Author Topic: Development Progress - April 2015  (Read 5078 times)

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Offline Rod-Serling (OP)

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Development Progress - April 2015
« on: May 01, 2015, 05:58:20 AM »
Excluding merges, 8 authors have pushed 210 commits to all branches, excluding merges. On master+ECS-Switchover, 185 files have changed and there have been 46,307 additions and 19,035 deletions.

Here's our commit graph for this month.

This is combined Master/ECS-Switchover commits, which are our two main branches.

Firstly, I'd like to give a little shout out to our new developers on the project. Please welcome intercross21, WaldschratMX, and copernicus to the Pulsar4x developer team! There are also a few other potential developers who have shown interest in our IRC chat channel, but haven't gotten around to making a commit quite yet. I truly appreciate all of the support from these new developers who are willing to spend their time on this project.

We've spent some time talking about the project goals and have had to make a hard decision. The original design for Pulsar4x had us creating the game as a multiplatform entity. Unfortunately, we've come to the decision that we don't have the capability to support other platforms other than Windows at this time. After countless hours of research, we came to the conclusion that C# and .NET simply do not have good enough multiplatform UI support. Most C# Multiplatform UI libraries are long abandoned. From now on, our main development team is going to focus on Windows only WPF development for the UI of Pulsar. We would love to support a multiplatform UI, but we still lack any true linux/mac developers. If there's any Linux UI developers out there on the fence about helping us out, please come help!

Now let's get down and dirty on what we've done this month.

The Master branch has been fairly quiet. Nathan has finished the shipyard work, but beyond that nothing has been contributed to the master branch.

On the ECS-Swithover branch however, we've made some real gains in almost all areas. Thanks to the addition of the new developers, we've made decent advances in our work on Ships, Installations, Minerals, the Technology Tree, Atmospheres, Commanders, Colonies, Factions, and Species. While none of these areas are fully complete, the fact is that our backend work is mostly done and we are now beginning to flush out the features of the actual game. In addition to these great developments, we've also made three major advancements.

1) We've implemented saving and loading of the game with JSON. It's currently fully functional and working great.
2) We're loading Static Data through JSON. Due to the data-driven design of our ECS Library, we're able to dynamically load everything from the technology tree to minerals and mineral names through user-friendly JSON files. This, combined with a Static Data Editor GUI allows end-users to easily customize their games to their tastes, expanding our modding capabilities.
3) We've finished porting over the SystemGen from the old library to use the new ECS system. While there is still some work to be done to link the SystemGen up to the static data loader (So users can customize things like mineral chance and planet type chances), it's refreshing to have our library creating solar systems again.

May is looking to be exciting as we continue to flesh out the features of our ECS branch with our new developers. We could really use a WPF UI developer, as that's our next big project coming up.

Thanks for staying with us!

Fair winds and following seas, my fellow space addicts.
« Last Edit: May 01, 2015, 08:35:32 PM by Rod-Serling »
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Offline Witty

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Re: Development Progress - April 2015
« Reply #1 on: May 01, 2015, 08:03:50 PM »
Awesome! Keep up the good work guys.
 

Offline se5a

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Re: Development Progress - April 2015
« Reply #2 on: May 02, 2015, 02:39:15 PM »
We've definitely made some good progress on the ECS over the last few weeks, I've been working on some of the installation stuff.
we've separated out the abilities so that the json (or mod files) can be defined with a number of these abilities. so you could create a mod with an installation that can for example, mine, and construct new installations.  Von Neumann machines anyone?
 

Offline MattyD

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Re: Development Progress - April 2015
« Reply #3 on: May 12, 2015, 05:20:24 PM »
Genome sequence base oxygen level + 10 is spelt wrong in the JSON files.
My Newbie AAR
 

Offline Rod-Serling (OP)

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Re: Development Progress - April 2015
« Reply #4 on: May 24, 2015, 11:04:56 AM »
Genome sequence base oxygen level + 10 is spelt wrong in the JSON files.

Thanks for this report! Sorry it took so long to reply, I was looking for what was wrong with it for awhile, but recently realized that another programmer already fixed it!
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Offline stamasd

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Re: Development Progress - April 2015
« Reply #5 on: May 24, 2015, 12:20:54 PM »
Just a quick bug report, the building instructions in the README.md file are slightly wrong. If you build the Pulsar4X.UI project, it doesn't automatically build Pulsar4X.Lib (and complains about it missing). The Pulsar4X.Lib needs to be built separately before Pulsar4X.UI. This is with VS Express 2013.
 

Offline Rod-Serling (OP)

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Re: Development Progress - April 2015
« Reply #6 on: May 24, 2015, 11:28:30 PM »
Just a quick bug report, the building instructions in the README.md file are slightly wrong. If you build the Pulsar4X.UI project, it doesn't automatically build Pulsar4X.Lib (and complains about it missing). The Pulsar4X.Lib needs to be built separately before Pulsar4X.UI. This is with VS Express 2013.

Which Github branch are you trying to build?

I'm guessing master branch with Premake, correct?

Also, if you want, you can upgrade to VS Community Edition 2013. It's free and is replacing VS Express editions in the future. It's basically Pro version, but not licensed for large commercial use.
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Offline se5a

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Re: Development Progress - April 2015
« Reply #7 on: May 25, 2015, 02:18:26 PM »
The different branches have different readmes and build instructions.