Update 39 - Ship Map for Cargo
Hey everyone! Happy Thorium Thursday!
It's been a while since the last update, but I wanted to let you all know that work continues, slow but steady. The latest feature I've been working on is the Cargo Control card.
There's a lot going on here, so let me highlight what's cool about this:
- The scrollbar on the left lets the crew member flip through all of the decks.
- Green dots represent rooms on the ship that accept cargo, the blue dot is the currently selected room.
- Orange dots represent cargo containers that can transport cargo through the ship. You can select cargo containers using the buttons on the far right.
- Selected rooms and containers show the cargo inside of them, including how many of each item and the volume of those items.
- Buttons allow the crew to send a specific container to a room, or have the closest container come to the room.
- All cargo takes up a certain volume of space, and rooms and containers have a limited amount of volume, so the crew has to balance those needs and anticipate when a room is going to run out of cargo. This avoids the situation where the crew member transfers all of the torpedos to the torpedo launchers at the beginning of the mission.
- A search bar at the top of the screen makes it easy to find any deck, room, or cargo item anywhere in the ship.
Let me know what you think! This is still very much a work in progress, but it's at enough of a minimum-viable-product state that I'm ready to move on to something different.
Speaking of which, the next thing I'll be working on is the pilot screen, followed by the view screen. Once those two things are done, and a few extra features are added to the Flight Director screen, Thorium Nova will be at feature parity (plus some more features) with where it was in April 2021.
Once that work is done, I'll release the next alpha. That should provide a lot of fun things to play with while I continue adding features.
Live Streaming
It's been a while since we had a Thorium Development Meeting. Alas, there weren't a lot of people showing up to the meetings so I decided to postpone them indefinitely. If anyone wants to do another meeting, feel free to propose a time on Discord, or send me an email and we can get one scheduled.
In lieu of those meetings, I'm planning on starting a weekly livestream on Twitch. It'll be low-key, just watching me work on Thorium Nova. Folks can chat or ask questions in the Twitch text chat and you can get a first-hand look into what goes into building this project. I'll send an update with more details when I actually get my streaming schedule figured out.
That's all for this week. I hope you and your loved ones are doing well. Remember, "you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back." ❤️