BBS advert for soldout commodity

[impaktor]

Intro

In frontier one would often have the habit to check the BBS for special "WANTED" adverts before selling the commodity on the market exchange. Especially if the station had 0t in stock.

About this Pioneer BBS advert

This module selects a major import and with a fairly low probability (for now 10% adds one advert, and zeros out the stock of that commodity in the commodity market).

There's only one flavor because this advert will be rare, so slight rewording of it will not make a difference.

This is in some way similar to #2753, but that one announces where the market is sold out globally, to all neighboring systems, (and offers a larger multiple than x2), where as this advert is as brief as can be.

Advert uses "$" icon for now (could alternatively use the shopping cart icon)

To-Do

Please don't look at the code, it's messy

• Don't allow selling more than I have
• Is it normal for other commodities to also be zeroed out? Looks like a bug, zeroing out stock of other major import commodities.
• Sanitize code & commits.
• Put strings into language module
• Remove debug stuff (e.g. constant spawn)

[impaktor]

By the way, in Frontier, when you jumped into a system, you could query each station for list of commodity prices (for a fee of $5, I think), through Comms. Would be cool if we could do the same, and also get stock, so then you might guess which station has one of these adverts, if they have 0t. Just throwing it out there.

[bszlrd]

If there's light lag, then it would be odd for you to get the info instantaneously though. Although I guess it would be doable if the info is broadcasted, and that cryptocurrency thing is what the money is. You'd get it instantly, the price deducted, but the recipient will get the money when the signal arrives.

[impaktor]

OK, except for debug outputs that should be removed/commented out, this PR is done.

I've re-written it now, so the module knows nothing about what a system imports anymore, it only check for 0 stocked commodities on each station and with 50% chance spawns a "wanted will pay double" advert on the BBS.

I ran this in Sol, with the changes suggested in #5074, (with the much lowered probability to be sold out of imported goods)

The Spaceport.lua reports it made 0 stock for these stations:

stock	commodity	price	station	type	got an advert in the end
0	Mining machinery	312	Mexico City	MAJOR import	x
0	Carbon ore	7	London	minor import	x
0	Animal meat	125	Jobs Pad	minor import	x
0	Plastics	36	Tomm's Sanctuary	MAJOR import
0	Metal alloys	43	Tomm's Sanctuary	MAJOR import	x
0	Metal alloys	43	Clarke's Station	MAJOR import	x
0	Animal meat	125	Discovery Base	minor import	x

which resulted in a single advert in each of the stations listed above, including Tomm's (i.e. even though it had sold out on two commodities)

(Now I hope the random number generator, Engine.rand:Number(0, 1) isn't in the same repeated state for each BBS station, as acceptance rate seems a bit high for 50% probability)

[Web-eWorks]

Two thoughts here: first of all, code doesn't look too terrible, maybe a few more comments needed to explain in the absence of debug messages but otherwise good.

Secondly, I would suggest dropping the 1000 option and setting an explicit maximum number of accepted commodities on this advertisement - I highly doubt this person would be paying double the going price on (especially) expensive commodities with a completely open ended commodity number. I'd rather expect they need a certain number to finish an urgent job and are thus willing to pay a significant incentive to ensure they receive their needed number of commodities. (Also it helps to keep the ad from being too exploitable; this is a 50% profit margin, which is significantly better than the best interstellar profit margin by at least 20%.)

[impaktor]

I would suggest dropping the 1000 option and setting an explicit maximum number of accepted commodities

I've had the same thought, actually. I might not get around to it until next week though.

[impaktor]

I might not get around to it until next week though.

Changes:

Now adverts have a fix amount they offer to buy. It's determined by the sum of the value of the goods they want to buy, is drawn from a random distribution that is uniform in log-space, as natural numbers typically are, example below:

Now, these numbers in the figure above span 0-100, however, mine are 500-10^5 in value (I was too lazy to make my own plot, above is from wikipedia).

Result

Notes

• I thought I saw a nice way to consolidate the last two conditional statements in OnChat, however, I kept getting an edge case that kept popping up someplace new in the code once I fixed it at some point
• the "Sell all" option sells everything the player has in stock, or that the buyer wants. Currently, if the player sells the full amount the buyer wants, the advert text is simply changed to "bla bla bla I want 0t", so then the player must press "Hang up" and the advert is removed. Perhaps there should be a "thank you, now I got all {commodity name} I need"

[Web-eWorks]

Code looks very clean! I have a few extremely minor nitpicks, but otherwise this is good to go.

[Web-eWorks]

If you'd like the "buy max" option to only offer the Hang Up button, just add this here:

if ad.amount == 0 then
    form:RemoveAdvertOnClose()
end

return

This will prevent any of the Sell buttons being added to the form, and will remove the ad from the bulletin board if it's empty.

[impaktor]

@Web-eWorks thanks

Btw, I could point out that this module does not, currently, have the ability to add several adverts for the same commodity, that could be done as a next step, offering different prices, but I think this will do for now.

I'll add this to transifex now as well (just a reminder to myself)