Hello everyone,
I’ve made some progress on Xeno 4 these past two weeks but we still have a while to go. So far, I’ve moved Project: Ant over to Xeno4.com. I have also transferred the registration system and made use of the Galaxy Map. I linked the systems and created an interactive galaxy map. I organized the game panel under four panes. After that, I started work on the path finding for inter-system navigation. However, there is quite a bit left to do.
Firstly, I must finish my algorithm to create each system’s native structures (asteroid fields, ice range, and gas collections, planets, moons, the star) as well as the system’s man-made structures (satellites, star bases, space stations, mining plants, space-anchored bases, etc.) After that algorithm completes, I’ll start work on moving within and without the systems. Then, I will update the pane to include your approx. location within the system and your position in the galaxy. After that, I will start work on some sort of communication (chat.) Once that is finished, I will work on fleets and enterprises. After those are implemented, I will start on creating various ships. After that, I will design a docked area page. That page will hold various tools for your ship and yourself. On that page I will add hangars for multiple ships, cargo storage for off-ship storage, a market to sell in, as well as a way to customize what is loaded on your ship. After all that, I will start on the battle map.
That’s all for now, once these are done I will post another list.
Early this morning, I finished the rendering of the map. Now I am done with the movement and I have also improved the look of the stars. (As well as added more colors.) Now, you can look around the map by clicking either 4 directions. It moves you 256 units in the direction you chose. The colors are random at the moment because I don’t have any means on determining star color.
Over break today I thought I would see if my server needed any updates. I thought, “if it does, I’ll just let Webmin do it. I don’t want to have to download PuTTY.” I set Webmin on it and it went away telling me there were something like 50 updates. I told it to go ahead and update as I was sure it would be done by the end of my break. As it started, something caught my eye. It was updating Apache. Now, this wouldn’t have been a problem (as I know it restarts Apache after updated.) Unfortunately, I noticed it, for reasons best known to apt-get, was deciding it needed to uninstall libapache2-mod-php5.
Hey! What’s Up With the Low Amount of Xeno 4 Updates?
Jul 30
Posted by Eric Christian in Commentary | No Comments
Hello, I realize I haven’t posted the usual amount of updates this week (I did work on optimizing the Galaxy Line algorithm in the Interactive Galaxy Map.) I just wanted to inform everyone who isn’t on my Facebook that there’s a new Xeno 4 theme in the works. That’s why I moved everything to the old .CSS file early this week. With that done, I could start on a new theme without breaking anything. This new theme will continue into the production release as I have designed it to be functional for both SEO and game development. I expect the theme will be released by the end of the day Sunday, at any rate. The old Metal Rafter theme will no longer be supported, nor will you be able to use it anyways
. The new theme will introduce a few new modules for the game including bread crumbs and the news will, unfortunately, have to be moved to the logged-in only area. That means that anyone without a beta key will no longer be able to keep up with in-game news. However, as most of the in-game news is posted in-depth on this blog, I don’t have any issues with that.
Another thing that has kept updates slow is the fact that I have broken down and bought Flash CS5 (yes, I will never support illegal downloading of software that companies put so much effort into making. For more information, see my Anti-Open Source Foundation/Anti-GPL rants.) I figured as it was the only thing I didn’t have in my tool belt, I might as well get it. I will not confirm nor deny that I may or may not use Flash in Xeno 4. However, I will say that you should not expect the game to work on mobiles like Apple’s iPhone ™. I expect everything will turn out fine.
Like I said, you can expect the new Xeno 4 theme to be up by Sunday this week.
Thanks for reading!
Eric
Tags: flash, low updates, new theme, seo, xeno 4