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Astra Imperia Aide, or AI Aide

After a couple of years of procrastination, I am back working on this. I’ll post the current changelog a bit later in the post. Overall, I’ve completed the Log Viewer functionality.

It will now email me logs on command from the user. The selected log may also be copied to the clipboard. Some work on the research window has been done, mostly organizational.

Master Research List

As you can see from the screenshot, the projects are now organized by field instead of just a giant list. This should decrease the amount of scrolling.

Next up, the Economics window.

Economics window

When launched, the Economics screen defaults to the Colonies tab. This will display a tree list of colonies, based on classification. Other tabs are Facilities, Personalities, Teams, Tactical Intelligence, and Strategic Intelligence.

Regarding personalities, there is a console command to generate a random personality. This personality won’t appear in the Personality tab at the moment.

Personalities tab

As you see here, the name generation procedure has also been beefed up to handle multiple names via spaces, and to handle apostrophes. As of yet, the save function does not work.

Teams tab

The Teams tab allows teams to be created, but not yet saved. The Team Leader drop list will eventually be populated with personalities from the database. The rating is randomly generated.

The Ledger tab:

Ledger tab

This is a very rough early draft of the ledger tab. The columns should be self-explanatory. The date/time are when the associated transaction takes place in game time. Item is a description of the transaction, and the cost is how much it costs. The button in the Update Row column will allow editing of the entry. This will probably be gated behind the SM mode eventually.

Finally, the Launcher.

Launcher

This has been the biggest headache so far but is now progressing nicely. The space on the left is a web browser and will show rich-content based on what’s new. Currently, it downloads a file “update.html” which is a simple HTML port of the news file. Which is displayed in the rich-text box on the lower right. Directly above that is a progress bar which will advance based on the download progress. In the upper right is the status output. This will show what is going on as the launcher does its work. I don’t rightly recall what the box on the lower right is for. I’ll figure a use for it or delete it.

Going forward once the launcher is complete, the Aide will be able to be launched either by the launcher or the main executable. The launcher will notify the user if there is an update and ask if it should be installed. If the reply is no, then it falls through to the AI_Aide executable. If the program is launched via the main executable, it won’t be updated, which will maintain the current game(s) in progress but won’t fix anything that the update addresses.

If there is a database update, the launcher will execute the updated files and this will most likely result in loss of current game.

Next step for the launcher is to download the manifest, compare it to the local files, download updated files, and replace the local copies with new files.

Changelog:

1823:

Global Changes

Database Changes

Specific Changes

AICore_Race.dll (0.1.1.1823)

AICore_Data.dll (0.1.1.1823)

AI_Aide.exe (0.1.2.1823)

New Features

TODO:
Check versions and update (AICore_Launcher)
Localize text fields (AICore_Race)
Show Component Design Window (AICore_Research)
Read table for specified system ID and fill the form (AICore_System)
Account for user preference when determining minerals (AICore_System)
Read the database for colonies (AI_Aide)
Figure out how to validate database integrity.
Fix orbit grid from resetting when adding an orbit in custom systems (AICore_System)
Expand voice responses.

WISHLIST:
Manually edit/enter system info.
Create Sol system.

Bugs:
On a new game creating a new system, the last stellar component overwrites the rest.

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