Trading

[Krom]

@Ben: I thought about changing School/Barracks selection, but it does not seems to work out for PC, player would need to scroll with a mouse, then click to select an item, then click "Train" button. Not very handy. Also it would be quite unusual. Perhaps on tablets it would have worked better.

[Ravior]

Well you know ... this kinda sucks ^^ I don't hear any ideas from you and all I do is coming up with more and more of them, getting declined all of them, without even testing my ideas.

[dicsoupcan]

Well the problems is that there are so many ideas being posted, and if you need to test every idea the development will go very slow. and besides that there are multiple ideas for one subject, so not all ideas can be implemented.

[Krom]

@Ravior: Sorry, but there;s no such rule, that every proposed idea has the same chance of getting accepted. We run Remake for almost 5 years now and we got huge amount of ideas coming and going, some got accepted, many rejected. Keep on trying, maybe next one will be on spot!

[Ravior]

Okay. But there cannot be any development of ideas if theres just answered "no" to the ideas one makes! If we want to have progress, we need to collect information about what of the idea is good and whats not so good. So lets make a pro / cons list about it, or simply let us figure out what we actually need here. Thats the following I realized so far:

TRADEING-SYSTEM OVERALL

a) one resource is selected to be send to another player
b) a resource needs time to be send (each piece of it certain amount of seconds)
c) the player which receives the items must be selected first
d) receiving is done by selecting the wanted item and clicking on an accept button which functions like a gate; either a ware is accepted, or not.

GUI

1 - It needs to be small enough that it fits on the control-panel on the left side of the screen in the game.
2 - It needs to have all the wares in it to select only one of them at a time
3 - The selection needs to be in a way that you can easily find the ware you are searching for
4 - The receiving player can be selected via a small rectangle which helds the players color

Please add up on this, and we can keep going towards a solution.
Or say which one of these must be changed.

[Ben]

I honestly just don't like this idea. A large amount is my opinion, but I've clearly stated many times that it just won't look good, no matter what you do to it, because it just doesn't look good. Krom also stated several times that the mechanics won't work in an RTS, so I'm not sure what you are saying about "Just saying no."

[Krom]

@Ravior: I have provided explanation why certain elements would not work well. That does not counts for a "just no".

Let's split Model from UI. First we need to decide on Model, then see how it can be implemented in UI, if there are UI restrictions we iterate the Model if it can be slightly changed.

Model:
1. PlayerA selects wares to send, amount, PlayerB.
2. Wares are taken from PlayerA.
3. Wares are given to PlayerB.
*I thought about doing exchange scheme, but it gets too complicated. We can add it later if its really needed.

There's no need to complicate it with "gates". We are doing simple prototype first.


UI: For that Model to work we need to select ware, select amount, select destination. All of this is quite easy to fit into existing panel. However there's a fork, do we keep trading over Marketplace, or replace it? I think we need to keep it, so that if map is low on gold it still can be traded. This means we probably need a new house or a menu entry. UI depends on that.

[H.A.H.]

What about making the "Select a player"-step optional? In this case it is still possible to trade as the original market, e.g., for gold if it runs out.

[The Dark Lord]

However there's a fork, do we keep trading over Marketplace, or replace it?

However there's a fork, do we keep trading over Marketplace, or replace it?

However there's a fork, do we keep trading over Marketplace, or replace it?

YES PLEASE!



On a more serious note: I guess many players like the marketplace, no matter how fake it is. So maybe... maybe it should...
No I can't say it.

[Krom]

@HAH: You mix two different things into one: "Market trading" and "Players sending wares" to each other. These are different mechanics and are better to eb solved separately.

@TDL: LOLs, but seriously I doubt we can remove Market from MP games, cos otherwise there will be no way to get some gold/iron after all mines run out.

[The Dark Lord]

Yeah I don't mind trading for raw materials; that's pretty essential. But all other trades could be removed imo
E.g.: you can trade every ware, but you can only receive gold ore/iron ore/coal/stone

[H.A.H.]

