Weekly development report: 2021/08/21

The stable version is quiet again. Looks like the most annoying bugs are fixed... or everyone has given up. :) No things to report here.

In the development version, the work on making the game UI more user-friendly continues:

• Finished work on sorting crafting recipes in the crafting screen.
• Fixed showing tools availability status in the selected crafting recipe info dialog.
• Small changes to general UI look, mostly entry fields, like changing the ship name, got a bit lighter border to match the look of others UI elements.
• Added sorting to the lists of available recipes to buy, healing wounded crew members and repair the player's ship in bases.
• Of course, standard footer here, work with fixing problems reported by the AdaControl tool continues. And even got a small boots. :)
• Another thing which can be interested mostly for programmers. To make the code a bit less buggy (an optimist, eh) I started using the subset of the Ada programming language, called SPARK. Generally speaking, it is a formal verification tool, used mostly in high-integrity software, like aircraft or medical equipment. At this moment, the work just started, thus there no too much to show. And probably not all the code will be possible to verify, due to limits of SPARK. But I hope that it will be possible to verify the user interface code. It would be something good. Writing normal tests for UI is quite complicated, plus they usually can't be run in automated way, mostly because servers don't have enabled graphic mode. Formal, mathematical verification of the code, could solve this problem. Translation for the players: this should make the game less crashes friendly. :)