Two months since the last progress report, but a lot has happened. I had test devices stolen, posted a semi-popular post on garbage collection in Android, and had a lot of fun writing my series on planet rendering.

Star and Planet Rendering

I've now got star and planet rendering integrated into the game. Every star and every planet is totally unique and generated on-the-fly as you browse the world. Here's a few shots showing that in action:

I'm still having issues with the speed of rendering, though. It all happens in a background thread, so it's not like it affects the actual gameplay, but it can take several seconds for the actual final rendered image to pop up when you visit a new area. I'm not sure what the best way to handle that is, maybe a place-holder image is good enough?

Ship Fleets

I've also started work on handling ship fleets. You build ships in shipping yards, which you can build on a colony. Once you colonize a planet, you can click on the "Build" button, go to the "Ships" tab and choose which ship to build.

You can have as many ships in progress as you like, but the more in-progress ships you have, the slower progress is (you basically need to divide your population between all ships -- workers here haven't read The Mythical Man Month: the more workers you can have build ships, the faster the ship gets built, directly in proportion to the number of workers.

Once you build some ships, they show up in the "Fleet" screen, which you can get to by tapping the "Fleet" button in the solar system view. Tapping that brings up this screen:

You can see here, I've got 7 scouts and 2 Colony Ships. On this window, the only function I've actually implemented so far is the "split" function. This will be useful if you want to send some of your ships to one place, and some of them to another place: split them up and send them on their way. Select a fleet, then tap "Split" to bring up the "Split" dialog":

You can either drag the slider from the left to right to adjust the split, or you can type a number directly into the box. Click "Split" and the fleet is split into two:

Coming Up

Coming up, I'll be working more on the fleet design. Once you can start moving ships from starsystem to starsystem, I think we'll really start having the beginnings of a real game!