RE: [Rails-devel] Drawing chits on the stock market

[Erik V. <eri...@hc...>]

> I've been thinking about how to approach drawing the company chits on
> the stock market. 

First a point of nomenclature: I have never heard the word "chit" before,
and don't know what it means, except (obviously) out of the context where
you use it. 
I'd expect more non-native English speakers like me to have this problem.
In the rule books I find "token" in most American and "marker" in most
European-originated games, and I would prefer to standardis/ze on
one of these two words.

I'd personally prefer "marker" for the stock market thingies and "token"
for the map (station) ones, but maybe there are better ideas around.
 
> One thing that occurs to me is that perhaps we need model/view
> separation on this as well. In other words, the information 
> about where
> the chits are ought to be stored in the StockMarket or 
> StockSpace class
> (I haven't quite decided which yet), and the UI should simply draw the
> market based on the information it gets from those classes.

Yes, I fully agree, see below.
I would say that everything that is part of the game state (and would need
to be stored in a save file) is part of the Model.
 
> If we only store the display information in the View portion, I think
> there may be problems when we need to save that information to a save
> file.
> 
> So, in either StockMarket or StockSpace (probably StockSpace, 
> i think),
> does it make sense to add the ability to store what company 
> stock chits
> are currently occupying the space?  Any suggestions on how we should
> store this? Does it sound like we need a new object class for this, or
> should we use information from an existing object, like 
> Company perhaps?

In the current classes I have included:
- in StockSpace: an ArrayList of Companies having their markers (or tokens)
there,
in top-to-bottom sequence,
- in PublicCompany: its currentPrice, which is a StockSpace instance,
identifying
the location of its stock price marker (or null for companies without priced
shares).

So the marker's StockSpace and the marked Company have a mutual reference to
each other.
This is the way I would tend to approach issues like this.
And this way we do not need a new class.

Erik.