Economic Simulation Games

[SportsDino]

Is there any demand out there (in your opinion) for low graphics economy simulation games. Obviously we all played FOF, so this is a sort of stat game crowd to start, but I'd like to find the right balance of a game that is fun, somewhat pleasant to look at, and deep... while not taking a long amount of time.

For example, my current side project is a military sim. Iconic style graphics, but I need to build path-finding, make a reasonable top down view of all the vehicles, a warcraft (originals) like world mapping system, etc... all those little things actually add up to a lot of time. That is fine, I modularize it and do a chunk at a time, but it is a year or two out to develop under that method (extreme part time, like 2 hours 4 days a week == lonnnnnng dev cycle).

I could put together an FOF like game in less time, still not instantly (and of course I have no knowledge of modeling football so a different genre)... but I could get a release (free, not a money project) out within a year and start building some hype perhaps if the quality is high.

So what economics number heavy-graphic light game would you play? Only restriction is it can't be based on the current stock market, it can have a stock model in it but I don't want to build a game for finance purists, I'm aiming more at a fun but deep sort of level. I also am more of a Tycoon-game style fan rather than a stat-gamer myself (so I wouldn't mind building a little Sim City style map where you see buildings and little simlings running animation loops, its real-time unit management that is a time drain for me).

[Kodos]

Economic Stimulus Games....





... is how I first read the title.

[Izulde]

Have you ever thought about a political sim?

[lordscarlet]

I'm going to continue to beat a dead horse here, but I woudl encourage you to consider a web-based game. The market for low graphics text sims is limited, IMO. However, making it web based people almost expect it to be low graphics.

[SportsDino]

I have considered politics as a subset of a few games, and once as its own game. I'm not opposed to the idea.

I've also considered a lot of games which are variants on diplomacy or policy strategy games. For instance, your standard empire sim but the focus is less on military and logistics and more on negotiations within and without your nation, and delegating tasks to a variety of agents or doing themself (with a micro-management penalty enforced via limiting the amount of personal time you can commit to manually giving orders).

The agent AI would be the highlight of a politics/diplomacy styled game, so it could be a strong point for me, but I would be concerned with it being fun and partisan-neutral. I don't want to emulate the Democrat/Republican battle, I'd rather focus it more towards policy heavy game, with a little mudslinging election mode every four years (so yes graze the political atmosphere slightly, but don't dwell in areas that will no doubt piss off people if the simulation randomly spawns more liberals than conservatives in their geographic hidey hole).

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I can push out more interactive interface using an application rather than web (not a statement of web being limited, but rather my limitations at building interactive web apps). I could learn it, but it would take time which is the limiting resource here to begin with.

I would be cool with a massively multiplayer game where it pulls down from the web into a desktop application. I can build a little web backend and database easily enough. If I go pure web I would probably cut the interface down to a web page style, I would not try to learn enough to make it highly interactive.

I guess my position is:
- I'm cool with a pure web game, if I have essentially a text + buttons GUI.
- By graphics-lite I'm not precluding a graphical user interface involving some eye candy (and if we set it in space I might even make it run 3D), and all that point and click stuff we are used to in tycoon games. I just won't make an interface where you are physically directing objects in space, I might have little guys wandering around like in Roller Coaster Tycoon, but they will for the most part have ultra basic locked animation and paths. Something like Railroad Tycoon II, you can build things and objects, and watch the trains run around all over the place, but all the interactions are 'place this here', 'stop train x', and so on so I don't need to make too much control logic.
- I personally lean towards some graphics you can look at, I think it gets across information faster and more appealing than text columns. Even a politics sim I'd probably center the GUI around electoral maps, visualized graphs, and so on.
- I'm comfortable with networking that I could make some sort of server/client design to make multiplayer a natural aspect of the game.

