rails-devel

[Rails-devel] RE: Stock market revisited

[Iain A. <ia...@co...>]

I also hope to have some time over the weekend to actually write some code,
in the meantime a few points for Erik:

Using DOM does mean that you do have the document in memory twice for a
short period of time, however the DOM version can be discarded and garbage
collected once its contents have been read. Since we are having multiple
config files (one per component), only one at a time will need to be in
memory twice, and the files are going to be pretty small anyway. I hope to
provide some XML reading utility code to help this get moving.

You are almost correct about the singleton pattern usage, don't jump in on
that yet, I'll post more details in the next couple of days about how to do
this right (just don't have time today, I'm afraid).

Linear stock markets are a special case of two dimensional rectangular ones:
they just have exactly one row. I don't think rectangular AND hexagonal is
that hard to do; again I'll try and post more on this in the next few days.

Iain.

[Rails-devel] Re: Stock market revisited

[Iain A. <ia...@co...>]

John David Galt wrote:
>Erik Vos wrote:
>> I was talking about objects reporting their state *changes*.
>> We need that to create a readable game log (e.g. for PBEM).
>I like this in principle.  However, since money does not appear or
>disappear but goes somewhere, I suggest that all money movements be
>handled by a single function ("Transfer" with two arguments) and
>logged as a single action.  If "add $30 to Player 1" and "subtract
>$30 from the Bank" are two separate actions, it"s too easy for one
>to get done and the other skipped.

That is an excellent point. Instead of any object (Company, Player, etc)
holding money, it should be considered a 'MoneyHolder', and the Bank should
be responsible for keeping the balance of each MoneyHolder's account.
Of course, the 'bank pool' needs to be one of these, and in most (all?)
games
is the only one which can have a negative balance - the transistion to
negative generally causing a 'game end' flag to set. Note that this balance
could be positive at game end, since cash can be transferred back (e.g. by
train transfers) after the game end is triggered.

Iain.