Progress

[Disembodied]

Requiring the player to source the commodity would be interesting, but then you probably won't be able to keep the profit predictable...or in some cases, even profitable at all!

I think - as long as it was still possible for a careful Commander to make a decent profit - that this would be a good thing, no? A sure-fire, guaranteed profit on every contract is a bit dull. Plus, the player is being rewarded in two ways: in money, and in reputation. Granted, if you run out of the first you won't have much use for the second, but it should be a balancing act.

My whole reason for changing them in the first place was almost exactly that -- gold/plat/gems sometimes were unreasonably profitable, but most of the other cargos weren't. They were really bad even at max reputation -- carry 100 TC of something at least 40 LY, get paid 100-1000 credits profit. You could lose reputation faster than that.

I think this is an area which could be looked at - how fast your reputation goes up and down, how easy it is to reach the really high-earning contracts, and how easy those high-earners should be once you get them (i.e. there should be more of a balance of risk to reward: perhaps the word gets out about the high-value cargoes the player is hauling these days).

I don't have any objection to the player making profits - even to the player making big profits - but there should be some risk, too: both the risk of losing money/reputation if you choose the wrong contract, and the risk of attracting pirates as you get more valuable ones.

[Switeck]

A sure-fire, guaranteed profit on every contract is a bit dull.

If random commodities, random destinations, and random prices are used, then many contracts will have negative profits and it won't be obvious because you won't have a buy-to-sell price difference to go by.
This can be "solved" by tacking on huge profit bonuses which don't reflect the value of the goods being traded.
Depending on how much Schmuck Bait you care to leave in, not every contract that needs it will have this bonus.

I don't have any objection to the player making profits - even to the player making big profits - but there should be some risk, too: both the risk of losing money/reputation if you choose the wrong contract, and the risk of attracting pirates as you get more valuable ones.

There's a decent risk traveling through/to dangerous systems in its own right without adding additional pirates along the way...the game becomes heavily player-centric universe if pirates are added specifically to attack the player if precious metal contracts are being hauled.

[cim]

There's a decent risk traveling through/to dangerous systems in its own right without adding additional pirates along the way...the game becomes heavily player-centric universe if pirates are added specifically to attack the player if precious metal contracts are being hauled.

Take a high-risk passenger/parcel contract in 1.79 and the game will add extra ships specifically hunting the player, in addition to the ships which are already there to attack NPC couriers. I don't view that as particularly player-centric - you just don't see the assassins after someone else's passengers as much.

Perhaps there should also be a way for a player pirate to discover where trade contracts are going to and from to wait in ambush, and take the opposite side of that mission too.

[Disembodied]

If random commodities, random destinations, and random prices are used, then many contracts will have negative profits and it won't be obvious because you won't have a buy-to-sell price difference to go by.

I wound't suggest using random prices - I'd suggest offering the player a decent, above-market-value selling price for the commodity if they deliver the specified quantity to the destination before the contract expires. Sticking with Furs as an example, this could be in the region of 90-100Cr/T. The player would also get the reward of an increase in their reputation. The player would have to use their own sense, skill, and experience to judge whether a contract was deliverable on time, and if so, what the best route would be to extract the maximum profit. Let's say they have to deliver 100TC of Furs. They could buy up 15TC of those Furs at 88 Cr/T on a Rich Industrial, if they needed to save time: they wouldn't be making very much per T on that specific 15T of Furs, but it might be worth it in order to make the total delivery on time and get the top price for the whole 100. Or they could see if they had time to make an extra jump or two and pick up all their Furs at a cheaper rate.

I don't want to make cargo contracts more difficult: I want to make them more interesting, by giving the player more to think about.

On the issue of Reputation, I'm not sure how it works, so this may be redundant - but if it's decided to make precious cargo contracts more dangerous (and I like Cim's suggestion that there could be a way for the player to learn about NPCs carrying high-value cargo, too: this could be of interest not only to pirate players, but to bounty-hunter players as well, looking to follow a pirate-magnet) then it might be worthwhile making the top Reputations a bit stickier. Like I say, they might be at the moment - but someone who gains a high reputation in anything should remain well-known for longer than someone who becomes reasonably well-known for doing something not terribly impressive. An example: someone who scores a lot of goals for a junior league football team might be well-known locally, for a couple of seasons; someone who scores a lot of goals for a top-flight team will be well-known internationally, and reman so for many years.

