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!