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On the 'fun' aspect:
- Not interested in making a game that offends people. Why I'm hesistant about a U.S. political sim (unless its cleverly shifted).
- Not interested in a game that is historically accurate. You need to hit a certain level of accuracy to avoid the nitpick anger factor, and I don't have that much research time.
- The game needs to have layers of depth, so a person trying it out can enjoy it, and a person really playing it can uncover more of the game over time.
- My focus is on the gameplay being based on the interaction with computer (or human agents), whatever game it is I want to make you have to pay attention to what other agents are doing. It should be a different game each time.
- The game should scale to fit time frames between a couple hours to a few days, either through alternate modes/scenarios/settings. Want people to decide the amount of time they dedicate to a playthrough to something they are comfortable with.
- If its multiplayer it needs to include cooperative and competitive play. I want the game to be more than just 'oh I'll cooperate and then backstab later' sort of thinking, there will be some path to mutual victory that has difficulty to it still.
- Unpredictability is good, the goal is rational and variable agents, not 'difficulty' per se. I don't want every game to play out the same, I want a different batch of bots to potentially invalidate the last strategy you used to win. More 'interesting' play than 'difficult'.
- I hate too much routine in building games, so basically whatever game it is needs to encourage creative design of whatever it is you are building, rather than repeated patterns for ease of micromanaging. Whether it is a city builder somehow making it not quite Sim-city like (a game I love of course, so why copy it too closely, and it does have optimum patterns)... or a politics game avoiding a sort of lowest common denominator platform that wins every election. I think people have more fun when they take risks in a game and it pays off (and for the open minded, when they take one and it fails miserably!) then in trial and erroring until they solve the game and then rinse and repeat.

Feel free to suggest your own fun criteria!

I am not accepting RPG ideas, I already have a fully fleshed out one I want to build, but saving that one back for if I ever assemble a team.

I have a military based game idea (and partial code) already, and I think its awesome as is, but will take a while, so if it is a 'civ-style' game it would have simplified military combat at best. I'm talking abstract armies fighting behind a progress dialog and you get back the results, sort of like FOF.

[SportsDino]

To further the political sim line of thought and make an example of something I could do, make it a web-based game, massively multiplayer, with a simulated world/population, and every player (and bot) as a candidate for office at some various levels of government (probably city/state/nation with potentially multiple nations).

The game revolves around convincing little simlings you are capable of running for office. Making decisions while in office that change the game world in some manner. Then rinse and repeat.

Advancement = Becoming the president is the obvious goal. But secondary goals would be to build up your city/state/nation status. Another goal could be developing the best party (alliance of agents). In other words, I can see there being multiple goals, which I think makes for interesting play.

Competition/Cooperation = You would be directly working with other agents in order to get policies in place. Vote trading, filibusters, building up a bloc of power... the interactions between agents can be modeled with a few simple interactions, but have very complex gameplay.

Fun Factor = i can make the simulated world throw all sorts of curveballs into the mix so the policy portion of the game doesn't get stale. The 'status' style players will have a natural motivation to increase their visibility and 'rank' within the multiplayer world. Policy wonks can try out their own wet dream philosophy of the month and see whether those tax cuts on the rich really trickle down, or whether socialism can succeed after all! Campaigns can get plenty dirty, but the other players can't 'grief' each other, the voters are all sims, so popularity in the gamer community won't dominate the ability to win an election. (although going against a dedicated voting bloc could suck when it comes time to get anything done).

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So thats sort of an abstract, I would have to research existing games that might be out there and make sure its differentiated enough (I can differentiate anything). Any other themes people want to suggest though, this is just trying to flesh out one already mentioned to give more input to what style of game I'd like to make.

[Sun Tzu]

Erotic Stimulation Games...

...is how I read the title

I am disappointed

[aran]

Here are a few ideas fora non-offensive political sim:

Set it in space on the first metropolitan space station where people live permanently disconnected from earth except through rare communication.

Keep the populations relatively low. Maybe at 10 thousand-ish individuals total. Model each individual's abilities and interests to some degree.

The player takes control of one of the pretenders to power. The leader of the expedition or whatever has recently died leaving no clear successor. The council that temporarily has power is very divided. Your character is a recently elected councilman.

Dynamically generate the characteristics of the people in the station and generate complex profiles for each of the councilmen.

Come up 20 to 30 areas of policy where the player can take a stand. They come up at different intervals throughout the game until the player's character dies.

The gameplay would mostly be time management. Allocate x hours to talk to these people, x hours to consider this policy decision, x hours to gather information on what people think about x, etc.. The more time you spend on certain tasks, the higher chances of success, the more people you'll win towards your side. The base chances of success are determined by the PC's attributes.

Make a somewhat complex relationship model that allows the player to engage in relationships with NPCs to learn about what other NPCs are up to and want. Then the player can broker deals, make promises, lie, etc to curry favor.

