Milestone 1: Primitive graphics engine in place

Milestone 2: Refined graphics engine with bells and whistles, client/server architecture done.

Milestone 3: Space trading and docking, few ships and outpost models. Functional UI. Alpha testing starts here.

Milestone 4: Beginnings of space combat, and filling out space-based economics. Asteroid mining.

Milestone 5: Planetfall, with terrestrial economics in place.

Milestone 6: Research model in place. Building enabled, all economics connected and mostly fleshed out. Beta testing starts here.

Milestone 7: Procedural content generation. AI work. Round 2 of beta testing.

Milestone 8: Balance and polish. Ensure all graphics models and textures are done. Should be content complete.

I should be able to finally reach M1 by the end of the long weekend. Start harassing me on Sunday to guarantee verifiable results by Monday.

I think now I've gotten enough work crammed into the graphics engine that I can claim M1 is complete. The engine doesn't yet have everything I want it to have, but it does have everything I need it to have. If I never touch it again, the game will still look and play just fine.

So on to M2, with graphics/client integration and even fancier graphics. Here's hoping for a shorter milestone than M1.

I'm not moving quite as fast on M2 as I hoped, but it's still decent progress. Client side integration is complete, though I haven't done much in the graphical bells and whistles side of things yet. At the current rate, I should be able to declare M2 complete within a week or two, and get started on M3, where I can start inviting people to actually use the thing.

Another week with some progress. Just getting to the point where you can push starships around is turning out to require more work than I'd thought. I spent a bunch of time this weekend getting everything multithreaded and figuring out the issues associated with that. I also put in a very basic user authentication system, but to be more functional I now need to get started on the server-side load/save. I also need to put together a bunch of the game world. The end result is that the simple pushing around starships is further away than I'd thought, but when it does happen, it'll signify a lot more of the application is done than it would have otherwise.

Once I reach that point, most of what's left will be actual gameplay elements.

I got a good deal of work done, but not quite in the areas I intended to. I managed to squeeze out a 12% FPS increase (currently ~600 FPS on my machine when V-Sync is disabled). I also made the models self-normalizing in size and position. Plus I have the world space command infrastructure up and running. Most of what's left to do for M2 is on the back end, and I seem to be in a good position to call M2 complete by the end of this weekend.

I think I'm ready now to declare M2 complete. All the infrastructure for everything seems to be well in place. Everything's multithreaded, and works fine as far as I can tell. The client/server stuff works well so far, and the server has no problems juggling an arbitrary number of connections. There's even a chat system in now. So onwards, towards M3 and alpha testing!

Most of the work going forwards is going to be actual gameplay elements. There'll be occasional touch-ups to the infrastructure as I find bugs or spend time with optimization, but for the most part I'm done there.

Once M3 is complete, I'll start gradually opening things up to alpha testing. That'll probably just mean updating the client on Sunday night and leaving the server running all day Monday each week, until we get to M5. For alpha testing, I'll try to minimize server restarts so everyone's stuff sticks around each week, but we'll see how that goes.

Been doing busy with some RL stuff, so my progress has slowed a bit. I still managed to get in a visual indication of objects the user has selected, though. The player can now only move around their own ships, and not those belonging to others. Also got some behind the scenes stuff to get the full geography hierarchy set up and actually running on both the client and server - though you wouldn't be able to tell until I get more of the UI in.

This week, my goal is to get minimap generation in. It's too easy to lose the ships when scrolling around, and finding them again is a pain. Should probably also make the chat UI look prettier.

I got full server-side load save in. That's like a minimap, right? Also, moar UI bits.

Going to need a way to make manually generating content easier, or going to need to get procedural content generation done before M6.

Climbing back on this horse.

Started putting in a command-line interface on the server. This is primarily to serve as a debugging aid, and to help me do the very early world-building. Was also able to work out some kinks in the save/load, and that side of things is starting to look pretty good, at least for the data structures currently implemented. The client UI still needs a good deal of work, and I'll try to start getting to that. I still haven't done the minimap.

Since I seem to do better with deadlines, I'm going to set a goal of being ready for alpha testing by January 4th. "Ready" referring more to the code than any sort of art assets. There'll probably be a whole bunch of placeholder models in the game at that time.

Got a pretty good amount of work done. At least it feels that way. I continued building up the command prompt, and probable ended up spending more time on it than I probably should have, considering that it's unlikely anyone but me will ever use it. Things might not be entirely thread-safe, but that's something I can revisit if I ever decide to use it in a way that requires thread safety.

I also added in Ship Classes, which are going to be templates used to create the ships (already in). I've done these in such a way that they can be edited on the fly, so that if there are any balance problems that come up I can fix them without rebooting the server, and the changes will propogate out to all the existing ships of that class.

Also got in space stations, on the server side anyways. Docking appears to work too, but I still need to clean up a few things around there related to drawing.

