This weekend will see the final (at least for a while) tech release of the Partholan PHP Scaffold for helping poor me develop Quantum Star SE faster, and with fewer blunders. The release will feature a basic login/signup, and of course the Installer.

It looks quite sweet even if I do say myself. Hacked together or no, its slim trim and it works as intended. The Installer is revolutionary – by Solar Empire standards that is. It’s extremely simple, removes all those path, uri and other variables that always caused problems, and it looks very cool. A canary could install QS with it.

The other QS jigsaw pieces are also falling into place. The database schema has been broken into three separate XML files, Base, Game and Module. Module is the schema that anyone can copy and edit to add new ships, components and other in-game items automatically. Each game can only use one Module – I’ll look at merging schemes a lot later – and this allows the most requested feature in QS or SE, the ability to add new fancy content to the game.

The code is heavily commented, and I’ll be generating a basic phpDoc documentation for online reference. It’s not all pretty. I left out a few unstable 0.19 bits – there’s no ServiceLocator, so includes are manual and many single instance objects are singletons (whether alone or within a Registry). Memory usage tops 1078KB, which indicates there’s still a bit of optimisation to do, I’ll have better idea after measuring this stripped of the phpDoc comments. There’s a spot of lazy programming evident in place – Iamsure would have a field day with my use of require_once() ;-). I haven’t even bothered to benchmark yet – I dislike worrying about numbers during a design phase, its distracting and premature optimisation is a dangerous temptation.

What’s left is making the frigging game!

I need to get a starting Location display setup and implemented. From there I can start hooking in Star Systems, Fleets, Facilities, Planets…the works. Then over to developing an Administration CP for adding games, changing settings, watching users, etc. It’s going to be a very busy month to get to the first Alpha. I’ll start hitting the first major wall by March – i.e. how to handle Ships. Unlike say Alien Assault Traders or BNT, QS allows users control many ships on a fleet grouping mechanic. It’s complex, and can easily turn exponential to the point of making hundreds of SQL calls for stupid little data points. SE does this with abandon and it only leads to trouble.

Why am I complaining? I’m back writing a game – hurrah!