Douglas' Journal of Designing

July 16, 2009, New kid has sucked up my time but am working hard on the paper RPG plot aspects of the game. Very important stuff, really the basics making a good game.

June 15, 2009, been working so hard, I forgot to update this. The program is up and running with a lot of cool stuff to see. Player accounts are up and working at the web store, working on collisions and new alien animations and buildings. Did some cool work with making the character generator but it is still very much in flux. Had a new baby girl, AnnaLisa!

April 20, 2009, Long time no write. I have been super busy! I now have the sever and client written and working. Soon I will set up player's accounts and invite the masses to explore and chat with each other. My new baby is due in about 6 weeks! Now, if I could just make some money!

January 22, 2009! It has been a while and Obama is now president but the world is in the tank! All I can say is, we will see.

November 6, 2008 Wow, Obama won! Can you believe it is almost 2009? I remember when 2001 came and I was wondering, where was HAL, now that we live in SF times. Project is moving along. We have a good script for the game movie and I just wrote the keyboard reader for the game! It really works the way I thought it would! SolarCReations was completely rewritten in a much more OO way and is much better. It now has multiple star orbits also.

October 6, 2008 Been a long time since I updated and a lot has happened. We not have the svn working and loaded with a lot of blender art. We have SolarCreations up and running but still in need of a lot of work. We also have some plans for the next few steps. Basically we will get SolarCreations to the point that it fills the star database and then we will make a little ship that can visit the stars. The art for the ship is done enough to use. The animation needs some more work for walking around the ship and interacting. I would love to find a panda3d programmer that would do the man walking on the ship so that I could focus on the animation and SolarCreations programming.

August 2, 2008 We now have a small team that is working on the website and the Django interface. I think the first script is close to finished.

July 20, 2008 Movie plot is close to done. Models are coming along nicely. Not much really new. Just going along and getting things done.

June 11, 2008 Lots happening. We are making lots of models for the game via the movie project that goes with the game. Have picked up a bunch of new people and things are moving along well! If you want to be involved with the movie project go here and join: http://groups.google.com/group/Traveller_movie

April 7, 2008 Not much done of late but research. We are coming up with some good ideas about how to do life forms. Added a page here about the user interface. Would love to find someone to code it so we could test it out! http://sf-journey-creations.wikispot.org/Basic_Game_Interface_For_Characters

Mar 19, 2008 Sadly, Arthur C Clarke died! He was a key inspiration to me for this program. Still making the star data program. Working on setting up web pages with full database access. Had some major breakthroughs about how to set permissions on the database! Our system has evolved too. Many are using LAMP: Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL and PHP. We are using something more like LLPP. We are moving to or are still using; Linux (but will run on others too!), Lighttpd server, PostgreSQL (thinking about SQlite) and Python with Django web fraimwork, Pygame and Panda3D graphics libraries. I would love to find some others to help with all this work. We really need a good HTML person and a web artist! Some Database expert would be nice about now too, even just to consult with about my DB designs. Experts with Servers and with Django would be good too! If I had all these people I could then work more on the actual game making. Anyone want to fund this project? Then I could pay someone for all this work, heck maybe I could even pay myself!

Feb 21, 2008 Still making the star data program. Updated look, added moons, fix brown dwarfs having planets on the inside problem, Surface temp calc added in K. Sidereal times fixed.
Asteroids have more data now too. All is going along, and looking good. I hope more people start helping more, then it would all go much faster.

Jan 29, 2008 Still making the star data program. It is making planets now but still working on making the details. This may take a while.

Jan 5, 2008 I have made a program that makes stars in the shape of a torus with the pattern done by a high contrast Perlin noise function. I am now working on a program to make the data for each star and then next the planets. We seem to have two other good people working on the project now. :-) Can't wait to see what they produce.

Dec 22, 2007 I have found a lot of open source software for making world maps and solar systems! This is really good news because that mean I will have much more time making the game and much less researching how to make areas to play the game in!

Dec 15, 2007 I am working on setting up the basic system so that player can play in the stars using ships to do trading and fighting. This is not the final system but just a test system that will be done in real time but with a simple HTML interface, a 2d flight system, and simple ships.