SITREP #12: notifications system & more (Patreon)

NOTIFICATION SYSTEM

With the old UI i got a bit stuck on figuring out how to handle messages/events. Stuff like a week/turn report, how and where to show them.  When in doubt I try to copy freecities or crusader kings because that's what inspired me to make this game. But throwing popup screens and being forced to go through them when maybe you want to do something else in the game felt just too off, even more so in VR. I looked around a bit for better solutions.

Now that the new ui is working and i'm able to do more stuff faster, I decided to go for a more complex notifications system inspired by other types of sim games like football manager. It's something like an in-game email system. I think this a very flexible way to do a lot of stuff and keep things clean and intuitive.

NEWS & MESSAGES SYSTEMS

I wanted  something like a log of world events like in crusader kings, mostly to debug the AI but it's something nice to have anyway. If a rival arcology changes their ruler or some important positions at their court or finish building something for example. I want to avoid flooding the notifications system with too much small stuff so I'm branching the notification system to something like a separate news feed. 

I want to do also a similar message system, sort of like chat with the characters. Intially that would be a very quick way to handle 1 on 1 discussions & commands.

OTHER STUFF

 I moved the cards system to html/css which will save me a lot of time content-wise, previously i was saving them as images, now I can render and use them dynamically. I'm trying to get to the AI logic and to the actual gameplay because that will be fun and interesting to code but there's still a few other systems to finish until there: the jobs and the turn systems