@Krom: you're right that I was too general in my previous post. But I think the mechanics can be combined quite easily in the same building. They share very basic characteristcs.

The market is a building suitable for receiving and sending goods; "trading" is a concept built on that principle. So let's model this former behaviour first:

1. The market building can be filled with a good of choice, e.g., fill it with 15 bricks. Each good has a maximum storage capacity, only 1 ware type can be stored.
2. Any good stored in the market building can be transferred 'back into the economy', e.g., serfs take out the goods and bring them to the storehouse.

Generally, we can say that a player only has to give 1 explicit order regarding the goods, namely how many goods to bring to the market; all other ware types are automatically taken out of the building and brought back into the economy.

Next, we have two possibilities with what we can do with the goods:

A. Send them to another player.
B. Trade them for other goods.

We can also model these different behaviours in the UI: we can have different views of the building. One is the overview of the building, that is ware type, amount, action: (send to player, trade for other ware type). The other is when the player wants to select a type of wares. Clicking the icon of the ware type or the trade for other ware type will show a different view that is similar to the storehouse.

I should elaborate on the mechanics of receiving goods. Whenever a player sends goods to another player, the game will look for a 'free' marketplace, that is a market that does not have any goods stored, or a market which has the same ware type as the ware we send and some storage capacity left. The game will then transfer the goods (I don't care whether instantenious or serfs need to bring them to the other warehouse, but one can argue that instantenious is better if you are allowed to send goods to the enemy). Whenever there is no 'free' marketplace, it will queue the order and wait for a free market. There are some special cases, such as two players trying to send two different types of wares to eachother (they are both not free, but the expected behaviour is to swap the goods whenever the maximum capacity is reached or the ordered amount is in the building).

[Krom]

I would simplify it a little bit: remove storage capacity and looking for "free" marketplace.

What if we do the ware picking with a "DropBox" that pops up a 5x6 grid of wares like in Store. Then the UI could look like so:

  Code:

- list of wares - that are inside - (max 4 different - kinds) -> [Ware to] [Ware from] _/ amount [-]amount[+] \ -> [Player to]

[Ravior]

Thats pretty similar to what I had in mind the last 24 hours after reading your answer on my post.
As I've said already I don't think that it would be of any problem to handle this thing with a dropbox or combo-boxes or drop-down-menus (like this one is you're suggesting).
Its a fact that there are really many wares and It makes no sense to have stuff displayed all the time which you really only need to see once or twice when you do something.

However there are other facts I'm not sure if they are cleared up by now:

Would it still be done like that it takes time to transfer wares? This would be (as I said) a tradeoff for the other players that if they don't produce themself it will not happen that they could receive heavy amounts of wares at the same time. The Trading system must be used with some caution and planning this way. This also makes sure that there is no such thing as that players if they failed in building up a fairly good economy could still win a game, because this is what is very important for the game by now. One must still have the skill to build up a working economy in whatever landscape he's thrown in. Or at least the trading option must require some skill to use it the most effective way, otherways It could break the game.

/other question:

I'm just learning this in my studies, but what about using real Software-Engineering Techniques here like use-case diagrams, use-case-definition documents and non-functional-requirements-definitions? I've seen in a simulated project that these work out really well when it's about doing something as a team. However these would require that anyone needs to learn how these work before these could be used by him or her.

[Krom]

@Ravior: Ware trading should take time, but this time is already taken by serfs bringing wares to a Market. There's no need to add additional delay IMO. Biggest issue that worries me is unfair players who can login into MP from 2 sessions and transfer wares from one player they control to another. Maybe tax will be also applicable.

We have some diagrams made with yEd (awesome tool), but they mostly concern code organization. Maybe you could teach us how to benefit by using "use-case diagrams, use-case-definition documents and non-functional-requirements-definitions" - that would be great )