That is a victorious flop of an exhausting victory.
Tired. Stricken. Distracted, and busy. I have met delay after delay, errors and bugs and all manner of setbacks. I have met them all and, with a bit of time, overcome them.
I'm sorry it took so much longer than expected, but it's done. The starmap - now officially titled the "Region Map" - is finally finished, sufficient for release.
What can it do?
- It draws stars of various colours and brightness.
- It draws them in 3D, though they're pretty much just dots. To see the 3D, you have to
- ROTATE your view around, which is controlled in the View Control panel.
- It can zoom in and out. Be careful when zooming out; depending on your computer's capability, drawing many stars can take a while. (The final gameplay version won't allow that many stars initially, though you are able to get extra stars in your map if you want them)
- It can download more stars. Using the Data Control panel; it will have a specified point as a center point, and a range option that you can manipulate with the buttons, and when you click on the request button then the map will request star data from the server; which will respond with all of the stars within 'range' of the center point. FYI, there are currently 6 blobs of stars forming a square-base pyramid, with an extra blob in the middle. This is to help see the 3D, though with so many stars it can be hard to get a good view on slower computers.
- It can save your current view and download settings, so that if you have a preference that you want to see whenever you go to the map page then it will automatically load those settings. In the final game form, the default will just focus on the area surrounding your home star.
- It can load your view and data settings back to your saved/default settings.
- It has little buttons on the control panels that allow you to 'minimize' the panel and get it out of the way; then there will be a little button that allows you to 'restore' the control panel.
- It can find a point based on object names as long as there is an object with that name. This is part of the more advanced use of coordinates... or is it basic use? Well, I'm not ready to go into too much detail about the coordinates at this particular moment, mostly because I'm exhausted by my allergies. All that I'll tell you right now is that the galaxy's name is Protoform, and there is a star named Minimus, and a planet named Maximus... And if you enter the the coordinate "Protoform.Minimus.0" or "Protoform.Minimus.Maximus" then the Region Map will go ask for its 'proper' coordinates, put them into your view/data panel, and thus be automatically centered on that star. Pretty nifty, right? =D
What can't it do?
- It doesn't give any option menu when you click on a star, but it will have that later. For now it's a link to the star's system view page, which doesn't actually exist at the time of this post.
- It can't go faster than what it does now. I'll add more and better view filters to help with load times.
- It can't make pie. Yet.
- It can't show fleets or things. This is partly due to the fact that there's no such thing as fleets or things.
- It can't click-and-drag pan. That would be monstrously laggy to implement right now.
What's next?
The first next thing that I'm going to do (after taking care of some real-life stuff) is set up a page for the stars to link to, and also tweak some numbers to get a better variety of stars; there should be more yellows and whites and maybe some blue. The page will be needed eventually, and having an incomplete page is still better than "Not Found" or whatever. Then I'll do some more BORING work to do some internal coding that will make my life a lot easier in the future. After which I will start on the massive and exciting task of planet generation. This will involve me deciding how to make the computer decide how to build planets! Once there's a bunch of planets, I can make some system/planet map stuffs, and then be another huge step closer to the game being finished.
Oh, and please let me know if you encounter any bugs.
That's all for now. Goodnight, and have a nice day.
*flop*
Revealed : All that stuff I just said!
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