Inspiration
Ever since the outset of COVID-19, the volatility of the American Supply Chain has been repressing numerous industries from maximizing their efficiency and profits. The pandemic has been paramount in highlighting the significance of an efficient and stable supply chain system. In a country as vast and diverse as the United States, this idea is even more imperative. The gravity of this situation, inspired us to create Industry Simulator 2023, a tool to help users simulate an artificial supply chain network between randomized nodes.
How we built it
Industry Simulator 2023 was created with a Vue/PIXIjs front-end and with the Python framework, Flask, handling the back-end. A user can create an online game on the website and have up to three other players join. IS2023 features a server browser, where you can join your friend's games. The game creates randomized nodes, each node is either a factory, a city, or a road connection. The factories production rates have to match the consumption rates of the city, and the vehicles delegated have to supply the cities efficiently enough that they do not experience loss in supplies.
Challenges we ran into
Our two biggest issues were the most common ones: time and manpower. We were unfortunately limited to our tasks, as there were only two of us. Our goals were to create multiplayer access and integrate the InterSystems supply chain technology into our system. We only and barely had time to create multiplayer access. If we had more time, we would have been able to complete both. We plan on completing this after HackMIT to highlight how complicated infrastructure creation is!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Despite the challenges, we are really proud of some of the features we created. We developed with Web-sockets, ensured that data is fully synchronized between the client and all players, and used this synchronization to make all buildings data based upon the same tick update. Our randomization mesh for our nodes was also an algorithm that we are proud to share with you!
What we learned
Our accomplishments and our failures provoked an incredible learning experience. We learned how to utilize flask to create a multi-session game with unique session ids. We had never used PIXIjs before, and had never attempted the arduous task of balancing a game. The creation of IS2023 was full of new experiences which we will never forget.
What's next for Infrastructure Simulator 2023
IS2023 deserves to be a fully featured game. As we already mentioned, we would love to integrate Intersystem's ML platform to offer users prediction based off of events that can occur in game. We want to add to this and are planning on also adding a dynamic event system with events like Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and Looting. These events would also have unique effects on things like production rate, demand, and supply rate. Finally, we have to make the GUI more user friendly, as we both are not front-end engineers, or artists. Due to time restraints, we created a very ugly UI.
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