Building the base

For ease of management, we're going to break the game into two halves - Andre will run the base, and everthing within the base (floorplan, textures, objects, characters, etc). I will run everything outside the base (vehicles, mining, terrain, space weather, robots, etc). This will help us continue development while I'm out and when I return. I love it when your team allows you to take a vacation!


Andre has a pretty innovative idea to build a series of modular floors shaped like rings... this way, we can add a new ring when needed (or when we come up with a new plot device). This will allow us to quickly test new base layouts and change in the future to support more ideas. Andre's thinking of using an elevator between floors, and will give us a preview of the idea during tonights telecon at 7:30.

On the left side are some pictures of a new moon base idea that NASA is testing out, full story here.

Minor Mining update

I've posted a small update just to test the mining changes. I'm having troubles building the datablocks for the other player uniforms and bots, so they aren't in right now (should be soon!).

Changes:
- There are less minerals needed to buy robots
- Mining an area doesn't use up the land as fast
- Mining areas are much smaller - so you don't have to move as much to mine
- Jet pack speed is based on how many minerals you are carrying.
- Rocks are mineable again - about 40-60 minerals per rock

Astronaut Uniforms

Here's the texture for the Astronaut Uniform - we're looking for 5 new ones, one for each character:

The Source JPG file is located here. The Source PSD file is located here. Andre's Engineer uniform is also shown for comparison. Great stuff Andre!

More mining!

I've added a minor update as version 1.7:

- To fix a few of the bug reports, I changed the way that movement works with mining - now you use up energy every time you mine. This lets you mine faster.

- The player starts out with a bunch of minerals to begin with, to make getting a robot quicker.

- Each robot can have different numbers associated with it - how fast it mines, how much it mines

- Everytime you mine, it will use up a bit of that area... after 10 or so times, it will tell you that there's been too much mining in the area


Plans for next mining updates:
- Robots wil hold on to minerals, you have to go out and pick them up when they are full
- After robots can't mine in an area, they'll randomly move around until they find a spot that isn't mined yet, then restart
- When robots mine, they might hit a pocket of gas or something explosive
- When robots mine, they might slowly take damage
- You can recall robots to base... some of them might not work and you have to pick them up
-- This wil be very useful if a meteor storm is about to hit
- If robots break, you can either fix them or scrap them for resources
- When making robots, you can pick many different options for building them

What other ideas?!

Mining robots

Game version 1.6 is posted!

This has some upgrades to the mining logic. When you mine, you can only mine when you have enough energy. You can only carry 100 units of minerals... once you have that, go and touch the golden machine by the base of the outpost to drop those off at base.

After you have enough minerals to purchase a mining robot, hit the "+" plus key. This will place a mining robot. You can place up to 6 robots, and each one you get mines a little bit better than the last.

Currently, the robots each cost:
5 aluminum, 8 carbon, 45 iron, 3 magnesium, 25 silicon, 5 nickle

What else should we build? What should they cost? I've increased the mining values, especially in higher ares... is this enough?

Mineral Counts

All,
Can you help me work through the minerals that we will have and their percentages of being found every time someone digs? The way it currently works it that for every dig, you have the chance of finding 1 unit of each type - so you could get 1 of each if you "rolled" perfectly each time.

Here's my first though effort. These are very easy to change in my config files:

Name
1st number - % to find in Low Altitude
2nd number - % High Alt
3rd number - % In asteroids

Aluminum 10% 30% 40%
Calcium 10% 30% 40%
Carbon 10% 10% 20%
Hydrogen 20% 10% 50%
Iron 40% 10% 20%
Liq. Ox 10% 3% 20%
Magnesium 30% 10% 20%
Silicon 5% 35% 45%
Water 2% 1% 3%
Titanium 0% 30% 10%
NanoFiber 0% 0% .1%

Do we need to add Nickel? Anything else? I'm guessing Iron should be increased. Water as well?

I'm thinking of adding an extra column for % when digging underground or % when robot digs (though these might just be double and tripple the chances of finding one). Thoughts?