Towards Convergence – development log #178
Michi made a lot of progress on the upcoming Local Markets feature which in turn relies heavily on the Player Ratings feature. Martin was supposed to work on the latter but got distracted by improving the financial charts in the game. So we have to wait a little bit longer until the two branches converge. Only a matter of weeks, though!
Michi (molp)
The work on the local markets feature continued this week. Time to show you some early work-in-progress screenshots!
A local market is basically a blackboard with classifieds. Everyone owning a base on the planet can post ads to the local market. The character in front of the ad constitutes the minimum rating your company has to have to in order to accept that ad. Ratings will go from F to A, A being the best achievable rating. Besides these there are also the P and U ratings: pending and unrated.
Clicking on an ad reveals a bit more information, for example who created it (including the companies rating), where it was created and how long it is valid. Depending on what the creator set during the creation of the ad it might be visible between one and 30 days. Finally there is a button that allows to accept an ad and forms a contract between the creator and the company accepting the ad. Once the ad has been accepted the contract parties have a certain amount of time to fulfill their respective contractual obligations, like paying, delivering or picking up goods.
Of course there is a similar command as the existing FXOS and CSOS to show the list of your own ads and the ads of other companies you accepted.
Martin
I kind of went off on a tangent this week. My original plan was to get started on the Player Rating feature but I wanted to get a few minor improvements of the price charts out of the way, first. As it’s often the case, that took a lot longer than planned for a variety of reasons. But this is what the charts look like now:
The most notable changes are these:
- You can now select the interval the data points represent.
- In sparse charts, dummy values with zero volume will be displayed to make the chart easier to read.
- The period and interval settings are now stored per tile, so instead of falling back to the defaults, the same settings will be used when you come back to a screen.
- There is now less unused space around the actual chart.
- The volume and price graphs don’t overlap anymore to make them easier to read.
- The volume bars are rendered in grey to make them easier on the eye.
- I’ve added a poof-of-concept “simple moving average” indicator. More of those could be added in the future.
- I fixed a bug that occurred when you had more than one chart on a screen and resized any of them.
The charts are still far from perfect, especially in cases with very little data. But I feel like I’ve spent enough time on them for the moment and should focus on actual game play again :-)
As always: we’d love to hear what you think: join us on the forums!
Happy trading!
Awarding contracts – development log #179
It is one of these rare times where we all took some time off to visit friends and family over the extended weekend. Nonetheless we ran a small server update this week and Michi can show some work in progress with the local market feature.
Michi (molp)
I started the week with the release of the fuel update that we announced last week. In a nutshell: We made faster than light travel cheaper by reducing the fuel costs and increasing the output of the corresponding refinery recipe. We hope that this will allow more players to trade on the three big commodity exchanges without worrying about fuel prices to much. You can find more details in the Release Notes.
Besides the release I continued to work on the local market feature. Adding and accepting simple ‘buying’ and ‘selling’ ads works now and so I decided it would be the right time to bring contracts into the game. As you might remember a local market ad will not instantly execute the corresponding trade once it is accepted, but rather create a contract between the two parties. The contract has multiple conditions that have to be fulfilled by the parties.
For example in a ‘buying’ ad, the buyer will have to pay for the goods, so she has a payment condition that is met once the agreed price has been paid. The seller on the other hand has to deliver the goods to the local market where the ad has been placed. If she has a base on that planet and the goods in her storage the condition can be fulfilled immediately. If not, transport is necessary.
Implementing the ‘buying’ case was rather easy, the corresponding conditions existed in the code. The ‘selling’ ad is tougher, Martin and I discussed multiple solutions and I will try if one of them works next week.
Here is a quickly shot GIF showing me accepting a buying ad and what the corresponding contract looks like. If you ever had to pick up some goods from a comex this might look familiar.
The top tile is the listing of ads of the local market. The one in the middle contains two lists: ads I created myself and ads I accepted from other players. Lastly the lower tile is just the existing list of contracts.
As always: we’d love to hear what you think: join us on the forums!
Happy trading!
