Development topics

According to Ohloh there has been a lot of activity on the project lately. Most of it went to implementing techologies.

On GUI side there are only development topics but that was enough to drive that many activity. First there was mockup and stub form. Then custom control for items in topic list had to be created. It required view related data (image, topic name and level, development cost) which in turn required controller class which in the end required model data. Model data consists of three parts:

• Static data: technology name, description, image, cost per level and prerequisite technologies
• Game state data: researched level, invested points and priority
• State change data: new priority

Static data and change data are new "flavors" of data and both required different treatment than game state data and tinkering how to implement. Speaking if radically new stuff in the code, there is an image cache feature on GUI side. Game model (core) is only concerned with image path and it's up to view to load it and store it. Image cache is, as you might have guessed, an associative table that translates paths to images by either loading them from disk or by returning already loaded ones.

That's all cool but what is new for player. Well, you can look at pretty pictures and rearrange them :). Being able to invest points requires three big things: colonies, system governments and turn processing. I think I'll tackle colonies next.

Also there was some polishing. System view can be panned left and right, texture atlas bug fix and new feature and textured wormholes!