The objective is to become the supreme leader of the council and stay there as long as possible.

[PilotMan]

Speaking of political/economic games, Crisis in the Kremlin was a well played game by me back in the day. The balance and background suited my cold war upbringing.

[Honolulu Blue]

I'm always on the lookout for good business sims.

[Icy]

I just need an updated "Capitalism plus".

[QuikSand]

Just one general thought here...

Part of the reason I like a football sim (or sports text sim in general) is because it's really the closest I can come to the real thing. I am not at all likely to ever become a professional in sports management of any sort, but playing a simulation of that sort of thing is fun and gives me some flavor of doing so.

The problem with simulating something that isn't all that unreachable is that you quickly run into a conundrum -- "why settle for the sim?" We have seen this in poker, as a good example, I think. When the poker book really hit, lots of video games started popping up to give people some sort of simulation experience of playing in big poker games. Bottom line is, what people really preferred was to just...well...play poker. So the market for card tables and dealer buttons and poker chips went up, much more so than the market for computer game simulations.

So... I think the underlying lesson is: if you have a target person who is interested in business or investing or the like, he's likely to eventually just start dabbling with business or investing, rather than get really deep into some simulation thereof. All told, the thing you are simulating there (absent a real hook of some sort) is too generally approachable for too many people to really ring a bell.

My goal isn't to throw water on the whole idea, just to offer a frame of reference for an endeavor like this.

[QuikSand]

As for political stuff, I like the idea generally. Maybe what would make it really work would be some not-by-your-choice custom goals for each participant? Like your character gets assigned certain things that are important to him and give him points/experience/bonus or whatever amounts to success in the game?

Maybe some of this gets to be within your control over time, but at least initially, maybe your character gets points only for certain things like: earning a seat on the regional council (as opposed to other offices?), securing victory for the official flag to be green (rather than other colors), and getting resources put toward the physics program (rather than other educational or scientific areas).

[Icy]

Originally Posted by QuikSand

Just one general thought here...

Part of the reason I like a football sim (or sports text sim in general) is because it's really the closest I can come to the real thing. I am not at all likely to ever become a professional in sports management of any sort, but playing a simulation of that sort of thing is fun and gives me some flavor of doing so.

The problem with simulating something that isn't all that unreachable is that you quickly run into a conundrum -- "why settle for the sim?" We have seen this in poker, as a good example, I think. When the poker book really hit, lots of video games started popping up to give people some sort of simulation experience of playing in big poker games. Bottom line is, what people really preferred was to just...well...play poker. So the market for card tables and dealer buttons and poker chips went up, much more so than the market for computer game simulations.

So... I think the underlying lesson is: if you have a target person who is interested in business or investing or the like, he's likely to eventually just start dabbling with business or investing, rather than get really deep into some simulation thereof. All told, the thing you are simulating there (absent a real hook of some sort) is too generally approachable for too many people to really ring a bell.

My goal isn't to throw water on the whole idea, just to offer a frame of reference for an endeavor like this.

Good point.

That is why i have never tried Wall Street Raider. I enjoy the stock market, but if i'm going to expend hours researching into companies, market etc, i better do it in real life and earn some real money even with low investing funds than doing it in a game.

[SportsDino]

I think I sort of have that vibe too, which is why I'm not really interested in building a Wall Street Raider... it is too much like something I already do. That might mean I'm sort of an 'expert' on how to build a similar game, but considering this is for fun, I need an entertainment draw to the project.

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I'm really liking the political space station idea. In fact, I think I could do a political/business hybrid there. I love building toy economies, and the setting lets me factor out and scale various difficult parts.

Thinking out loud here (mostly assuming the hybrid, as I think it offers complementary gameplay and two different models for different gamers):

- Modeling an entire population as individuals is something I can (and want) to do. Since it is on a space station I can scale the population to the best fit for gameplay and hardware.

- I can basically pick and choose what I want to model on the space station, so in terms of an econ sim I can limit the goods to space cabbage, or laser blasters, or other things that I can basically completely invent how these things are actually made without care for too much nitpicking (cause sci-fi, similar to fantasy, anything odd can be explained with 'a mad scientist did it!').

- I can probably make hot button topics on a space station which people can relate to, without getting all angry about. Also I can pull political themes from classic sci-fi literature to give it more color.

