Work Log

  The Organizational Update     This sprint was focused on making organizational changes to the game. Both on the front-end and the back-end. Front-End      The changes here consisted of improvements to the layout of the "Bodies" tab of the overview. The first two came as suggestions from the closed beta. Copy/Pasting Noise Layers      With all of the different parameters in a noise layer it can take some time to get exactly the result you want. To mitigate the amount of re-typing values by hand I implemented the ability to copy and paste these values. The overview of the system is essentially that when you hit copy the game will store a reference to that noise layer. When you paste then it will replace the noise layer struct with one created one to one from the copied noise layer. Duplicating Bodies      The other suggestion from the beta was to be able to duplicate entire bodies. This would help if the player is making lots of moons or something of the like. It was relativ

  Closed Beta Post-Mortem      Today marks the end of the official closed beta for Mini Solar System. As of the time of writing two bugs were found (one of which has been remedied) and five features have been requested (three of which have been implemented). Closed Beta Bugs      The first bug that was found was something that I thought I had already fixed a few times. When applying video settings the conformation box would pop up but the countdown text would not change. This seems to be an isolated issue however as it only happens on a single tester's machine. I tried to look into it but couldn't replicate the issue ever. I will keep it in mind going forward but for now it's on the back-burner.      The next bug that got found but was fixed was that setting the orbit visualizer to a high number of steps (we used 10,000,000 to replicate the bug) would cause the game to crash. I immediately realized that this stemmed from the fact that I didn't clamp the value of

  The Pre-Beta Crunch     This week's sprint was entirely consumed by bug fixes before the closed beta. I did a little testing over the weekend and gathered a list of changes that I felt were obvious and would be easily spotted by testers. It contained mostly aesthetic improvements but also some bug fixes and even a few crashes. I started off strong but the 80/20 rule quickly caught up to me. Day 1     Like I said, the sprint started with me taking care of the lowest hanging fruit. This was mainly UI tweaks; buttons not having correct styling, fonts not being applied, names not displaying correctly, and widgets blending in with the background, etc. I did also take care of some more major things like the planet collision formula, a crash that would happen because of an uninitialized a struct, and quitting to the main menu prompting the player to save before it does so. Day 2     Still going strong, I fixed some things that really should have been done earlier, mainly "the nami

    UI Left, Right, and Center     This sprint was comprised almost entirely of UI adjustments and improvements. I fixed up the loading screen so it looks and functions smoothly and I tweaked lots of UI elements in-game with a new font and more consistent styling. Loading Screen     For the last few sprints I have mentioned a video by Epic Games as my blueprint for making a loading screen based off the action RPG demo . When I tried this approach though I couldn't manage to get the game to build with the extra module. So, a bit defeated by not being able to do something so simple I went looking around the internet for something else. Approach 1: Plugin     Pretty quickly I came across the Async Loading Screen plugin. From the outset it looked very promising. It seemed to have lots of customization, did exactly the same thing as the RPG demo, and seemed pretty simple to use. I will say that getting it up and running in my project took literally minutes, but that's about where