Dev Journal 7/15/05

Published on July 15, 2005 By CariElf In GalCiv Journals

Scott finished the rest of the starbase graphics, so I was able to get them all into the game. We have a different graphic for each of the four kinds of starbases that you can build: military, economy, culture, and resource starbases. (If we manage to fit asteroid mining in, it will use the resource starbase gfx). I also tweaked some of the behavior of the starbase build/update screen. I changed it to list the number of installed modules rather than the number of available modules, as it's more useful information. I also made it so that there is always a module selected, so you can just keep hitting accept if you have a whole stack of constructors waiting to update your starbase.

I also fixed a bug where the line on the map that shows the path of a tradeoroute was going through planets and stars, and made it so that the trade route lines will show up on the trade minimap, so it looks as if the trade routes are good to go. There is a bug where mini-freighters will lose their autopilot status, but that's more in the realm of ship movement bugs. As always, the ship movement code could use some work. I'm thinking about changing the path calculation algorithm from A* to the direct line approach, and switch to A* only when the ship encounters an obstacle. This will have to wait until I have more time to tweak stuff.

I fixed a few other minor things, like added the sensor range to the ship stat displays, made the (redundant) build button on the starport wnd a cancel button, etc. I also made all the minimap option buttons work, except for the rallypoint one, but we don't have rallypoints in yet. I also improved the startup time when using the quickstart command line parameter. It now skips initializing the setups screens and pulls everything directly out of the prefs.ini file.

One thing that ate up a lot of my time (even though I've been using both my laptop and my work pc in an effort to not waste too much time) is trying to debug crashes that happen when you hit the turn button too many times. This also happens when we use our special debug mode that makes the AI players not give the human player a turn, so it's been harder to debug the AI. It seems to crash a lot in the STL code, which makes it even harder to track down what is causing the error because it's often so deep in the stack that you can't tell where it started. I looked for a way to make the stack size larger, but I haven't found a way yet.

Next week, I'll be working on getting the starbases animating and possibly getting into fleets, if I can either track down these heap errors or make someone else do it.

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