From: Jacob Fugal <lukfugl@...>
Date: 2006-03-21T02:30:42+09:00
Subject: Re: [QUIZ] Space Merchant (#71)

On 3/20/06, Timothy Bennett <timothy.s.bennett@gmail.com> wrote:
> James (or whoever else is doing station.rb), how are you representing
> cargo and passengers, and where are you putting them in the player?
> I was just starting to work on classes to represent items and people
> that can be found and/or used on planets, and realized that there may
> be a bit of overlap between items found on planets and bought at
> stations, so they should at least be the same duck type.  I was
> thinking that they'd be stored in player[:cargo] and player[:passengers]

I'm working on an implementation of Station and just representing
cargo items as symbols. Ie. the Station has a @trading hash keyed by
:machinery, :organics, etc. (whatever the world builder populates the
station with). When the player docks at the station, they see what's
available for what prices and are presented with a Buy/Sell/Exit
choice. When they, for instance, Buy, the Station will call two
methods on the Player: Player#pay(price) and Player#load_cargo(good,
quantity) where 'good' is the symbol representing that good. As such,
I don't need to know anything about the Player's representation, I
just require that Players visiting my Station provide the appropriate
methods. This representation of goods by symbols of course assumes
that a transported good has no state or operations beyond
classification.

Jacob Fugal