Ancient Star
Development log
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Stars
by Ivan Kravarščan
Rework progress
With new game screen finished, the LibGDX rewrite can finally go into multiple areas. That is, I’m not shoehorned into what to do next. I can do colony info panel, research, and diplomacy screens, go back to start and do load game screen, or polish galaxy view. So, while specifying load game screen I took a quick dip into finishing star rendering.
Drawing stars
Some star types where difficult to make into one image without getting serious artifacts around details and an easy fix was to superimpose two images. That should have been a quick fix if I just did that, put two images at the same place and move on. Instead, I tried to make Stack layout to do the same. According to documentation this layout should do the job of „stacking“ and inherit parent layout transformations (map zoom and pan) but for some reason it had issues with it. With that digression over there was one genuine issue to deal with. Giant stars no only do have two layers but also need to be bigger than normal star bounding box while name and status icons stay at the same distance. Solving both requirements paved the way to more complex graphics like more detailed ship images or player portraits, if I ever come around doing actual graphics. I mean, I’d like to and have a plan how to, but who knows how priorities will move the time table around.
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