March 2011
34 posts
The game is now live for a small circle of AirlineSim team members to figure out the worst weaknesses. After I had the time to fix these I will open up the game to a somewhat broader audience. Stay tuned!
I spent an awful lot of time on a basic set of master data. In fact the design of a single “product tree” for the basic types of trucks and ships took me one and a half day. The result are around 50 products and about 20 building types. These do not include any consumer goods. It’s just the raw and intermediate materials required to produce the mentioned vehicles.
As such it...
Whenever the game starts and you are wondering what industry to venture in and where to locate your enterprise it might be worth to take a look at the city of “Seska” in “Kaladania”. Geologists claim it to be the only place in the known world to feature both coal and iron ore deposits while providing a cheap supply of water. The perfect combination to gear up heavy industry...
So far this has been a very productive day. I got a lot - if not all- of the polish done I had anticipated given the limited timeframe. But the things achieved today only cover “technical” aspects. I’ve decided to spend a bit more time beyond the initial two weeks to get a decent set of master data into the game. In theory I could upload the game onto a server now and most...
Final day. The way it looks right now I won’t have much time on the week-end to spend on 2WP so today is all about getting as much polishing done as possible.
The good news is that all core features of my original plan have found their way into the game. That is the production of goods, the transport of those by actual player-controlled companies and countries featuring their own...
Sorry for a day without updates. Tomorrow will bring some news. Promise!
Addressing the final large feature today. It’s once again something that - to my knowledge - does not exist this way in any other business sim to this day. The feature is: Actual currencies!
In the beginning of the game there will be 6 to 7 countries, all featuring their own characteristics and their own currency. If you want to buy something in another country than your own you first need...
Once again, rather quiet today. But I really want to get this transport topic out of my head. I’m still somewhat ahead of my schedule but this feature (and the next one) has an inherent risk of posing nasty problems. The faster I get done with it the better. So talk to you later ;-)
The trip instancing code is making my head hurt right now. Expect some waiting time until an actual update appears in this spot.
It’s Sunday, but nevertheless I want to get at least some stuff ticked. One is a basic pathfinding algorithm for land- and water-based vehicles (it’s a lot simpler for aircraft ;-)). As I did a lot last week I’ll use existing code from some old experiments and adjust it to the requirements of 2WP. As soon as that’s done I should give some attention to the required master...
Weekend already. I’d prefer wasting it for 2WP completely but this annoying thing called “life” needs to be taken care of every now and then. So hopefully I’ll be back in the code in the late afternoon. Still very excited!
A few words on transport
I am currently working on one of the most important features in 2WP because I think it’s rather new in the world of business simulations. I’m talking about the way 2WP handles transport of goods.
In this project, everything is about a closed cycle of goods and money. As such it makes sense that transport is also a part of that cycle. You could probably achieve this by simply letting...
Can’t believe it’s friday already. But progress was very good so far this week so I’m confident that the two major missing features will be finished in time.
Wohoo, first ever trade on a commodity exchange was just executed!
It took me so long to get to this point because I couldn’t help fiddling around with some visual stuff last night. But what it means is that the first time ever the simulated “population” has bought goods for consumption.
Finishing the trading interface now and then on to even cooler features :-D
Back in the tunnel.
Ok, it’s seriously time to call it a day. Details about today’s work (probably including first images) follow tomorrow.
As you can see, I’m rather quiet today. That’s because I’m actually writing “new” code compared to the days before when I mostly used components and algorithms from other projects which was somewhat more “distraction tolerant”.
The commodity exchange code looks more or less finished but still needs proper testing. There’s also no user-interface for...
Next: Commodity exchange.
For reasons of simplicity there’s no difference between commercial and private consumers (your end customers) in 2WP. Whoever needs materials of whatever kind places a request at the local commodity exchange and vice versa.
Starting Day 3. On my schedule today is closing the production -> consumption cycle.
Short status report: So far this project has cost about 30 Euro in music bought to ensure an appropriate acoustic background in my office.
Another major step is done and it is now possible to place production orders. The additional effort I put in this morning surprisingly paid off immediately and this rather complex topic was finished within no time.
Now I need a break though…after that I’ll see to implementing the logic to actually finish production orders. If everything goes well there will be a closed production...
The construction code is working now. It took me a bit longer than I planned since I decided to use as much code as possible from one of our potential future project and because I had to fiddle with the CSS a lot (I suck at design).
By my original planning I’m somewhat behind schedule now. But the construction code now has more features built in than anticipated (for this moment in time). I...
The accounting stuff took longer than expected yesterday, but I’m still ahead of schedule. One can now select the company to be currently active and I added some mandatory info widgets to the page (like currently selected company, cash balance, stuff like that).
I’m now starting to work on the construction of buildings and thereby the production of goods.
And off to day two! Make sure you have read why we are doing this.
Founding an enterprise is working…in theory.
Before going the final steps I have to build a basic accounting system. This will be a variation of the one employed in AirlineSim but with a certain “twist”. Which one this will be remains to be seen :-P
Slowly adding initial functionality. Login/Logout is working and the player is now able to create his “avatar”.
In contrast to AirlineSim, in 2WP the player starts with a “person” instead of a holding company as initial economic entity. Every player will be (legally) allowed to have one such avatar (unlike several separate holdings in AS). This avatar only has very...
The basic framework is done but is obviously looking a bit bare right now ;-)
Next step will be the authentication and authorization system. The former will allow the game to be hooked up to our Aquila account management system from day one, the latter will ensure that users only get to see stuff they are supposed to see within the game. So war, I’m well on schedule.
2 weeks. 1 game. About this project.
My name is Martin and I’m the developer and project leader of AirlineSim (as the name suggests, a business simulation game about airlines). Next January, this project will be 10 years old and I will have spent around 40% of my life with it since I started it in my late teen years.
So what is this? About the project.
For online games there is nothing like a “finished state”....
Trying to make a browser-based business simulation game in 2 weeks max. Details follow soon.