- If I go with a hybrid, I'd basically let you 'be' a sim. You could advance your position through job, business, or politics (or a combo of all of them). In a political only sim I would probably just have the economy and population more virtual, with the emphasis being on interactions with the other politicos/population representatives.

- I really really would like to make complex diplomacy/negotiation interfaces. Like are prevalent in Civilization/Total War/etc.. but they actually mean something. A lot of the gameplay would revolve more around making agreements with the other agents, than your ability to micromanage logistics.

== Running your little sim's life is mostly time allocation in the abstract. You set a schedule with X hours to some job, hours towards special purposes (like studying hypermath or building a personal rocket scooter, whatever), and maybe some parameters you can tweak based on the activity. This is considered routine, and since I'm not building an RPG really, its mostly just a way to build up personal stat bonuses and get some base income from your salary.

== If you are involved in business, it is a similar idea, manage at the abstract rather than details. You set a sort of generic production level, quality, and pricing and the micromanager turns that into X widgets at Y quality for Z price and maintains it dynamically as the game progresses. You would control hiring (maximize efficiency or costs), and set time allocations and parameters for the business. The idea is this should scale to multiple businesses, so if you make the big space station monopoly you are abstracting out the individual factory decisions to AI's and the policy scales more to sweeping decisions of where to expand and guiding strategy behind the decisions.

== In politics I'd probably have a council and chief executive model (as the station at most would get to the size of a town probably, thousands). As an executive you manage whatever powers have been declared in law (security, manage government production, whatever), the council would be responsible for designing the policies. The basic gameplay is crafting policy (i.e. adding or removing clauses that you can pick from some pool I provide) and then voting on it.

== In either mode, you can use conversation mode to further the gameplay. In politics it is practically required. In business though you can put together bigger deals.

- conversations in the game should involve inequal information. The AIs will have motivations and will consider everything fairly instead of just running down a script (however if you make something completely stupid up they will look at you funny and think you are crazy). Some agents will haggle, others will attempt to deceive, I can put in some personality variables that mean you have to get a feel on each agent you deal with and adjust.

- The economic model would be mostly based on goods chains. Those goods either serve some physical purpose (a blaster would let you shoot someone for instance) or are consumed in some way that improve's agents needs/luxury (food, televisions). The bean counting will be simplified wherever possible, you don't need to manage how many TVs or space cabbages your simling has, there is a general needs/luxury target/budget and your spending is fitted to match automatically. Many goods are intermediates in other chains. Also some goods provide bonuses to various activities (exercise equipment could help with health scores for example).

- Politics is part personality and part needs. Agents have there own time allocations and will seek policies that support them. Depending on personality they also might want to nose into other's business and prevent them from spending time how they want. Not everything will revolve around money, there will be some issues based material, but it will revolve around some in game effect. For instance, a vegetarian law could be passed, or anti-robot prostitution, or so on.

- There will also be random stuff that just happens. Asteroids, solar flares, immigrants, and so on.

[chesapeake]

Have you ever played the board game Republic of Rome? Each player represents a faction in the Roman Senate. The goal of the game is to make one of your senators Consul for Life. But one of the great design elements is that, if Rome gets too divided, it can be defeated and everybody loses. Each player has to balance the desires of their faction with the welfare of the Republic.

In my judgment, this design element isn't used nearly enough. If you are going to include some kind of political aspect, I think it might be fun to add some mechanic like this.

[Icy]

I think you would have a lot of customers in this forum for that game.

[SportsDino]

Haven't played Republic of Rome, but I'm a big fan of cooperative/competitive gameplay, and a game theory nut. I think on a situation as fragile as a space station there can be all sorts of danger from being too divisive. I certainly can build some mechanisms that make too much self-serving behavior lead to stress on the greater machine.

[aran]

If you want to bounce design ideas off of someone, send me a pm. This is the kind of game I'd like to work on as well. I've got other projects at the moment.

[SportsDino]

I prefer working solo, my time management is a severe mess at all times and I've not a fan of schedule paralysis. On my own I can knock out parts at whatever pace fits my work. If there is interest in an 'open' project after I build the core engine I can consider a team to flesh out into a game, but will not distribute the internals. I'm willing to make a free game, but the last thing I want is EA to snatch up the future of game AI for free (In my not so humble opinion).

That would be a few months down the road.

