Right now there is an interesting discussion going on at the PK forums concerning the new items(platinum/special gloves/boots) coming wednesday.
Due to the decremented mining and chopping times it is expected that prices for basic resources like wood/stone/ironore will drop dramatically (about 75%).
According to this it might be a good idea not to stockpile these items and sell them as soon as possible.
For those of you (constructors) depending on these items, it may be best to postpone purchases until then to get cheaper prices.

Expected prices for platinum: 20 food vs. 3000 gold

Thus resulting in an average value for:

crafting gloves – 92 food vs. 13300 gold
chopping gloves – 212 food vs. 31300 gold
mining gloves – 72 food vs. 10300 gold
magnetic boots – 55 food vs. 7700 gold
gardener boots – 212 food vs. 31300 gold
explorer boots – 112 food vs. 16300 gold

Further there is a lot of ruby stuff coming:
For a sneak peek look here.

As for the upcoming content update of PK on february 2nd, I included the new resource platinum on the main page although my database has no prices for this yet.

Additionally to this the product chains for the new gloves and boots have been included into category other items.

• mining gloves

• crafting gloves

• chopping gloves

• magnetic boots

• gardener boots

• explorer boots

Due to the missing platinum prices don’t trust those prices for now.

Further there has been some progress in layout for the strategy page, content still is just a fast writeup and not yet translated into english.

FIRST: What you currently get is a small screen emulation like on a real phone device, not a tablet one.
SECOND: You will need a google account to install PK from the android market place.
WARNING: Never log into PK with your account simultaneously on an emulator and a phone/tablet whatever.

HOWTO:
1. Make sure you have the latest JAVA JRE installed.
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html
2. Download the according Windows/MacOS/Linux x86 – Android SDK from:
http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html
3. Download a signed “system.img” version 1.6 which allows you to use the Android Market Place on your emulator from either:
http://www.4shared.com/file/165624746/fc72c3ed/system.html
OR
http://developer.htc.com/google-io-device.html#s3
(You will only need the file system.img for android version 1.6, see inside ZIP archives if necessary.)
4. Go to your desired install directory and unzip the SDK archive there.
5. Start the Android SDK in: tools/android (do this only once, as editing your device destroys the system image)
6. Create your android virtual device (avd):
Name: whatevernameyoulike
Target: Android 1.6 API Level 4
SD-Card: Size 16MB (not really used)
Skin: Built-in WVGA800
Hardware: (leave everything default) – Abstracted LCD density 240
7. Now, copy the system.img you downloaded before to:
“your home directory”/.android/avd/whatevernameyoulike.avd/
8. BEFORE YOU STARTUP !!! Select “wipe user-data” as a startup option.
9. NOW start, this will take some time, BE PATIENT.
10. The emulator will explain a few special keyboard shortcuts, so I do not explain them here.
11. Sign in into your google account, then configure the virtual phone as you like:
You will need location services, but GPS and some other stuff can be turned off to gain performance for the emulation.
12. Click on Market Place and search for “Parallel Kingdom”, download and install it.
13. Launch PK from your Apps, and enter your PK credentials.
REMINDER: LOG INTO YOUR PK-ACCOUNT FROM ONE DEVICE AT A TIME ONLY.
14. Restart the emulator later: tools/emulator -avd whatevernameyoulike
15. Don’t blame me, mail me or anyhow disturb me if it doesn’t work for you. I’m sorry for you.

• Fixed some wrong calculations in the chain browser, also matched the styling to the rest of the page and resized the table layout.
• PK maps added, also some older kingdom maps, which are only accessible to kingdom members.

As I promised there are some more improvements to the site.

• a fast calculator matrix for buying and selling items
• show active users visiting the site in the last 10 minutes
• google maps integration for dragon lair dungeons
• a quick writeup on kingdom defense strategy (to be completed)
• some hints where values come from and when they are updated
• put all external links on one separate page (needs decoration though)

As always there is a lot of space for improvements in design and linking data together.

A few things on my todo list are:

• change the font styling of numbers for the front page price table (yes, annoys me too)
• show active users visiting the site in the last 10 minutes (almost done)
• google maps integration with kingdom map overlay (although this is not so hard to implement as it may sound, I got a licensing issue with this as google wants to have free access to sites using this feature, but who wants google to index our kingdoms territory ?)
• kingdom maps download and kingdom members only content (planned)

PK Trader
hourly generated indicators for most traded items, compared to the last 24 hours

PK Trader Blog
this blog you are reading right now, with latest information about this site

PK Product Chain Browser
a fast profit finder for products,
highlighting the cheapest price in gold and food to buy at a tradepost or produce it by yourself,
based on tradepost data for resource prices

PK Price Chart Overview
price development of selected items in the last month, generated daily

PK Price Chart Analyzer
a much more detailled and powerful chart analyzer for all ever traded items

PK Trader Chat
site internal chat, just in case you feel alone when not in PK

Other external reference sites

• PK Average Prices (PerBlue) – A link to PK’s official average tradepost prices
• PK Maps (Sourceforge) – A link to a collection of PK maps published by the PK Empire
• PKed.de Forum (german) – A link to the german PK Help Forum
• PK Forum (PerBlue) – A link to the official PK Forum

At the moment, I’m running this website at home which means you are eating up my internet bandwidth.

So, I try to keep the number of people having access to this site quite small.

Further, I only allow people access if I can trust them not to give their credentials to others.

Don’t blame me if you cannot access this site someday or sometimes.
Don’t ask me to add your friends, I’ll ask you 😉

I always liked trading simulation in games, and already did something similar for a game from the X-Universe series.
So it was only a matter of time that I come up with a trading advising site for PK.

For me, this is a hobby project only for fun and your PK profit. Nothing more – nothing less.

The whole site runs on a Mac mini 2006, using Apache.

• Content Management is done in Rapidweaver.
• Chart plotting is done by ChartDirector.
• Everything else is scripted in Perl and PHP.

Meanwhile the DB has been migrated from SQLite to MySQL, which is a lot faster and doesn’t suffer from locks during multiple concurrent updates.