Year 13 - Day 205

I've officially finished off the Colony Market system so colonies can list buys and sells, and ships landed there can buy or sell items.  I'll revisit this at some point to add transactions to the database so players can keep up with their buys/sells and these will show up as a sort of Provenance for items.

Now I'm updating the Item screen and killing some bugs while doing that.  I've got a few major ones to track down so that may take a day or two.

I have actually started looking through the Combat code and getting myself re familiarized with how things are currently working.  I'm at the point where I need to be able to actually know when a ship is Disabled or Derelicted, and write up the functions that will Destroy a ship and Kill off crew members.  Sometime in the next week I should have the first official death of a crew member in the game.

Year 13 - Day 142

I'm back at it after an extended break.  Today I finished up most of the colony side of the Market system and killed a few bugs with it.  Next up is the ship side of the Market which will allow a ship to buy and sell items while landed at a colony.

I think for now I'm going to disallow buying and selling if the ship belongs to the same player as the colony.  I don't really see a point in it since ships and colonies all operate off the same money pool for the player.

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.

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.

Year 12 - Day 293

I'm making some progress on both the market system and ship combat at this point.  I've been switching between them when one gets too frustrating.  Both are very complex and are going to require a lot of coding, testing, and debugging.

At first I thought I was just going to do 1 ship vs. 1 ship to get things started, but so far I've been putting in a lot of the code to handle multiple ships in a battle, so it looks like multiple ship combat will be available right from the start.

Year 12 - Day 276

I'm currently working on the Colony market screen.  By tomorrow a colony owner should be able to enter new market orders and have them show up on the list.

Year 12 - Day 193

I continued some work on the colony Market screen today.  I added the market orders table to the database and have orders displaying on the screen.  I found I designed myself into a slight corner, so I'm going to have to rework a little bit of stuff around items, but it's nothing major.  I'm thinking by the end of the weekend most of the buy/sell functionality should be finished off.