I now work on the "real thing" and that is fascinating to read. I didn't know about Wall Street Raider. Anyone who's ever tried a "paper trading account" on a real brokerage app knows how poor these are: it's near impossible to simulate the real thing without implementing the real thing.
One thing I really don't understand at all is how it's possible to do so much in only 115 kloc. 115 000 lines of code is next to nothing for such a project: there are solo projects with more lines of code than that. It simply ain't that much: how can you simulate mergers, financial derivatives, etc. all in so little lines of code?
It is, simply put, a little codebase. Which makes it all the more impressive.
I mean: it's both a lot (for the time) and nothing for what it does. I'm sure brokerage apps have 10x that amount of code and they only deal with the client side of things. I understand the game doesn't reproduce everything but it still looks incredibly impressive to me to pack so much in so little lines of code. Doubly so if this is sufficient to teach people the basics of finance and trading.
Now something else: this reminds me a bit of a game by the company FTL (created in 1982), who created Dungeon Master. Before that game FTL did "Sundog: The Frozen Legacy". In Sundog they implemented an interpreter for a programming language so that they could write their game (otherwise the default languages available were too limitating) and... You could buy/sell stuff across planets, that you'd transport in your spaceship. They had started writing a complex trading engine for the game: the player was supposed to be able to place buy/sell orders and whatnots but eventually they gave up that part of the game. FWIW when I was playing Sundog The Frozen Legacy I was feeling I was Han Solo in my spaceship: great memories.
Wishing the best to Ben Ward and sending big thanks to Jenkins. These kind of entries are why I'm on HN.
One thing I really don't understand at all is how it's possible to do so much in only 115 kloc. 115 000 lines of code is next to nothing for such a project: there are solo projects with more lines of code than that. It simply ain't that much: how can you simulate mergers, financial derivatives, etc. all in so little lines of code?
It is, simply put, a little codebase. Which makes it all the more impressive.
I mean: it's both a lot (for the time) and nothing for what it does. I'm sure brokerage apps have 10x that amount of code and they only deal with the client side of things. I understand the game doesn't reproduce everything but it still looks incredibly impressive to me to pack so much in so little lines of code. Doubly so if this is sufficient to teach people the basics of finance and trading.
Now something else: this reminds me a bit of a game by the company FTL (created in 1982), who created Dungeon Master. Before that game FTL did "Sundog: The Frozen Legacy". In Sundog they implemented an interpreter for a programming language so that they could write their game (otherwise the default languages available were too limitating) and... You could buy/sell stuff across planets, that you'd transport in your spaceship. They had started writing a complex trading engine for the game: the player was supposed to be able to place buy/sell orders and whatnots but eventually they gave up that part of the game. FWIW when I was playing Sundog The Frozen Legacy I was feeling I was Han Solo in my spaceship: great memories.
Wishing the best to Ben Ward and sending big thanks to Jenkins. These kind of entries are why I'm on HN.