It’s been almost three months since the last blog post, so that throws my plan of one post a month straight out the window. Hopefully nobody started to think this project was dead, because that certainly isn’t the case. There have been some time-consuming events in my personal life, so I ended up spending all of the time I managed to find for the project on its development, rather than blogging. I’ve worked a lot on several smaller things, so while there has been significant progress, it’s not something I can write up in one thematic post like I have in the past. In this post I’ll give an overview of some of the features that have been added.
First Anniversary
Today it is exactly one year ago that I wrote the first line of code for the new incarnation of Particracy!
Some statistics on the size of the project as of today:
| Back-end source files (Java) | 1,016 | |
|---|---|---|
| Back-end source lines (Java) | 73,357 | |
| Front-end source files (Java) | 196 | |
| Front-end source lines (Typescript) | 20,884 | |
| Front-end templates lines (HTML) | 13,511 | |
| Database tables | 168 | |
| Implemented features | 478 / 772 |
Those 772 features are the ones I’ve fully listed and explored right now, I anticipate to add at least another 200 by the release, so that final number of functional requirements would be around 1000. About 50 features are continuously in a state of “busy”, meaning they’re partly implemented.
Simulating a worldwide economy
An important reason work on Particracy Classic or its handful of reboots I have undertaken over the past decade has always stalled, was that my vision of the game requires simulating a worldwide economy, and that is just really hard. Not just a player-controlled economy you see in games like Civilization or Stellaris, but an actual private sector with supply, demand, exports and imports, and government taxes, investment and regulation on top of that. Sounds easy right? One person I was talking to a few years ago referred to this particular challenge as the problem that brought down the Soviet Union, which to be honest did daunt me a little. This time around however, I’ve gained a few insights and developed techniques that I’m confident will enable me to build a decent economic model to act as a foundation for the simulation aspects of the game.
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Technical Details
For those interested in the development side of this project, I thought I’d write up some information about how the game is being developed. If you’re not interested in the technical side of things, you could always forego this post, or just skip to the fancy colorful diagram at the bottom.
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.Bill Gates
Various bits of progress
This will be a small update, as I’ve been working on many different parts of the game, but haven’t finished any major arcs, so I don’t have a big write-up lying around. Hence I’ve decided to show off some random, unfinished bits of the game.
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