Finally, I started on new player generation. Hopefully after this week new players will be able to create themselves, although that still needs more client-side support.

I spent most of my time working on the server, so the client is starting to lag behind. I'll be trying to focus my efforts there this week.

Slow week. I got the modular UI work completed, but that isn't much of a feat since apparently I left it only about a dozen lines from being ready last time I touched it. But it does mean that the UI is pretty much plug-and-play now. I spent a good bit of time trying to build UI elements and failing to make anything that looked good, then I switched over to trying to make 3D models for the game and failing to make anything that looked good. The modeling stuff is good practice, though. The UI will probably be crap for a while, but when I make it semi-transparent it isn't too bad.

Need to focus on the UI this week. Hopefully by the end of this week I'll be able to do the first fully functional trade in game.

Got a couple more models done, these don't look as much like crap as my previous attempts, so I'll leave them in. They're not good enough for the finished version, but I think they're good enough for alpha.

On the coding front, with the goal in mind of getting the first trade done this weekend, I started adding in a bunch of the wares and components. One thing lead to another, and six hours later the economy was ready for alpha and has the infrastructure ready for the first beta, but there was still no way to undock. To rectify this, I tossed in a quick undocking feature that causes stations to spit out all ships belonging to you if you press 'U' on the keyboard. There's no real UI around this yet. That's user friendly, right?

I increased the threadedness of the server a bit too. Started thinking about expansion, and currently the server architecture can lead it to running with one processor at 100% and the rest with lots of idle time. So I adjusted some things so that now it'll take up 100% of an arbitrary number of processors, if it needs to.

This lead to an issue when I was using the command prompt to test and/or meddle with things. If you glance a couple of posts up you might notice I mentioned it not being fully thread-safe. That came and bit me, so now it is.

New player creation now has client-side support. It's a bit naive, but it's good enough for alpha.

Everything still looks on track for a January 4 alpha.

It's a good thing I'm not getting paid to do this, 'cause man would my ass be fired. I've been about two days off from being alpha-ready since early January, and I'm trying to climb back into the saddle now. I got distracted by a certain other project, but that's really a pretty weak excuse.

Anyways, back on this thing now. Even only a couple months gone and I'm seeing this code from fresh eyes again. For once, I'm even not thinking "What idiot coded this? Oh, right..." as I dive back into things - I'm still pretty happy with the modular UI system I put together.

Heh, I guess that means I should get back to work as well. I don't know how come, but I just can't make myself finish the cargo ship model, even though all that's left is some texturing. I end up staring at it in editor for some 10 minutes, then closing and thinking "Maybe tomorrow".
Well then, maybe tomorrow for real this time.

Well, shit, this is embarassing. I don't think you need to get "back to work".

This is what I got through this week: Fixed up some of the systems for parsing information requests from the client, and I got some of the work done on filling those information requests. Killed a server-side memory leak involving chat messages, made player creation (very) slightly less naive, and fixed a couple other bugs. Also added some hotkey support to the UI.

That's it.

Sorry.


Left before alpha-readiness:
-----------------
- Smooth(er) ship movement (client)
- Station UI (client)
- Jumpgates (client & server)
- Finish information filling (server)
- Create a richer proto-universe (server)


(edit: also, I 've realized that I have no idea how the thread manager works anymore. Let's hope I did a good job the first time!)

Added a whole bunch of data structures and associated mechanisms to the client so it can retain and cache the information fetched from the server. The client's not so thin anymore.

Ship movement is now smooth enough, and information on geography and objects now flow smoothly between the server and client. The last is more of an ongoing process as new features get added, and right now the server assumes user omniscience and fills all data requests blindly, but it's good enough for Alpha.

Those were the two biggest items on the list, so if I can keep up this pace, it shouldn't be a problem to call M3 by Monday.

Left before alpha-readiness:
-----------------
- Station UI (client)
- Jumpgates (client & server)
- Create a richer proto-universe (server)

(edit: Also, happy 2 year registration birthday, Baltic! I'm sorry.)

Back to failing again. I've found some other things that need to get done and taken care of them, but from that list only really managed to get the station UI crossed off - and I did it just about as half-assed as possible. Will need to fix better later. Also got stargates on the server in. Still needs client support. Did make headway on the proto-universe thing too in terms of building the tools I'll need, but that's not actually done yet. I'm saving it until last, since I have this nasty habit of breaking the data files.

Left before alpha-readiness:
-----------------
- Jumpgates (client)
- Create a richer proto-universe (server)

Give me one more week. I'll let you peek at it next week even if Jumpgates are still invisible and you're restricted to the single local space.

I have a version ready. I'm working on it today more, so not uploading it yet, but I can make it available on demand, but such a version will only be good for ~1 hour.

I'll upload a version that'll stay good longer at the end of the day. Server will be running all day tomorrow.