Spring in Your Step

So the past week has seen no actual developments with the game. Instead I've been going through the painstaking process of migrating the game from GM4Mac to GM:S. It's a slow process but it should pay dividends. Not only will it allow me to release the game for Linux but I'll also get a 2-3x speed increase in processing speed. This'll allow me to have even more units and larger levels in the game. So next week expect some new feature upgrades and stick with me, as I know it's boring hearing there have only been performance tweaks but it'll allow for lower end machines and now Linux to run the game as well.

Losing Oxygen

So today I finally refined the "Vacuum" that fills the ship when an event happens. As you can see in the below images, the older method wasn't very convincing that there was a ton of air being sucked out of the space station. I'm really happy with the change between these two systems and I'll be refining it a bit more but I'd say it's about 90% there now.

Old Breach

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New Breach

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Simulation

So the programming side of this has been a bit slower than usual and that's due largely to me reading up on AI simulation. Fear not, I'm currently working on implementing a huge bulk of the game AI. It's a huge aspect of how the crew on board the space station operate and I'm hoping that by the end of this weekend I'll have integrated how the crew behave and how the economic system in the game work. I've also been working on a few more simple aspects of Vacuum. Below you can see a shuttle arriving at one of the hangars and dropping off a refugee.

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Housekeeping

So today there wasn't anything too exciting going on with Vacuum. As the number of images and units continues to grow I've had to do some serious housekeeping. I spent two hours today just organizing everything into folders and trying to optimize code. While working on the zoning to create rooms I noticed the zoning itself was really slowing down gameplay. No worries now, I've not only optimized that specific code but gone through, line-by-line and optimized everything. The game is already running much more quickly, even with dozens of units on the screen at once. All this is before I'll be upgrading my software too! So I'm hoping for up to a few thousand units to be able to be represented at once.

Trade this for That?

I've been working on the trader and here's some of the progress. You can see the cargo containers that will deploy when you buy or sell goods. The traders will then fly into your hangar and drop-off or pick-up cargo. The energy fields are currently placeholder graphics.

New Model

So I now have a new model, the first trader ship to be created for Vacuum. Tonight I'll start programming on how to make it have a role in the game but suffice to say it'll play a vital role in ensuring your space station can trade with others throughout the galaxy.

Soon, full speed ahead!

So this week I will be wrapping up the bulk of my obligations for the remainder of the summer. This means that I will be able to give significantly more attention to Vacuum for the next few months, so you should see a slew of updates coming every week. I'm really hoping to have some kind of gameplay video/alpha version available at the end of May or toward the beginning of June at the latest. I'm currently producing the game on a a Mac running GM4Mac. Unfortunately these means I can only create .dmg files, not .exe. This is something I'll be trying to find a workaround for. If yoyogames had a GM:Studio release for Mac it wouldn't be a problem. Regardless, I'll post more on this matter as we get into the summer. Fear not though, Vacuum will be released on Windows, Mac, and Linux regardless of what I have to do to sort out this currently existing issue.

Workaround

Technology, it's great when it works and awful when it doesn't. So I keep my latest backups of Vacuum on a flash drive that always sits next to my laptop. Someone used the flash drive and deleted everything on it. Fear not, everything isn't lost. However, I have spent the entire day reworking the hunger and purchasing system. So I was set back by at least a day, possibly part of another but we'll see. I keep multiple redundant backups but they're not always the newest but always recent enough that nothing too catastrophic can happen.