I thought I’d finished on Galaxia for tonight… But I came up with stars:

Instead of adding truly useful stuff to Galaxia I decided to added a nice cool feature.

The interface will use two maps (so you can look at two places at once). The disadvantage is you need your display set to 1024x768 for it to work properly but that would have been true anyway since there is still the control frame to display under the map that I haven’t done yet.

You can now build colony ships and transfer ships between facilities. The next thing to do is to allow orders to be chained so one is done after another. That way ships can be transfered from the shipyard to the launchpad automatically after being made (as well as lots of other cool things).

Of course the big thing to do is add users to the game since everything I write now needs to be slightly different depending on object ownership.

The new version of Galaxia will be called Galaxia Reborn.

Things done:

• Map display, including:
  • Resizable/rescalable grid
  • Planetary terrain
  • Planet surfaces wrap
  • Inside colonies (and other structres)
• Basic object info
• Ship movement, in realtime

I’ll post some screenshots in my next entry.

Galaxia Reborn will be plain HTML through a browser. A step back technologically but it is for the best I assure you.

I’ve been working on keeping the game as graphical as possible still though:

gr_space.gif gr_earth.gif gr_colony.gif

Things to notice:

• Multiple planets (and any other objects for that matter) scale nicely when in the same sector.
• The coords on the planet wrap.
• The grid is a different scale when inside structures (this can be set to anything in theory; players may be able to alter is as a zoom feature.
• No scrolling arrows inside a structure; they are limited size and son’t wrap.

The crazy smilie is a wink.

And in a change to tonights advertised post of ‘Galaxia’ I’ll post a link to a picture of me dancing.

The picture was taken at the Inter Varsity Dancesport Championships by Laurie Young (his blog), the Imperial College team photographer. The girl was my dance partner for the year who it just occurred to me it might not be polite to name. Hmm… I’ve just realised I’ve already named her in another post.

Google and WWE employees have this problem with what they can and can’t post in blogs. They lose jobs though. Although I have no desire to annoy my dance partner any more than I might have previously…

Galaxia

Things done:

• Map display, including:
  • Resizable/rescalable grid
  • Planetary terrain
  • Planet surfaces wrap
  • Inside colonies (and other structures)
• Basic object info
• Ship movement, in realtime

I’ll post some screenshots in my next entry.

For some reason I didn’t wake up today until 1pm. Which meant I missed my only lecture of the day but it’s not a big problem. I think I’ve finally caught up on all the sleep I’ve been missing.

Greg Egan is an amazing author. I’m currently reading “Diaspora” which basically seems to be a collection of ideas on philosophy, quantum mechanics, ethics, the nature of consciousness and cosmology all rolled up in a neat plot. At the moment he’s describing the experiences of these beings that suddenly have to cope with moving into a five dimensional universe and the emotional stress it causes…

Galaxia Plus is also coming along surprisingly well.

And I should also have my bag tonight! Which is lucky since I need my dance shoes before my class at 8:30…

Having something I can throw random thoughts at whenever I at a computer is probably a bad thing… especially considering how much I’m at my computer.

At the moment though I genuinely have some free time… I have to wait two minutes to see if the GP server will start itself automatically. Ooh look, the two minutes are up. And unfortunately it didn’t start… I’ll sort it eventually.