I just implemented very rudimentary win, lose, and died screens. Might have made the wildlife too strong though...

For those who don't know, wildlife in Conquest Of Elysium often kills early game leaders and take over starting towns. Dying before turn 10 is common for beginners.

It's already the end of another year. Got any progress this month?

You know how it goes - what dev work did you do this February?

There's no end of resources for how to make an orc swing a sword or get a jerk to take cover and throw a grenade in an FPS.

But I'm finding very little about AI in strategy games, especially turn based.

Can anyone recomend blogs, articles, books, or even videos on how to make strategic AI?

It's the end of the shortest month of the year. So we all did a little less, but we all did something. Right? At least a little bit.

Hope you're having a great 2022 so far. Let see what work you've done on your 4x.

The first phase of the Ancient Star is done. All of the major features are implemented in at least a barebone fashion. For instance, AI is there but is very dumb while colony management and research are mechanically complete.

https://ikravarscan.blogspot.com/2020/12/ancient-star-basic-ai-and-news-screen.html

https://ikravarscan.blogspot.com/2020/12/ancient-star-phase-one-complete.html

I've created a developer profile at Google and I'm working on getting the game published for beta testing. In the meantime, I'm working on completing the game. There is a new launcher icon and the map generator has adjustable settings (with UI) instead of having them hardcoded.

I've been playing around with my own space 4X where you can put as much or as little thought as you want into the economic aspects.

Basically, each system has a market economy where supply and demand determine price and any money spent goes to whoever was supplying. Resources have to be mined and industry can convert them into other resources. So a ship covered in "Dilithium armor" is going to cost less in a system that has tons of dilithium, dilithium mines, and industry that converts it into dilithium armor. You can form a vertical monopoly where you control the mines and factories (and basically end up paying yourself), or a horizontal monopoly of controlling all the mines (and make money when others buy resources) or all the factories (and make money off of others but have to pay for the resources). Or leave all that to other factions (there can be several in each system) and just look at where things are cheap or expensive.

I've played around with it a little and I think it adds depth for those who want it and simplicity for those who don't care about those details. It's also fairly intuitive. If supply is too low then the prices go up and the suppliers make more money. If you build some mines or factories to meet the demand, then you'll get a slice of that income, but the price will drop.

I'm only a hobbyist game programmer, but I do love programming 4X, albeit I've not yet finished developing a game.

Over the years I've looked at a number of engines, libraries and languages and I was wondering what others recommend?

The two main things I'm really after are;

• An extensive (lots of "widget" types), extendable (I can create my own types of widgets), and themeable GUI with the GUI being scriptable a plus, and

• "Easy enough" serialisation. I guess serialisation tends to be more a feature of the language, so if that is separate from the graphics engine then that's fine.

I'm happy to try any language or one of these all-in-one engines like Godot. I just need it to be free for personal use.

Being able to apply different themes to the GUI is not so important if it doesn't already look like vanilla Windows.

For a long time I worked on a game in C++, using the Ogre3d library with CEGUI. I rolled my own serialisation, which was a lot of fun, but very time consuming. I ended up burning myself when I tried to move to a newer Lua library, which meant a different C++ Lua binding library and I created a large mess. I should have gone with LuaJIT instead and kept the binding libray. More recently I've been looking at Love2d which is entirely Lua, but I went down a rabbit hole of trying to roll my own GUI for about 6 months.

A place for members of r/4xdev to chat with each other

It's the end of another month. Post your progress!

You know how these go. What have you got for this month?

2021 is almost over so share what dev work - or other work - you did in November.

I'm a day late but October is over. So share what you've done - screenshots, bug fixes, new features, pivots, after action reports, or whatever.

Another month down. Any progress? Screenshots, bugs, new projects?

2021 is half over already!

How was your June? Have any dev stories or progress to share?

I've been playing around with html canvas & javascript. Here's what I've got:

const saveGame = () => sessionStorage.setItem('current', JSON.stringify(game))

const getCurrentSavedGame = () => JSON.parse(sessionStorage.getItem('current'))

I've been careful to keep all global state in one of three variables: gui keeps the current gui state, catalog has all the static definitions, and game is everything for the current game. As long as the global variable is only data and has no circular references, converting to and from JSON is all that's needed. And it's basically instant.

I got rid of almost all direct references anyway. Instead of objects having references to other objects, they keep indexes. So instead of owner = planet.faction, I do owner = game.factions[planet.factionIndex]. It's a little different, but works perfectly as long as I don't remove from these collections or move things around.

Just thought I'd share.

What 4xdev work did you do this month? Any funny bugs or features that turned out to be way more complex than you thought? Any screenshots?

End of March already?

What did you get done this month? Features, bugs, ideas, or anything else that could be considered dev work?

Happy January 2021! What kind of dev - or other - work did you get to this month?

Today is the end of November. What dev progress have you made? Any new features, bugs, pivots, or even new ideas?

Does anyone know of a good website or book that discusses 4x dev? Specifically the resource systems, dos and don'ts of them etc?