August is behind us. It was most certainly good vacation season but rather poor time for VERZ, resulting in rather little development. Originally we planned to start another wave of testing during vacation months but now we must accept delay. Below is what has changed in meantime.
Separate credits balance for buildings
There are many reasons to keep credit balance separate between you and any of your economic buildings. One of these may be set to purchase expensive commodities like missiles, exotic goods or that ship orbiter you requisitioned. However, if too many services are sold you may find yourself out of money to pay crew wages or get repairs. Setting aside limited amount of credits ensures such a situation cannot happen.
This is first out of three steps we need to finish initial trading for the game.
Mechanics behind solar panels rewritten
Up to now solar panels were using light intensity to generate antimatter with time required inversely proportional to number of panel modules installed. If producing a single antimatter unit took one hour at a given location, then four solar panels in the same location produced one antimatter unit every fifteen minutes. In locations close to main star with multiple panels it was possible to reduce production time below one minute or to several seconds when one was persistent and made a megaproject out of such building. Who needs Dyson Spheres, anyway?
Current approach brings solar panels in line with other resource gathering units. Each solar production unit runs its own cycle and, once it finishes, it executes a single solar collection action. This makes it much easier to reason about energy supply to building’s other production modules and avoids the massive antimatter overproduction problem.
Nearest development direction
The other two steps out of three mentioned above are setting up ability to define maximum amount of commodities a building will accept and creating pricing for your building. Typical trade becomes possible once traders know what to buy or sell and for how much. At the moment it is only possible to open your facilities to the public without restrictions. In practice that means anyone can take or store anything as if it was his or her owned building. By far not an ideal situation when wishing for working commerce!
Besides occasional bug requiring immediate fixing we have little detours. Development moves straight towards completion of core game loop.
