Re: space game

[Ken Dunn <luser@xtra.co.nz>]

On Mon, 11 Jan 1999, Darel Finkbeiner wrote:

> Ok, my original plan is this:
> 	Users would be choosing destinations one of two ways.  
> 	A) choose which JumpGate to use, each Gate having one destination
> 	B) choose final destination, calculating which Gates to use along the
> way, a sort of "Navigation Console" type thing.


Things that come to mind, sounds too much like Tradewars. I'm
working on a more detailed port and a skeleton for an economic 
system. Basically the idea goes like this

	a port has a field for a producer attribute. At the moment
	these are the generic types: mining, agricultural, industrial,
	entertainment, fuel (i.e local gas giant or whatever),finacial, 
	military, underworld. A port may have more than one attribute. 
	For example mining and industrial. 

	A port also has a wealth attribute. These two and the type
	of cargo dictate the price fetched. Cargo carried also need 
	not be limited to one of the generic types. For example, a
	rich port with only a fincial attributes would pay a higher
	value for office equipment (or more realistically illegal 
	drugs) that other places.

	Thought about a government/political/law attribute too. 
 
How does that sound ? 
 
> How do we choose a method of displaying that 
> in-system time, and bind it to the ship object?  This is something I am
> unfamiliar with.  The ship object itself could remain mostly unchanged as 
> far as movement is concerned, since the location would own the ship.

(I'm not %100 sure what you mean.)

Each movement from port to port or what ever takes at least 1 unit
of time, saves messing about with fractionals. The slowest ship might
have a movement factor of 1, and the fastest possible being a 10. 

days taken to travel one distance = 11 - movement factor.

That sounds easy.  Newtonian physics in won't really make much sense
anyway. If a finer scale is require quarter days for a time unit could 
be used. In which case days=units/4 + remainder * 0.25.

> a whole lot on this yet, but I will send it anywayz.  Please poke 
> holes in it
> and let me know a better way to do something.  right now the code doesn't
> actually do anything, but you can see the port class. 

Standard C types, I'd rather avoid them and use something 
like *_int* types. 

Have bashed some code out, it wouldn't be usable, but it should show
some of the ideas I'm got in my head.  Will email it to you when 
I've finished it, a few days. It is in C though, will switch over
to C++ on.