Quote from: vomov

EDIT: sorry for the wall of text, I got carried away.

Quote from: vomov

I'd love to help with testing and balancing, though, as well as most people here

Quote from: vomov

UI can definitly benefit from some improvement, but I'd say to leave that for last.

Quote from: vomov

Question; didn't Outpost 1 under windows simply change the theme to some odd variant of the high-contrast theme?

Quote from: vomov

Could mining sites have differing proportions of these, though?

Quote from: vomov

these routes is calculated using for A*

Quote from: vomov

As I read it, we've got several resources:

Common Metals

Common Minerals

Rare Metals

Rare Minerals

Energy

Food

Organic Waste

Other Waste

Quote from: vomov

This would be a parallel system, where you set up a couple of 'studies', which are then shared across labs.

By all means, this is the kind of discussion I was hoping to see.This is an area I could certainly use help. For the moment I've just used arbitrary values that help me just to see where things are going and test the resource consumption, etc. but none of it is set up well. Arbitrary values don't usually work well for these kinds of games so balancing will be needed.Naturally. This is why I called it a 'functional' UI but that doesn't make it good. Toward the 0.8/0.9 versions of the game I'll be looking at making a pretty UI that's as functional as it is good looking, but for now the basics do the job with simple buttons and pop up menus and the delightfully classic Windows 95 look.Pretty much. They just changed it to black and green.They already do, though atm it's as simple as YIELD_HIGH, YIELD_MEDIUM and YIELD_LOW. Again, just threw in some arbitrary values there but it wouldn't be difficult to expand on that such as YIELD_HIGH_RARE_HEAVY, etc. or there could just be a randomized element to what kinds of resources a given mine will yield. I have mines randomly generated up to a set amount but the terrain difficult dictates the likelihood of getting a higher yield mine (e.g., tougher terrains will tend to favor medium and high yields, easy terrain will tend to favor low yields).There was another user that had PM'd me about exactly this. My thinking was that trucks had a certain range for which they could travel... say 30 tiles. So we could limit the A* search to that. Your other proposals of showing pathed trucks makes sense and is something I had considered as well and only makes too much sense. Highlighting truck routes is a natural progression.Following that, once a route is established, the user would mostly be looking at assigning x number of trucks to particular routes. The UI for that would show if there are too many trucks, if resources are being left at the mine, etc.I also thought about how often routes would need to be calculated and it should be fairly straight forward -- whenever a new mine is placed or an existing route becomes obstructed (colony expansion, etc.). The only issue then is whether or not the Smelther that it's being brought to is inaccessible and in a case like that the game can alert the player that there is a mine with no truck access to a Smelter.Finally, when a mine becomes active, does the user have to initiate the routing? Or does it happen automatically? If it happens automatically, it will need to determine which smelter it needs to go to. Smelters are connected to the colony via tubes, but mines aren't, so a smelter could feasibly be built right next to a mine meaning trucks aren't taking much time to get back and forth and that the resources, once processed, are immediately available to the colony. I don't see this as an issue but it would mean that trucks would need to have a limit to how long they spend at each building. My thinking is once they arrive at a structure, it takes them 1 turn to load/unload.These are the resources I'm currently considering:I don't want to really break it down much farther than this and I may even consider combining the two waste's into just simply 'waste' which when processed produces a small amount of metals and minerals. I don't think making it any more complex than that is necessary or fun.I am curious though -- if one does not have a recycling center, what happens to all of this waste? What do the colonists do with it? Organic in particular -- does it just get dumped out onto the surface somewhere where it gets to fester before being irradiated or frozen? I would think at the very, very least that all residential units and any structures with toilet facilities would have some sort of a sump well that separates the solids from the liquids with the liquids then being sent off to the CHAP (perhaps it should just be called the Life Support Facility considering it does more than just air) for cleaning and re-circulation. That being stated, the now dry solid waste is the concern... do they just throw it away? With a recycling facility that's my suggestion of where this waste, along with manufacturing waste, etc., would go to be broken down into their components for use where needed.This was the general idea. I liked how Civ5 just laid out their topics, it doesn't mean that we need to be limited to working on only a single research topic at a time. On the contrary, I would want different research projects to happen at the same time. But this is where I think the research parks come in. Unless you have an administration building of some sort directly connected to labs, you'd have to set each lab individually. With the administration set up, now you can set research for up to four labs at a time, or maybe instead of having labs being required to be directly connected to the Admin building, the Admin building would instead have an area of effect, say any lab within 3 tiles of the admin building are under its control. This does bring up the problem of what about overlapping areas but that can be solved by just restricting administration buildings to having to be at least 6 tiles away from any other administration building.I like your thoughts on the population and morale models. I haven't looked too deeply into it yet as I've been more focused on getting the basics done first so if you wanted to design the population model and morale model, by all means go right on ahead.