Stuff I've read lately

"Igniting the Reaches" (David Drake) - This is the first book in the trilogy continued in "Through the Breach" and finished in "Fireships". I would say the quality is consistent through all three books. Also, each book stands fairly well on its own. Still, I would of preferred to read them in the proper order.

"In the Grip of Grace" (Max Lucado) - Reviewed on my faith blog.

Stuff I've read lately

"Paying the Piper" (David Drake) - This "Hammer's Slammers" novel is classic Drake - plenty of action, punctuated by brief breaks.


"The Purpose-driven Life" (Rick Warren) - Reviewed on my faith blog.

New Stars Status

I actually got a lot done the last month. I have integrated my old universe generation code into the main engine. While I was there, I fixed a bug in the tech research code, and in the colonization code. Now, the colonize test works; and I have added it to the regression. I discovered an oddity in the way planets are handled for players (separate objects), and I will probably rebuild it into a single true object with per-player data views.

Here is the new game wizard:




Only page 1 is done. Page 2 is the race list (the normal wizard has a third page, with victory conditions). Currently, it always saves the game to newFile.xml. I will add a save dialog shortly. The main thing is to update the struct UnivParms to include a race list. Then, update the engine to pull in the races. Then I can add them to the gui.

If you do 'newStars -n newFile.xml' it will generate a universe according to your parameters (to stdout). But there will be no players. We also need to work on random seeds.