Stareater iterations

Before I move to the next topic I'd like to make a little intermission. Stareater is long running project, it's about 7 years old and yeah, still not done. I admit I have taken on very ambitious goal back then but instead of giving up when things got over my head I have started over. If you have been following this blog you'd noticed just that, the current programming effort is a rewrite of the previous iteration. What might have been lost to time is the fact that there has been one before that. Below is a short description of each iteration and names I made up just now so I can refer to them in future posts: 

• DIY or "do it yourself" was the very first incarnation of the Stareater where I have literately went by coding everything myself in C++. Only "others" work I took was OpenGL for graphics and GLUT for "windowing" (how application window is started and managed) and mouse and keyboard input. Unfortunately such ambition had to hit a brick wall somewhere and it was in GUI department. Making GUI engine from scratch is science for itself and I've spent more time on it then making an actual game. Since I didn't take robust enough approach it got really tiresome. DIY iteration ended with pretty beautiful galaxy map (stars only, no planets), map navigation and minimal GUI for starting the game.
• CroVar or "Croatian variables" began as GUI mockup project for DIY iteration. It was C# Windows Forms project and at some point I realized I'd be happier to spend more time on game logic and keep GUI effort to a minimum. So I filled in mockups with a actual game logic from DIY and somewhere along the line I've decided to use Croatian words for class and variable names. That's why I'd call this version CroVar. This iteration got pretty far, stars, planets and colonies were fully functional, planets could be colonized, ships could be designed, built and moved, foundation for AI was laid down and even space battles worked!
• WhyNot is the current iteration of the Stareater. At some point CroVar code got big enough mess to consider refactoring it. At first wanted only to make better separation of GUI logic and game logic but I figured I could fix many other wrong decisions made in CroVar. And it resulted in a total rewrite with good amount of why not this too additions? In all seriousness "why not" approach saved me a lot more trouble than it has brought me and it improved the quality of the code and final product. Mod files got more intuitive format, OpenGL graphics are back, it got easier to code new features and simplified changing and maintaining old features.