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.