I spent a lot of this last week fixing my computer, it had taken some heat damage, I believe from having the hot summer sun shine in on it every day, and I had to disable one of the cores, and it was pretty unstable, so I finally did something about it. But it required a couple of days of downtime, one day to assemble the hardware (and when I say day I mean about three hours after work before bedtime), and one day to stumble through downloading and installing all of the game dev tools I forget I use.
But, I did get some good stuff done. I’ve had a galaxy map for a little while, where you can fly around from planet to planet, here’s a not entirely flattering picture of it:
However, this week I got all existing systems integrated into the galaxy map. So you can move from jump node to jump node, land at planets and modify your ship, and you run the risk of running into pirates at some of the jump nodes. Actually, it can be set up so that any faction in the game will have a chance of showing up at any particular jump node, but pirates are the only faction I have set up at the moment.
This week I’m working on some better editing tools, all of the data in the game is loaded into the game through xml, which should make it easier for players to create their own content for the game. But the ships are still a pain to set up, even in the xml. So I’m currently working on a tool that will allow you to set up a ship, then export the ship to xml to be loaded into the game.