After putting in a lot of hours on Quantum Star SE Evolved this weekend I have moved onwards from my earlier 0.18 test release. That was aimed at exercising the Partholan backend to find any last obvious bugs. This weekend I finally got into the meat and bones of the game. I started with a diversion into the Installer which had a few issues in 0.18 (most annoying was the lack of a proper theme for it!). I’ve updated and added back the Install theme however and the results are quite satisfying. I’ve added a few screenshots to this post to show it off.

Installer ScreenshotThe opening Installer page.

The Installer is an attempt to simplify the often horrible level of detail some PHP applications will require. Most of the in-depth options are hidden and can be changed from their defaults later from the Administration Control Panel. In most cases they won’t need adjusting. A lot of the messy items from Solar Empire and QS2 have been removed. QSE automatically figures out the URL and full system path with little trouble. Database choices are down to a minimum with any specialised requirements managed fluidly by the backend. There’s been an effort to simplify the number of directories requiring permission changes (just Data and TplCache).

Now on the game side I’ve upped the ante and created a simplified CSS based theme called BlueSpace. It’s layout is flexible and completely CSS driven. Tables are being used only to support our form layouts and even that can potentially be replaced with a CSS style when I spend the time needed.

BlueSpace ScreenshotThe temporary Admin CP page using the BlueSpace theme.

The theme is pure CSS. I spent time wondering how to manage theming and making it as flexible as possible, but in the end the usual lack of theme making on open source games decided the issue. Themes are now nothing more than customised headers, footers and CSS – that in itself adds most of the flexibility needed. The templates themselves are fixed XHTML though obviously you can alter these on a private server – I’ll note this means text is not changeable if you decided to upgrade directly from the standard QSE development releases without text diffs. This by effect decided how to manage translations. My translations approach is going to be to pre-generate translated versions of the base “tpl-en” English templates into separate Template directories; tpl-fr, tpl-cz tpl-fr-CA, etc. In effect I want to remove the need to translate on-the-fly at runtime anything except Game Module content. So lets just translate and store the templates as semi-independent entities, allowing perhaps some minimal CSS adjusting for things like text direction. The approach makes possible a more manageable translation effort matching full English sentences to translations – not the flawed key phrase matching that is very hard to get right.

Anyway to round out this post, the game is moving ahead steadily now that Partholan is feature frozen. I’m currently playing about with the Administration Control Panel to add the most necessary functions such as the Game Creator, Game Manager, and the updated Universe Generator. I have to admit feeling some growing pride with QSE. It’s hard to get that from working on a technical blunder like the original QS2. Evolved is waaaay better ;-). I’m having fun working on it at least…

Create Game ScreenshotAnother BlueSpace view – the Create Game form view.

Can’t wait to get a starting Star System view finished so I can start adding in all the funky fun stuff like Fleet navigation and Homeworlds. Looks like yet another more complete release by week’s end! :-)

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