The Wonders of Pygame
After spending a good amount of time in the SAIS source code and getting a feel for the game logic, I sent a long mail to a collaborator with my dream goals for the system. I listed a bunch of things, but my real pie-in-the-sky items were these:
- Make solar-system navigation in something akin to the tactical mode.
- Make in-game object rules handled via embedded scripts using something like lua or embedded python. This would make it a modder's paradise, with new objects and graphic sets easily spliced in.
- Add planets and station objects in the solar-system view.
After poking around through lua some, I chanced to take another stroll through the pygame docs. I had not remembered how high-level pygame is compared to using libsdl in C! Pygame has all sorts of great rect methods and sprite groups and other great features that make it a real win. So now I'm taking up the fool's errand of the second system.
I've got access to the SAIS code, so I've been trolling through it to figure out some of the math behind the game object interactions. The camera math is some of the clever stuff, and I am thinking of making heavy use of pygame's rect magic to make that happen.
And then I'll make the game AI, situations, ship definitions, and so on out of modder-supplied python code. I'll have my own default set based on SAIS, but it should be fun.
But for now I'm working on making the simple tactical system work as a hollow demo, with space-object-motion and sweeping camerawork. Once that works in a generalized manner (so that you can raise and lower HUD elements once that's coded) I'll start making a game of it.