On 19 April 2012 20:20, Michael Litchard <michael@schmong.org> wrote:
Hi, I noticed one of your suggestions

> - A version of the classic Traveller/Elite trading system - a really nice
> little toy business rules system that can be code either minimally or to
> show off the funkier features of a language to get more flexibility and more
> interesting pricing rules. Minimal version would be a few tens of lines and
> the config file declaring item

I couldn't find anything on Elite, could you give me a reference?
I found a reference concerning Traveller, but if you had anything in
mind, it may be helpful.

Thanks :)

If you download Oolite, available from most Linux repositories, it should have the same trading rules as the original Elite (which it stole from the Traveller pen and paper game.) There's a space trading game for the Palm Pilot that has improved more interesting rules - maybe you can find a Palm emulator if you don't have one? - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Trader_%28Palm_OS%29

Basically, you like goods that can be traded and you have worlds to sell them on. Worlds have government types and economic types - and in more complex variants ecologies and events - that affect the price and supply of goods. Eg Fish will be cheap on a Farming world with an Ocean environment, but expensive on an Industrial Desert world especially if it is Rich; Guns will sell for more if a War is going on; Survival Equipment and any Food Item will sell for more in the aftermath of a disaster. You can also model legality based on a Government type.

The challenge is to get a system that allows trade rules to be concise and expressive while being written in a form that can be edited by a non-programmer - the config can be an .hs file, but it should be one that even a non-coder can understand and edit. It's a nice problem because it's scalable (you increase the complexity of the rules) and it has a lot of characteristics of real business systems. I knocked out the core of a solution last night - together with the recursive Shape Editor it's one of the best language test programs I know - and should have something nice around Monday if you want a copy.

- Jay