The problem was more modest -- modelling a part of a game called Car Wars. It was quite popular at the end of the 80s and noone ever wrote an implementation for the design rules, but many have certainly tried. The rules have too many exceptions and ugly special cases. Which is the main reason I worked on solving it.

Heh. Car Wars is a great game! A Steve Jackson game, if I remember correctly. There is an official computer game called AutoDuel, which was based on the same ruleset. As AutoDuel was released between 15 and 20 years ago targeting primarily the C64 market, it wasn't able to match the complexity of the full ruleset.

That said, given the success of the AD&D computer gaming market, I cannot imagine that the current Car Wars ruleset would be that difficult to model. If I remember correctly, it's primarily a bunch of tables with a few interactions thrown in. That's extremely easy to do using the methods from those types of games. Look at how Warhammer and Battletech have been done. BTech has a number of computer games, especially console and arcade games, which means that the special-casing can be easily handled.

Ruleset modeling has a ton of real-world uses. For example, trading everything from commodities to currencies uses rulesets to aid the traders in which situations need their personal attention. A lot of the work on those systems was done based on the research that looked into modeling chess.

My criteria for good software:
  1. Does it work?
  2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

In reply to Re^3: RFC hierarchic modelling documentation by dragonchild
in thread RFC hierarchic modelling documentation by BerntB

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