I’ve been doing some more work on Research Station Mars. Starting to add in new features for the employees. First up was re-working how the employees interact with objects. They are now linked with the object while using it in order to stop multiple employees using it at the same time.

Next was adding in degeneration to objects when employees use them, followed by the ability for janitors to repair them. That feature still needs tweaking to adjust how long they take to repair and how fast they degrade.

Finally, there was a massive problem with how the employees went about their duties. They spent a lot of time standing about even though they needed to work/sleep/eat/etc. so now they will always go and do those tasks as soon as they can or need to. So they stand about a lot less and seem a bit more realistic.

Other developments include a redesign for the graphics that looks good and is also easy for me to create, given my limited art skills. I’m also looking into re-working the GUI to keep things simple. The search bar is a nice idea but not exactly practical since there’s never really a lot that you need to filter through. The way details about employees and objects are presented is a bit limited as well, and require a bit too much explanation to understand and filtering them is awkward. So I plan on simplifying this as well.

Once again thanks to college progress has slowed down a lot. Since this is my final year project there’s loads of work to be done that you won’t see or know about. I have to do a technical manual about my project, detailing where the idea came from, technologies used, system architecture diagrams, explanations of the main sections of code in the game and then to top it off I’ll have to present my finished project to my lecturers, then a few days later at an open day for employers. All that along with 3 other projects, class tests and actually attending lectures means that there isn’t as much time to actually make the game as I’d like. This will change soon since once my final exams are done with in just over 2 weeks I’ll have a full month to just work on the game and technical manual.

Over the last number of weeks I’ve been getting lots of little bits and pieces done. The miners will now mine out the rooms that you want mined, there’s been fixes to path finding to make the game run better and loads of other little issues that needed fixing(for example clicking through the GUI when building rooms). Next you on the list of ‘thing to do’ is making equipment degrade over time, have janitors fix the equipment and finally have scientists research new objects. Looking at what has to be done by early May it seems like loads, but there’s lots of code in place that makes most of these problems a cinch so I’m confident about getting the game to the stage I want come the deadline. Graphics not included, because they’ll never be the way I want as long as I’m doing them.

Right in mygame. Employees can now wander about when they’re bored, eat food when they’re hungry and sleep in a bed when they’re tired.

What’s that? You don’t believe me? Well then feast your eys on this:

Look at them eat and sleep!

Sort of.

It’s mostly a modification of the old theme, but the text has been made much smaller, there’s lesss images used. There’s now a side bar with a list of the games I’ve worked on, links to some other sites and a list of the post categories, so navigation is much easier now as well. I added in a search box at the top right as well, in case you were wondering what that thing was. I’ll probably put a label above it later to make it more clear.

In Research Station Mars news, I finished off refactoring the code for employees and objects so that they could be sorted together. This means that sorting the draw order of he employees is now a cinch. The employees now randomly move around when they have nothing to do(currently that’s always) and I’ve made some improvements to load times by refatoring all of the GUI code. I’m back in college now so progress has slowed down a lot for the moment, I’ve got to write a technical report about the project so that’s taking up my time. However, next week I plan on getting the bit where the employees actually use the objects done. Most of the groundwork is already there for this so it’s not going to be too difficult.

Seeing how the game holds up with loads of employees on screen. Generally pretty good, this was running in Windowed mode with a few other applications open so performance was a bit rubbish. However there’s no way you’ll ever have that many employees at a time. There’s about 140 there, all finding paths at the same time and moving about and being animated.

~140 Employees