Stuff I've read lately

"Remnant Population" (Elizabeth Moon) - meh. The story of an old woman contacting an alien civilization is just kind of weird. What really bugged me was a universe with both STL sleeper ships and FTL. It made me want to break out GURPS Vehicles and try to come up with an economic situation where that could possibly make sense.

"The Exemplary Husband" (Stuart Scott) - Reviewed on my faith blog.

"Once a Hero" (Elizabeth Moon) - This looks like a mil-SF book; but it's more like a drama set in a military background. I'll probably read one or two more in this series to see where she is taking it. That's three Elizabeth Moon books in a short span, I still like "Speed of Dark", but I'll probably take a break.

New Stars Status

Not much progress the last month.

I created a command line version of the client. It just loads the C++ New Stars Tcl library, and issues a bunch of commands. A lot of them use information eye-balled from the files. Here is a sample from orders2400.tcl (which updates the first turn file):

#### copy the colony ship
set colShipId -1
for {set i 0} {$i < $::numHulls} {incr i} {
   if {[newStars $::ns_hull $i $::ns_getName] eq "Colony Ship"} {
      set colShipId $i
   }
}

Another file is applied in 2403 to give the load colonist, move to planet, and colonize orders.

Here is the final screen shot:




I had to fix the server to properly update client object ids to server ids (I didn't see this before, because the client actually generates the turn through the client data - that's a bug...).

I also had to fix the client to properly use GUI load commands (otherwise you need another turn).

The mining rates are probably off. There is an oddity in the battle engine, in that the colony ship and star base try to fight. I need to add lots to the client to get a better feeling for how much ships cost and how long they will take to build.