Space-Merchants and the future!

[Gerben van de Wiel]

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I have been following the Thread about Ruby quiz number 71, with great
intrest.
I have a few question about the effort to develop some basic functionality
of a space merchant game.

-Has anyone already registered a project @ rubyforge
-Is there some where a discussion going about how to develop the quiz
results in a working game
-Is there a functional basis of this game
-Are there people willing to give some time to develop this concept in a
real working game

It would be nive if we can create some dev team to work on this game, and
provide a nice functional
and fun game to the ruby community.

i myself was thinking about a nice way to combine OpenLaszlo and RoR to mak=
e
a thin-client
and make some kind of space-merchant(ruby) server.

i am looking forward to your suggestions and or commentary.

Yours,

Gerben van de Wiel.

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[Benjohn Barnes]

i am looking forward to your suggestions and or commentary.

I was thinking that Ruby would be kind of neat for building a
talker (or web / graphical world place) where the users are able to
arbitrarily extend the world in dangerous and exciting ways, while
also being able to talk to each other.

mmmm - mostly just a multiuser IRB, in a way... I think IRB has
workspaces? Perhaps these could be rooms? And you could "puts" to
all the people in the room? Heh - I don't know. Sounds silly though,
and fun, ... and spectacularly insecure!

 

[Timothy Bennett]

I have been following the Thread about Ruby quiz number 71, with great
intrest.
I have a few question about the effort to develop some basic
functionality
of a space merchant game.

-Has anyone already registered a project @ rubyforge

Not that I know of. I offered to register one, but never got a
response, and I don't have the time to do it all myself.

-Are there people willing to give some time to develop this concept
in a
real working game

I can provide some time, but not a whole lot.

Tim

 

[Reto Schuettel]

Hi

I have been following the Thread about Ruby quiz number 71, with great
intrest.
I have a few question about the effort to develop some basic functionality
of a space merchant game.

Well.. I found the quiz very interesting. I'm at the moment a little
bit frustrated about a game called X3 The Reunion. It's also a space
game, but well.. it has some 'more advanced' abilities compared to the
Space-Merchants (like 3d graphics, a story, ability to fight, etc..
a full game ). But there are some interesting similarities: What's
the easiest way to get money. In X3 you can either fly your space crafts
(little fast ships, big slow transporters etc) by yourself or you can
use (if you have enough (in-game) money to buy the needed extension) a
computer which trades for you. The computer looks for interesting trade
routes, tries to find the best balance between the available money,
transporter-cargo-capacity, needed time (length of the route) and of
course the profit . Well, the game is extremely buggy, slow and so it
isn't as funny as I first thought[1]. :/

But, X3 & S::M brought me to a whole new idea:
We could improve the Space-Merchants and then give the people here the
opportunity to 'program' (of course in ruby) their own merchant AI.
There would be a whole predefined world (planets, stations, goods,
whatever), perhaps other predefined stupid trades (so that there would
be a big ecosystem), a limited amount of credits, a limited amount of time
(so that people would have to think twice about the algorithms) etc. The
aim would be to to create a good AI which tries to get most out of the
situation.

The server would run on a central server (so that everybody could
compete against each other). Perhaps it would make sense
to have regular cycles: for instance the players could upload their
scripts/libs by the beginning of a week, and then the whole simulation
would run for 24-48 hours (I don't know how much in-game time this
should/would be). After this time the game would stop and the current
situation would be saved (which player has how much money, which ships,
etc). We could download the logs, improve our scripts etc. etc. And the
whole thing would start again next week. Perhaps after some time we
could 'reset' the whole universe and start from the beginning .

Welll... to be honest, it sounds like a lot of fun, but also like a lot
of work . Kind of on-line game, but for programmers . And, The techniques
learnt and trained could also be useful in our every-day work (or
not .

Well.. what do you think? Interesting? Too much work ?

Regards,
Reto Schuettel

1: It isn't that bad either, so if you like the idea and a 3d space
game, take a look at the demo: www.egosoft.com