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- [DONE] Integrating P/B (Profit to Book value) into the current report, to make it a general-purpose research-your-stock-investments report.
- Average car price per company. Would you be investing in a company that makes high-end cars, or tries to focus on the volume segment of the market?
- [DONE, except debt] Add a report that shows companies' equity, debt, and cashflow situations. Detect if your investment is about to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
- [DONE] Letting you easily see which companies are bankrupt, and when they went bankrupt. I've always kind of wanted there to be newspaper articles when companies go under. Maybe some sort of obituary summary for them based on their historical data.
- Geographic summaries, e.g. see total vehicle sales by continent, country, or district. You can get this manually if you tally up the Competition chart in the District screen, but it takes long enough that I usually ballpark it in practice.
- [DONE] Total market sales by year. Perhaps some charts for sales by type, letting you visualize things such as the plateauing and decline of the Phaeton. Don't be like me, introducing a new Phaeton in 1949.
- Company summaries for companies that aren't public. Sometimes they go broke and you can bid on them, but how can you make a decision based on almost no information?
- Some fun historical reports, such as showing trends in cylinder counts over time (I3 vs V4, for example), or automatic vs manual transmissions. I've tried to trend this over time for my companies, and it's a lot of work to correlate manually.
- A Showroom-style report, that lets you focus on the trends across generations of your vehicles more easily. Maybe you can even track market dominance, instead of numerical sales.
- More of a stretch, but perhaps some more details on factory costs, number of sales needed to break even in a region, etc. I don't know everything I would need to for this yet, but even a little bit of data on this could help solve questions such as, "why is my Swiss factory so much more expensive than my New York factory?"
These are pretty much all things I've wondered about through my playthroughs, and sometimes tried to categorize manually.
Since it's a free time project, expect updates to be sporadic. I'm also leaving on vacation soon, so don't expect updates until at least late July. But feel free to add your own wishes and suggestions.
Also sorry for how messy the db is, layers and layers of stuff were added to the game over the last decade that I never intended to implement or do. It really needs a good refactoring, which is a feature bounty ticket.
FYI, the reports aren't perfectly gaap compliant mostly because of the amount of processing time it would take to do it. And limitations of the UI prevent me from having multiple, dynamically created tables which would be the best way to go about showing all this stuff in game. So I have to spit everything out into html, and that prevents me from doing dynamic input and creation needed for things like letting the player enter the year or getting a range of years. etc. Nearly all the reports are static in the game, so every little thing I do to them adds more processing to the end of turn. That sort of ties my hands.
Another feature bounty is replacing the entire UI system with a new UI library that would allow me to make dynamic tables. That would allow me to return the reports from html back into in-game GUI. But that's a pipe dream because of how expensive it would be.
(Although I will say, I probably should split out stock/asset sales. I leave in there for now, because it's faster to just throw the income number in the DB out there.)
Anyway doing all this outside of the program removes some of the limitations and issues that plagued GC. So it's a good idea, I hope it catches on as a campaign program. (Although I would have chosen QT instead of Java. ^,~ )
Feel free to ask if you have any questions related to the DB.
I have a formula wiki coming post release. That might help with some of your extra stuff you want to add.
I wouldn't actually be able to tell if the reports were GAAP-compliant, not being an accountant :). GearCity has increased my level of interest in accounting, however.
I'm actually rather pleased with how some reports in-game do allow you to e.g. remove the "Other" from a line chart, so the 90% share of "Other" in the early doesn't obscure the other companies' market share. And the search/sort options are quite handy. But yes, those decisions a decade ago can tie hands. My longest-running project is a bit over 10 years old, and I definitely wouldn't have built it the same way with more experience. But such is life.
As for myself, I've realized over the years that I enjoy solving problems with code more than I enjoy new programming languages, so I went with Java as what I knew that allowed me to hit the ground fast, and produce fairly pretty reports in the process. There probably are better options - but I'd rather play GearCity than learn a new language or framework for the sake of learning a new language or framework.
The formula wiki does sound like it might be useful. Factories are probably the area I've puzzled over the most (I finally closed the super-high-cost Zurich factory, but it seems to have made no real difference to my total factory costs once production shifted elsewhere... or maybe a couple hundred grand instead of the expected several million in savings per month).
