if the fleet or ship the hero is on get destroyed. Does the hero die or what happens. We decided that the hero crash lands on the closest planet or asteroid. From there they make there way back to your Home world. That will take a while to do. But you can take a mission in the mean time to go and rescue them. That will always include a fight. I think it will add a little bit to heros and you will be a little bit more careful about where you send your heros.

Interface

I have started to work on the interface. This is the first very rough development design for the interface. Figured you would like to see what I'm working on.

Javascript Libraries

Last night I got some more of the framework in place. I am using Mason template inheritance to build my basic shells and header includes. I also got all my JS libraries installed, tested and working.

The JavaScript libs I am using are:
MooTools
SqueezeBox

First Post

Figured I would start a developers blog. I work on the game about two hours each night. Each night I will post what I did and any screen shots if things have changed. I plan to keep this pretty open. Not much in the game has to be hidden. Also i have a few chats with friends and I plan on posting parts of those that matter to the game.