Easter is almost over, and I used most of the time to complete the Trekwar shipdesigner, and set up lots of hulls for it.. I also created a chat system for the game.
ShipDesigner:
Faction Hulls:
x
Chat:
I was planning to implement the ship actions, like colonization and ship combat this easter. But I think I’ll work on the Starsystem management system instead, as I redesigned it heavily this easter.
Almost done for the Trekwar shipdesigner which allows you to custom fit your star ships with available components.
Recently much of my spare time programming has gone to giving the Trekwar client a graphical overhaul.
Now I’ve managed to get most of what I broke, working again (Research and Starsystem Control), and I’ve added a glasspane that shows up and prevents the clicking of buttons (and thus creating a weird state of the client) while each tick is being processed by the server.
Currently the test galaxy is 100×100 tiles and takes about 0.5 seconds to load to client
Unlike the previous version of the game, it is now possible to have many windows active on top of the actual game map.
The system box (far left of the screen) has been changed to display more information, and next up is a complete redesign of the fleet box.
But before making the new fleet box and fleet management system, I’ll have to do some major rewrite of the internal ship system and logic, to support user created ship classes.
I’m looking forward to 8-10 hours of pure java and logic.. There is only so much Swing a man can take 
Recently I’ve been continuing on my Star trek game, and doing part 2 of the GUI updates, I have to fix up the research view, as it was broken by the new UI.
I also made a new starship path system, and optimized some slow stuff in the drawMap() function
old design – aka: stupid dot system
new design – aka: ehm.. yellow lines?
After making the research view work again, it’s time to port the old starsystem administration UI into the new design. Followed by the new shipdesigner feature.
Today I finished a program at work, and as a result I got two achievements:
Since I fixed that annoying memory leak, I’ve been working on updating the graphical client of the trekwar game. Instead of having the map as a own internal window, the map is now always shown. I also made a new menu in Photoshop (thank Thor for photoshop tutorials 
)
old screenshot ( 0.2.X )
new screenshot (0.3.1)
Next up is implementing the new Shipdesigner system.
I finally got rid of that stupid memory leak in the Star Trek game I’m working on. It turns out when I optimized the use of JLabels I forgot about the action listeners, so the reference to the local copy of the game map was never removed from memory.
With a map update every 35 seconds, the client would go out of memory (200 MB) in 15 minutes, in where around 270’000 action listeners where in memory.
Now however the game can run smoothly for days:
Currently I’m working on a major overhaul of the GUI, and the game looks much better now. I’m gonna release the new screenshots when I get the client stable again and re-integrate the map window in a new way (soon)
I recently had a good idea for my Star Trek game, this would also solve the problem with some factions having very few ships designs, and might even allow me to add more factions (Ferengi, Dominion, Kazon, borg?), seeing that finding and balancing enough ship classes for each faction was the biggest problem with adding more factions.
It might even make it possible to add some more exotic factions (Xindi, Gorn, Breen, Son’a, Tholian, Vidiian, Hirogen, Tzenkethi or maybe even the Terran Empire
Instead of just having 4-5 static ship classes where all ships made of this class are identical, one could have a little star ship designer where you fit a hull with the components you want (warp drive, impulse drive, phasers, torpedo launchers, sensors, fusion reactors, shield emitters, armor, cloaking devices, troop transports, colonization and terraforming tools).
This means I will have to do some re-designing the next time I have time to work on the game (wont be that much, only implemented 2 ship classes so far)
According to my superior mspaint skills, the interface will look like this:
September 1. I started working at Bibsys, which is a company that develops library systems.
This means I can no longer spend the days in my underwear, watching Macgyver dvd’s and playing Neverwinter Nights (I have somehow managed to loose my save games, so my once proud half-orc barbarian is no longer… but there is a seriously overpowered lvl 8 wizard that has taken his place).
I’m also happy to say that “everything” at Bibsys is Java, so my chances of being haunted by php are virtually gone
The curse of the fourth floor
the First time I whored my programming services out for money was over at Uninet, I was working on the 4th floor.
My first full time job was over at Intrapoint, where I worked on the 4th floor.
The job after Intrapoint was over at Market Monitor / Betradar, also here I stayed on the 4th floor.. then I was moved to another office which was ALSO on the 4th floor.
Now I’m working at Bibsys, at the 4th floor.. spooky 
Still havent been able to localize that damn memory leak in the Trekwar client. At least the server has no leaks and can run for days only using around 15-20 MB of memory (galaxy with 10’000 sectors):
The client however will crash after about 10 ticks if the galaxy is really big. Have stared at the code for hours, with no result. I’m going to have to start some methodical and very tedious debugging to get this thing fixed 