[aran]

I'm not offering to write code for it. I figured it was a side-project and you can do it yourself. I was just letting you know that if you need ideas or opinions on the design of the space station game, I would offer my opinion/analysis whenever it's needed.

[lighthousekeeper]

...and then terpkristin is all like "Why settle for a space station sim? I can just build a real space station myself"

[Cringer]

I have always enjoyed games revolving around transportation. Railroad Tycoon games being probably my #1 rated game franchise of all time. I would probably like some kind of text version of this that expanded the scope of this type of game. Multiple transportation businesses to get into, covering an entire planet instead of just a region. You could copy a FedEX model with local vans/nationwide trucks/national and international flights, or maybe get into the passenger side with trains, planes and buses, or haul freight with trucks and trains.

[SportsDino]

Ah I see what you mean, ya I don't mind design input, I do need to settle on what to build of course. I'd be cool with throwing out some really wireframe diagrams of major gameplay screens and interactions once I get rolling and iterating on it. The first key is getting the fundamental interface smooth and fun, then making sure I can scale it to absurdity and beyond. Can always use a few opinions and critical thought! So there are a couple stages that could involve input, the major workflow up front (defines key components I need to create), and then later on there will be sort of a brainstorm content phase (basically 'object' creation, tuning, specific interactions and manipulations of those objects, etc).

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It would be funny to get a rocket scientist to tell me everything that is absolutely wrong with my space station game. I'll put the blame on 'mad rocket scientists'. Seems like there is an opportunity for an easter egg though here.

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There is a game called Transport Tycoon (and Locomotion, among others I'm sure). This engine started out for essentially a 'space trucking' sim back when I was in undergrad. Basically Railroad Tycoon in space, which was my inspiration into business sims (RRT is in my top ten all time games list, top three back in the DOS days).

The only issue with the space transport game is I want to flesh it out when I have more graphics tech built up. I've got a couple games with the theme I could make (one a more interstellar railroad tycoon like game, the other a sort of pioneer/oregon trail like development of the solar system space industry RPG).

I love transport games, but I'd need a differentiating feature. To the untrained eye a really good AI behind such a sim doesn't seem too much different than the current state of the art, it easily gets lost by players looking for the optimal path to building up their empire. I think it could succeed if people had some additional evidence to make it set out from the pack, but its hard to do something already done and convince people its wildly better, than to hit them with something out of left field and have them identify it with you.

I could do a worldwide trading sim, you either transport cargo or own the production units. My concern is I like the 'trainset' nature of RRT almost as much as the gameplay itself, I like it if after a couple hours of building your empire you can physically see the monster you have created (little trains chugging along, factories you own, etc). The problem is I haven't built up my massive scale world map engine quite enough yet, this is one of the hold ups with my military sim (I pretty much make a battlefield the size of a small continent and a scenario is something like... world war II ). The goal is a more realistic space that people will accept as a 'world' or country without being unmanagable to play within. I could go with a simplified text and geographical maps approach, but then you don't get to physically see your network, it is just sort of a collection of numbers.

That said, I do need to build such a system at some point, so if a super massive Railroad Tycoon with overhauled gameplay sounds like a winner be sure to cast your vote for it. I'd probably focus on a more economics game, although the idea of goods chains, abstracted out economic controls, and deeper cooperative/competitive agents would still be involved.

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As for Erotic Stimulation Games....

Well there is always 'Strip Club Tycoon', or 'Pimpin like Pumpy', maybe 'The Movies: Stick Figure Porn Edition'? The problem is I can't draw or model a human worth a damn. Even the last one I might need to subcontract out to flere...

[SportsDino]

All right, front runners in my head, looking for whatever generates the most buzz and will get down to business:

1. Space Station Sim (as previously described)

2. World Industry Tycoon (like Railroad Tycoon on steroids, more options in the owning industry side, larger maps with somewhat different design, but basically RRT II taken to an extreme).

3. Space Trader (more graphically intense version of the above, but set entirely between planets/stars)

4. RISK-style combat, Empire Sim (somewhat resembling board game rules/interface, but with a high powered 'treaties' component to the gameplay, instead of military conquest you are trying to maintain/advance your position in the balance of power, with massively multiplayer style gameplay [so like playing a game of RISK where you have diplomacy, and instead of 6 players you have about a 100 and tons of regions].)

