Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Year 13 - Day 15

I'm slowly getting there.  I try to write at least a few lines of code each day.  The colony side of the Market system is almost finished.  Then I'll work on the Ship side of it before I get back to working on Combat.

Part of the complication lies in the way I'm handling items.  I have "stackable" items like mineral ore, which are basically one item with the quantity field set to > 1.  Non-stackable items have a damage rating, which ranges from 1 to the total mass value of the item.

This system works fine until it comes time to sell or buy non-stackable items.  The issues are:

1.  I'd have to list the current damage rating so the buyer can be sure they're not buying a damaged item.

Solution:  Can't sell damaged items on the market screen.  They'll have to be "sold" via colony pickups and money transfers.  This may actually lead to a little more complexity since I may have to add an escrow system, or I could let a player organization handle this.

2.  If I list that I want to buy 20 Jump Engine Modules, it becomes more complex to decide which 20 engines a seller wants to sell out of his inventory, both for the UI and the code behind the scenes.

Solution:  Items are "sold" to a colony from the ship's Inventory screen, where non-stackable items are listed individually and will have a price next to them if the colony is willing to buy that particular item.

3.  Listing multiple non-stackable items for sale will add a lot of clutter to the market screen.

Solution:  Not really sure on this one yet.  I guess I'll have to add some type of robust filtering system to the market screen.  I may have to play around with it a bit to see what works best.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Year 13 - Day 6

I just finished off 95% of the colony Pickup Orders functionality.  I'm sure I missed something and I still have to test it out a lot, but right now a colony can issue an order to allow another player to pickup items at the colony.  A message is sent to the other player letting them know this, and he can send any ship he owns to the colony to pick the stuff up.

I still need to work on the UI of the colony end a bit, and item transfer itself still has a good chunk of work to be done, since right now transferring items takes no time to complete.  Eventually it will take an amount of time to transfer an item based on it's mass, with the Cargo skill helping to speed this up some.

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Year 13 - Day 2

Happy New Year!

I'm almost finished with colony pickup orders.  It's all working except for stackable items, so I should finish it up very soon.  After that I'll probably stay on the same lines for a few days and finish up the Market system since a lot of the work I've been doing recently will help finish that also.

Then I'm back onto the combat system until I get it finished up with basic beam lasers.