[Diziet Sma]

Perhaps there should also be a way for a player pirate to discover where trade contracts are going to and from to wait in ambush, and take the opposite side of that mission too.

I like that idea very much..

I don't want to make cargo contracts more difficult: I want to make them more interesting, by giving the player more to think about.

Agreed.. there's more than one way to make something interesting and challenging, without simply ratcheting up the difficulty.

this could be of interest not only to pirate players, but to bounty-hunter players as well, looking to follow a pirate-magnet

Another excellent idea!

then it might be worthwhile making the top Reputations a bit stickier. Like I say, they might be at the moment - but someone who gains a high reputation in anything should remain well-known for longer than someone who becomes reasonably well-known for doing something not terribly impressive. An example: someone who scores a lot of goals for a junior league football team might be well-known locally, for a couple of seasons; someone who scores a lot of goals for a top-flight team will be well-known internationally, and reman so for many years.

Agreed.. currently at least, a top reputation is too easy to lose. Having a number of gradations of "impressiveness" might be a good way to counter that.

[Disembodied]

Perhaps there should also be a way for a player pirate to discover where trade contracts are going to and from to wait in ambush, and take the opposite side of that mission too.

Perhaps another F4 option: Visit the Bar? There could be some random gossip to be picked up about which ships have picked up what cargo and parcel contracts (and perhaps the player could make some less official deals, too). There would be more offers, and more gossip to overhear, in busy systems with lot of interconnections. The player could have an option to "Buy a Drink", which might let them overhear something interesting; or they could buy "Drinks All Round!", which they could do just to celebrate something anyway (and which would cost more in a busy crossroads system than it would in a dead-end one), but this might also loosen a few more tongues and let the player overhear rather more information.

[pagroove]

Perhaps another F4 option: Visit the Bar? There could be some random gossip to be picked up about which ships have picked up what cargo and parcel contracts (and perhaps the player could make some less official deals, too). There would be more offers, and more gossip to overhear, in busy systems with lot of interconnections. The player could have an option to "Buy a Drink", which might let them overhear something interesting; or they could buy "Drinks All Round!", which they could do just to celebrate something anyway (and which would cost more in a busy crossroads system than it would in a dead-end one), but this might also loosen a few more tongues and let the player overhear rather more information.

That would be very fun and interesting. And when you are going into the bar you hear some nice music (and enjoy a nice background too).

[cim]

You'd need a fair few variations, yes? I could probably come-up with some, for either core or an OXP.

Ideally for each communications role (roughly equivalent to the core 1.77 ship roles) there would be several personalities each of which would have several possible speeches for the various situations (especially the commonly used ones). Some speeches might be shared between personalities or roles, of course.

I'll put together a form on a web page to start collecting them and hopefully the community can put a good range together for use.

[cim]

Something which a few of you have asked for now: flashers and exhaust plumes are now accessible and somewhat editable as JS objects - there are new ship.exhausts and ship.flashers properties to list them.

[Cody]

I'm liking the Interceptors' behaviour, cim - very nice indeed. I just joined a pursuit flight of five Interceptors, as I had a serious grudge to settle with a bunch of bandits.
They had dealt me heavy damage - and they killed Empedocles the cat, the rotten bastards! Space dust, now - all of them!

[CheeseRedux]

Clarification regarding the OXZ, please:

No OXZ within another OXZ, that's easy enough. But will an OXZ function from inside an OXP?

My AddOns folder is organized into several subfolders, something which makes it very easy to turn on or off large swathes of OXPs in one go simply by adding or removing the .oxp suffix on the folders in question. For instance, the galaxy-specific mission-packs have a folder for each galaxy, with only one being active at any given time. I'd very much prefer that this remains possible with the OXzs as well.

[another_commander]

Clarification regarding the OXZ, please:

No OXZ within another OXZ, that's easy enough. But will an OXZ function from inside an OXP?

The answer seems to be yes. This is the relevant part of my Latest.log once I moved the .oxz inside another OXP folder.