Anyway, I've made a couple minor additions locally, adding in Profit/Book and Market Cap columns to help evaluate potential investments and acquisitions; as far as I'm aware the only way to view Profit/Book in-game is to view each company's stock report, which can make it easy to miss bargains. Although as it turns out, the bargain companies in my game tend to be unprofitable, often heavily so... maybe that is why they're priced as bargains.
I'm probably going to wait until near the end of the month to publish an update, so publishing the update doesn't take too much time relative to additions that I make.
It also has two new, small reports - Yearly Market Sales (all vehicles, worldwide, divided up by year), and Defunct Companies (companies that are bankrupt/acquired, and the year of their fate).
I've added some new screenshots in the first post, and also updated the download link there. But for convenience, I'll add the link here as well:
Latest Version[ajtjp.com]
Feedback is welcome. Future improvements are likely, though the rate of them remains highly unpredictable.
P.S. Does GearCity have a forum other than the Steam one? I miss being able to inline screenshots as old-school forums allowed.
Currently we only have the Steam forums. The Steam forums sucked off most of the users of the official forums, to the point where it was pretty much only spam bots posting there. I 100% prefer the official, old-school as you call it, forums.
I plan on re-opening it when the feature bounty system goes live, since it will be heavily integrated on there, and such work has to be done off-Steam.
Eventually we may land on other third-party forums, assuming the game is accepted. But they're pretty much the same as Steam forums (Can't say whom or where on here, as it's against Steam's TOS.)
We do have a Reddit (/r/gearcity), which allows first-party image posts. (I dunno how to do more than 1, but I have seen full albums uploaded before.) Alternatively, you could use a third party host like cubeupload.com
Maybe it's due to the size of the savegame (ca 5-20 MB)? With earlier save points/smaller save games (ca 2 MB), it usually works without problems. But maybe this is just a coincidence.
I use the recommended Java version (JRE 8 Full).
That size (5-20 MB) shouldn't be a problem, however; the latest save I am playing with is 558 MB and growing all the time. Although it does make me wonder, have you ever used the Purge Data option in Gear City to keep the size down? I haven't tested with that, but could see it potentially affecting the reports. I'm also curious in general about the difference in save sizes; even a 1911 archive I have weighs in at 48 MB, although I have been playing with 300 AIs so if you have fewer, maybe that's why we're seeing such different save file sizes.
Apologies for the slow reply; I've been on vacation and haven't been on Steam for awhile.
For this sort of program, you shouldn't be putting the database into memory. So file size shouldn't be a problem unless you are. In which case, don't. :)
Two other things i should mention, as they may have caused it: 1. I play with a modded version of the game (~50 AI companies; slightly modded turnevents; moderately modded compononents.xml). 2. Maybe - I'm not sure anymore - I had made small changes to one or two of the initial save games with an sqlite editor (bigger size of competitors' factories; maybe also changes to the competitors' money which sounds like a more likely source of the problem). However, the issue appeared with several save games independent of each other and I am quite sure that I didn't make changes to all of them.
As I said, I'll get back to you as soon as the problem reappears.
As the size of the change list suggests, this is the largest update so far, with a ballpark estimate of having more than twice as many changes as the first and second releases combined. While a lot of this is effort put into allowing you to switch files, and getting the chart behaving intuitively (including allowing you to hide a series by clicking on it), I think the sum of updates makes the program a lot friendlier to use. I definitely am enjoying not having to tell it which file to open every time!
I'll likely continue adding some options to the Engine charts (e.g. allowing you to view the data for your company only), covering more types of data (e.g. fuel efficiency, average horsepower), and plan to add a similar Gearbox chart in the future. To me, these charts are more for the fun alternative-history role-playing than the CEO decision-making that the initial report aimed to support, but those are two faces of the same die when answering the question of why I enjoy playing Gear City.
(Also potentially relevant to the save file discussion, it should not be an issue, as I'm using JDBC and specifically this library to query the DB: https://github.com/xerial/sqlite-jdbc)
You can read about it and download it from the official GearCity forum, at https://www.ventdev.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=4377&pid=9907#pid9907 . I'm making that the main thread going forward, since it allows embedding pictures of the report, and a picture is worth 1000 words in explaining what the reports do.