Missions of the Reliant: A report from Alliance HQ
Gwynne: Alliance Commander J.G. Gwynne reporting as ordered, Admiral. Admiral: What news of the situation, Commander? Gwynne: It’s all in my report, sir. She sets an electronic notepad on the Admiral’s...
View ArticleMissions of the Reliant: Complications
I’ve accomplished surprisingly little in the last couple of days, in functional terms. I can sum up why pretty easily: I’ve had to stop and puzzle out exactly how Michael did some of the things in his...
View ArticleMissions of the Reliant: Untangling the strands
Skip the roleplay blurb For days, the Admiral had sat smoldering at his desk. Rumors in the barracks said he hadn’t moved from it at all, but one Lieutenant swore she’d seen him praying on his knees....
View ArticleMissions of the Reliant: Warp drive online, Captain!
The post title does not decieve; the ship’s warp drive now works. That was an adventure in arctangents, power-of-two exponents, multiply-add operations, rounding errors… I have to say, this was a...
View ArticleCode funnies
I ran across this bit in Mike’s code, and couldn’t help but smile: I’ve met few programmers who don’t put funny comments in their code now and again. For example, here’s one of mine from the warp drive...
View ArticleAlgebraic simplification
I was translating Pascal to C as usual for Missions when I came across the code fragment for computing the time bonus earned on victory given the current game time: Now, I could have translated that to...
View ArticleMissions of the Reliant: More progress
As usual, this will be a quick update. I just don’t have the oomph for the long blog posts at this time of night for some reason :-). Implemented the About box, keeping Mike’s old credits box exactly...
View ArticleMissions of the Reliant: Cleaning up the wreckage of the train crash
I’m back, and I didn’t give up on Missions! I’m sure there must be exactly one person out there who cares :-). But seriously. I don’t have any new features to show at the moment, unfortunately. When I...
View ArticleMissions of the Reliant: Math is fun, or why I wish I hadn’t flunked geometry
At last, an update! Absolutely nothing visible to the user has changed whatsoever. The internal structure of the code has been significantly reorganized. As with the lament of all programmers faced...
View ArticleMissions of the Reliant: I’m haunted by coordinate systems!
As if all the mucking about with coordinates before wasn’t bad enough, next I had to deal with unit vectors, polar/Cartesian coordinate conversion, sign adjustment vs. trigonometric functions… you get...
View ArticleMissions of the Reliant: Watch it, you’ve got one on your tail!
Missions of the Reliant version 3.0 now has the framework for enemies, enemy AI, and those infinitely annoying little fighters that everything lauches in droves at you and you can only hit by draining...
View ArticleMissions of the Reliant: Too late. Hang on!
The Reliant’s laser cannon is now functional. It fires from the wrong spot on the ship, hits the wrong spot on the enemy ships, has the wrong idea about when the enemy ships are in and out of range,...
View ArticleMissions of the Reliant: Why having two coordinate spaces is a problem.
The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley - Robert Burns, “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest, with the Plough” The torpedos do work, there’s no doubt about that. There’s just one...
View ArticleMissions of the Reliant: Why the bridge is an easy target at the top of the...
I’ll give you this one, Star Trek fans. It’s a shortening of a quote from the Captain’s Table series of books, specifically book five, “Once Burned”, by Peter David: “Why in God’s name the bridge,...
View ArticleMissions of the Reliant: Take the weapons station
Well, I cleaned up the command console code quite a huge bit, it now works quite nicely, and also the gunner’s commands are all fully implemented (with the exception of, as with the helmsman,...
View ArticleMissions of the Reliant: Thanks for the support!
I don’t have any real progress to report, with one exception: The “Report” command for all crew members, the one which tells you that systems are damaged and that crew members are hurt and that...
View ArticleMissions of the Reliant: Receiving subspace message from Alliance HQ
According to my commit log, I’ve accomplished a lot, but I think a lot of that is stuff I’d already done and mentioned here, and just not committed. Bad programmer! Bad! No treat for you! Anyway, there...
View ArticleMissions of the Reliant: He’s dead, Jim.
With heartfelt apologies to DeForest Kelley. The doctor is now a useful officer. Good luck getting the last word, though. Wounded crew get treated with the very latest technology, the skill of the best...
View ArticleMissions of the Reliant: Broadcasting distress call.
At the suggestion of Jude, seconded by none other than the man himself, I’ve created a mailing list for announcements and discussions about Missions of the Reliant. Unfortunately, I’m a bit of a newbie...
View ArticleMissions of the Reliant: Happy Belated Anniversary, Reliant!
The one-year anniversary of the project to port Missions to modern Mac OS was one week and 5 days ago. I’m sorry I missed it, but as always, life puts a heck of a damper on the fun we want to be...
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