Business simulators

[Micah Yoder <LYoder@cyberis.net>]

> Another idea for a piece of edutainment software that might be of value is
> an economic simulator.  You have several "companies" (groups of students)
> selling a "product" (say tennis shoes), and they can set the price of
> their product, their marketing, R&D, production levels, plant expansion,
> etc and the teacher can operate the economy controls, like interest rate,
> employment levels, market saturation, etc.  This would probably be popular
> all the way from the fourth grade level to the twelfth grade level :)

One thing I've been working on for the past several months off and on
(mostly on lately) is an airline simulator.  I've been intending to
announce it here eventually, so now's a good time I guess.  :-)

I *think* that will fit into this category fairly nicely.  My (unnamed)
game will be sort of a cross between Railroad Tycoon and Stardock's
Entrepreneur, but with airplanes.  It will be multiplayer and networked.

The player will own an airline and make all kinds of decisions.  Like,
when to buy a plane, what route it should fly, fares, how much it should
spend on safety, when it should give raises.  There will be a basic
economy simulator that will affect demand.

Current status:  It's now at the point where I can feed it a long list
of raw airplane schedules (leaves PDX 10:30 arrives DEN, automatically
calculates arrival time, etc) and it will list all possible travel
itineraries between any given pair of cities.

Each city will have traits that they desire - do they want the lowest
fare, the fastest schedule, best safety record?  Then, all the schedules
will be ranked and the airline with the best one will make the most
money!

The stock market will also be a big part of it.  You'll be able to buy
competitor's stock, and if you get more than 50% of it you can
assimilate it into your airline!

And part of the strategy will (hopefully) to get gates at airports,
which of course are limited.  I'm still trying to figure out how to work
that in.

Then there will be disasters to make things interesting.  "An 8.7
magnitude earthquake utterly destroyed the San Francisco airport!  Hope
you didn't have a major hub there!"  "Economic panic!  Profits plunge!"
etc.

My next major bit of code will be to make the schedule selection
algorithm.  It will be quite complicated, but I think I can pull it
off.  I plan to GPL it, and I'll open it up and release the source when
I get a few more things done.  It's a huge program, and I'll probably
need some help eventually.  But I think I have a good start. :-)

The server is written in C++, and I think I'll do the client in Java so
it can be played by anyone.

So....that's what I've been working on "behind the scenes" lately.  Any
ideas would be appreciated!