Dev Blog- Sea Trading Game. UI changes at long last! Working on a new trading interface

As I mentioned last week, I'm going to spend a few weeks working on UI type changes before I go back to doing hard core behind the scenes changes. Well, I half followed through on that this week! I did make a number of UI changes that I've long wanted to do, but I haven't been able to for one reason or another until now. In the process of making one of those changes, however, I realized to support it I needed to re-write a fair bit of my code behind the scenes. Bottom line, I divided my time pretty equally between the two tasks.

Most of my time was spent working on a new system for storing cargo. The current system is, well, confusing and not really workable. I've made a few improvements to it over the last few months, but it's time to scrap it in favor of another system entirely. What I've decided instead to do is to have all of the goods in to a single hold, including passengers and supplies, with some configuration items possible to make it all work a bit smoother. Here's a concept art for what I'm aiming for:

There will be a number of slots where goods can be stored, if there are goods, they will appear there, otherwise an empty spot will appear. I'm sure this will need quite a bit of work, and the artwork isn't the best, but hey, I've always said the plan is to get the game to a point where it is fun without the artwork, and then find an artist at that point.

Another thing that I'm quite pleased to inform you of is that I successfully fixed a long standing bug where the name of the city was sometimes hidden, or blocked out a ship's name. Here's an example of it working correctly!

Lastly, I added a display showing how many days it will take to get to a given location. It's a huge improvement for sure!

Bottom line, there is definitely a lot of progress still to make, but things are coming along! I'm expecting to have most of the UI things fixed that have been driving me crazy by the end of November, after which I will continue to add more core game features for a while.

This week I'm planning on getting the new cargo hold system in good shape, including re-configuring holds, buying/selling goods, and taking on missions.  I'm still considering if I want to do the same fishing system that I've had in before, most likely I will continue to do it, but I'm not 100% sure at this time.

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