Random Missions: Creating Locations

To avoid problems with missions conflicting with storyline, when a mission is accepted the game will create a new area for it…

This was the theory, but in practice I found one million bugs in the process (that affected other parts of the game… For example, if you opened a new place in the storyline, it would only show after a reload… never noticed that).

Also decided to use the planet graphics instead of stars on the starmap:

This is all placeholder for now, but it looks better, and it shows better the new planets, etc (you can see in the lower right corner a moon, where the mission I just accepted takes place).

Still need to make better code for the generation of new planets, because sometimes they position themselves on top of the existing lanes, which looks terrible.

Found some more bugs related to the random generator, especially one that took me about 30 mins to figure out… I generate the universe when I load a savegame, using the same seed… But if the algorithm changes, even slightly between a save and the load, it will cause everything to screw up, since they won’t match! I forgot about it, and removed a generated number from the universe generation, which means a shift in all random numbers, which in turn meant my universe was no longer properly generated! This one was tricky to find out, since the offending code looked so non-offending!

Now listening to “Ki” by “Devin Townsend”