Code: Select all

07:58:25.650 [searchPaths.dumpAll]: Unrestricted mode - resource paths:
Resources
    ../AddOns
    ../AddOns/BETA-Neo-DockLights0.10.oxp
    ../AddOns/BGS-A1.9_r110.oxp
    ../AddOns/Cabal_Common_Library1.7.oxp
    ../AddOns/Combat_Arena_1.0.oxp
    ../AddOns/Debug.oxp
    ../AddOns/FighterHud Test.oxp
    ../AddOns/FighterHud Test.oxp/Camera_Drones_1.3.oxz         <===== Here we are
    ../AddOns/griff_dodo_normalmapped_halfsize_tex_v2.01.oxp
    ../AddOns/griff_elite2_griffin1_v1.0.oxp
    ../AddOns/Griff_Shipset_Replace_v1.31.oxp
    ../AddOns/Griff_Shipset_Resources_v1.2.24.oxp
    ../AddOns/New_Cargoes_1.1.0.oxp
    ../AddOns/PlanetFall 1.51 Beta for 1.77.oxp
    ../AddOns/Snoopers2.5.oxp
    ../AddOns/VisualEffectDemo-Rings_0.4.oxp
    ../AddOns/ZygoCinematicSky&Nebulas1.1.6.oxp

[JensAyton]

The answer seems to be yes.

However, this is a bug and there’s no guarantee it will stay this way. (A more sensible approach to the same problem would be to support subfolders in AddOns, which you could then move to another folder to disable them.)

[Norby]

this is a bug and there’s no guarantee it will stay this way.

I use similar subfolders as CheeseRedux to oganize my OXPs, which is especially useful for development (although I use .oxp- extension for turn off ). So I think .oxp subfolders should be allowed henceforward within .oxp folders. If an oxz in another oxz is disabled then it is not a problem to me until oxzs are working in any depth of oxp subfolders (as currently). Else we lost something which is useful so I think this bug can be raised to a feature if the dev team accept it.

[Disembodied]

Thinking about loading times some more ... if this is implemented, it should apply to passenger contracts too. Maybe something like 1 hour per passenger, loading and unloading? Not that it would take a passenger an hour to leave the ship - but there's cleaning up after them, setting up the passenger cabin to the specifications of a new passenger, etc.

For cargo loading times, maybe there could be three (or maybe four) classes of ship: small (9 TC capacity or less); medium (10-40 TC capacity); large (41-200 TC capacity); and very large (200+ TC capacity). For experiment, loading times could be something like:

• Small: 10 minutes per TC (taking 1 hour 40 minutes to fully unload and reload a 5 TC capacity Adder)
• Medium: 4 minutes per TC (taking 4 hours 40 minutes to fully unload and reload a 35 TC capacity Cobra III)
• Large: 2 minutes per TC (taking 7 hours 40 minutes to fully unload and reload a 115 TC capacity Python; and taking 11 hours 40 minutes to fully unload and reload a 175 TC capacity BCC)
• Very large: 1 minute per TC (taking 25 hours to fully unload and reload a 750 TC capacity Anaconda)

For precious metals and gems, times would probably need to be calculated on a per-transaction basis, regardless of the quantity or size of ship: maybe 10 minutes per transaction? That would cover fetching the goods from the safe, fitting them in some secure carry-case, and having them inspected for quality.

What do people think? It's not common, in my experience anyway, for a large ship like a Python or a BCC to sell a full cargo-hold and take on a new full load in one go. Obviously though these sorts of numbers would have a significant effect on any timed missions. Carrying passengers in a Cobra III, for example, would become more difficult, or at least less profitable. If the player had 1 passenger cabin, and wanted to sell and buy 30 TCs of goods in each system they visited in a passenger run, that would add 3 hours (30 TCs x 4 minutes x 2) to each jump - a whole extra day for a trip of 8 jumps. If the player doesn't have time to trade on a passenger trip, they become a lot less profitable; so either the passenger fees would have to increase, or the time limit would have to be extended.

Of course, both options could be possible: there could be passengers paying high fees for quick transit, who expect the player to make them the top priority and not to indulge in cargo hauling on the way; and then there could be passengers in less of a hurry (or with less money), content to pay smaller fees and take a longer time to reach their destinations.