Friday the 13th Journal Entry!!!!!!!

from JoeUser Forums
Warning: This journal has nothing Frightning or Really Interesting about It. Read at your own risk of boredom.

Hey GalCivers! Time for another trip down memory lane to see what got acomplished this week.



The first thing that needed to get wrapped up was the Starbases. I never would have guessed they'd take this long, but, SUPRISE - I suck.
Here we have all 5 phases of the four base types of starbase station you'll be able to build. Later on we'll of course have Terror Stars and hopefully Planetary Starbases (where, at the end of construction, it becomes a planet that you can enhabit). For now we jsut wanted to get the basics starbase functionality.




The other thing on my To-Do list this week was to create a studio set for the news robots to make their broadcasts from. As you can see I didn't get it done...but it's coming along to my liking :)

As noted above, this boring journal entry cames at the end of a pretty tame week. We got a new guy Jesse on the team that has been kicking butt on Ship Battles, so hopefully that'll make it before Beta3.

Oh, and speeking of Betas, I hinted at another Beta2 build this week, but unfourtunatly 0.21 will be the last Beta 2 build before Beta 3 in Late August, so get those swim trunks on and enjoy the summer, cause once fall hits you'll be seeing some substantial changes in the game! 'Till then we'll keep you posted on our progress!
22,573 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Hmm..I just took off my moron hat and realized it wasn't the 13th after all.

Ah well    Time to go sulk at my own foolishness.

Reply #2 from JoeUser Forums Top
But it is friday, and that is a nice looking studio.
Fences - Organize your desktop icons today!
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
[inserts Simpson's] Haha! [/insert]
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I'm not bored at all, I liked the graphics

And welcome to Jesse! (okay okay... I know I'm not on Stardock's dev team but since I saw a week ago that my present graphic card cannot beta test GalCiv2, I have to do something)
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
About "Planetary Starbases", How much control will the player have over its shape or abilitys? Could I invest the money to make it the #1 Tourist attraction of all times? Or be a cheapskate and have it all boring..

Also what shapes are you envisisaging? Anything between a Halo to a giant sphere enclosed around a star would be pretty damn cool..
Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Basically think of it as a planetary Terror Star (if you ever played the first one).  You'd keep adding modules to it until it until you put a "Final" module on it that converts it's onscreen representation from a starbase to an actual planet. Until you actually convert it from a starbase to a planet with that last module, it'd be fairly useless.

So unfortunatly there'd be no fancy Planet/Starbase half-breed when you're done, but this is kinda what I was thinking for the Starbase design itself...

Which iconically kinda borrows from both of your ideas   so hopefully we can actually squeeze in time for this to get in and have the AI use it correctly, otherwise it may just be another fun idea that will have to wait

Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
I wish I could draw my ideas, I could nail that circle in the middle perfectly, aside from that...stick figures!
Reply #8 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Hehe We actually use stick figures to show size ratio's when working on new ideas. Case in point...

So yeah, sometimes it's necessary to use a nice stick figure here and there to get a simple point across.  Here we're showing (or trying to, at least) how small a human is compared to this Starbase.  The human is holding an apple that's inside a giant walkway on the outside of a medium classed starship that's patroling the lower left side of the starbase.

This is an example of artwork that advances the game in no way and was actually a waste of about 10 minutes, but at least now we know GalCiv2's worm-to-starbase ratio (143,637,807:1)

Reply #9 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Oh, and just so you guys know that we're not wasting too much time, here's an early shot of possible small ship designs with the Human Style ship components.