5. Sim Earth Redux (Or whatever the game was where you had evolution running amuck in a sort of tilebased world. Sort of an ecosystem sandbox game sim, as opposed to Spore which is a big RPG with creature creator game. This project is mostly what I wished Spore could have been, but without all the fancy graphics and over simplified gameplay. May consider both a 'god' mode perspective and a sort of 'play as creature trying to survive' perspective)


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The later ones have longer blurbs because I haven't posted them yet. I'm not accepting new candidates unless they are surefire awesome to the point of after hearing about them I can't stop wanting to do them (so feel free to throw em out there, you never know).

I can put out more details, I'm hoping to start architecture design next week to coincide with a lull in my storm of work projects, so the completely wide open brainstorming needs to be cutoff by Friday.

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My current faves are:
1. Space Station Sim
2. Sim Earth Redux
3. World Industry Tycoon

[DaddyTorgo]

SimEarth was cool.

SimAnt was fucking awesome

[path12]

My vote would be for the space station sim.

[I. J. Reilly]

The Space station sim sounds really interesting, with the balancing of community health and individual achievement. That being said, I think the best games come from designers who really like their subject matter. So I vote for whatever you want to work on

[nfg22]

Speaking of space/politics/buisness...anyone ever play the SNES game Utopia? Probably on my top 10 of all time. I like the ideas you all have thrown out.

[SportsDino]

Okay, decided to go with the space station. Some refinements that bumped up consideration:

- I'm a wannabe sci-fi writer, after the sandbox engine is in place I think a trivial expansion is to give it a plot line in an optional 'story' campaign. You can either play a more pure sim (you select a bunch of environment vars to configure the game you want to play) or go through a more preplanned but hopefully still fairly open gameplay challenge/story arc.

- The story stuff is all gravy I can cut for time, I think as a sim it will be a solid game, story mode is a potential value add if it is well written and designed (my biggest concern with story modes is they tend to lock you into a main path, my hope is to try out a new design model for story in games to see if it can be compelling and flexible, not sure if it will work).

- I've got a fairly interesting lego-block style graphics approach I want to take. The engine will be mostly OpenGL integrated within Qt toolkit (potentially I'll see if I can make a mac friendly version, I'm PC mostly). Space stations are easier to model than more realistic graphics (in my opinion). The station will build itself over time (one of the strengths of my engine, agents can change the environment) so there is sort of a 'train-set' feel to the game, but the emphasis is on persuading people to build it the way you want, versus laying out the blocks you want personally as in RRT.

- Got a notion for a sort of 'conversation database' I want to plug into the game. All the lines are pre-written of course, but I'd like to put in lots of variants with slightly subtle differences, and have it somewhat randomized and parameterized by the agent's personalities. Inevitably people will read all the text and it will repeat, can't avoid that really, but it should make the initial playthroughs a touch more interesting. Leaning more towards 'character interaction' is an appeal to this game, a sort of dynamic I haven't seen too often in pure sims (you sort of get a feel like it with the Sims, but really you could replace the sims with cartoon animals or elaborate barbie dolls and really see its just a vanity dress-up game with light need balancing gameplay sim... the interpersonals are perhaps TOO abstract and equation like).

- I think I want to lean the game slightly more political than I was considering at first. There is still a heavy and deep economics model and option set, but you can't logistics your way into power. Its now more aimed as a tool within the 'power' game on the station (note power can be self-serving, altruistic, or more best for the community is best for me focused, it is not necessarilly a slightly disguised conquer everything sim). Wealth is always useful of course!

- I've decided to disguise the 'super-agents', you basically are facing a station full of 100s of individually modeled agents. You might assume the president for instance is a super-agent (an agent with much higher compute time and more powerful 'game motivation' as opposed to an agent just living their life), but you can't just go to a screen and identify your opponents. Super agents are pursuing the same set of 'victory conditions' as the player in the sim game. In the story mode they have strong motives to fulfill some element of the plot, not necessarilly victory (often times they are adversarial, not just to the player, but potentially a threat to the station such as a psycho serial killer). If I go multiplayer the humans take the role of the super agents.

So anyway, I think I've gathered up enough elements to convince me its a worthwhile project, while not straying too far from code I've been tinkering on. I'll go hide and come up with some basic specs, will bump this thread when I've got a skeleton to share.