Oolite Bulletins

Captain Hesperus wrote:

Griff wrote:

would it be cool to have restrictions placed on cargos, prehaps food & radioactives can't be carried together, or if you have computers you can't sunskim as UV rays would damage them (uh, do UV rays damage computers?).

Not really, (apart from maybe bleaching out the colour of the casings), but random solar flares can cause massive damage to unshielded electronics due to the broad-spectrum EMP effects. Or I could be utterly wrong.

Captain Hesperus

No to both, I'd say.

Radioactive containers should (must) be properly shielded or their storage/handling/transport would be a suicidal matter,.
Also, the solar flares must be properly absorved both by the ships' shielding or they wouldn't be able to sunskim, and by the planets' magnetosphere least the said planets always remained without electronics, even if local could survive the flares.

Captain Hesperus wrote:

Griff wrote:

would it be cool to have restrictions placed on cargos, prehaps food & radioactives can't be carried together, or if you have computers you can't sunskim as UV rays would damage them (uh, do UV rays damage computers?).

Not really, (apart from maybe bleaching out the colour of the casings), but random solar flares can cause massive damage to unshielded electronics due to the broad-spectrum EMP effects. Or I could be utterly wrong.

You say “bleaching”, but more accurate is “curing”. UV can make plastics brittle and, typically, yellow-brown.

Ahruman - with regard to implementing economy changes, what I have in mind is that I could write a library, in C, which should therefore compile okay with the ObjC compiler; and that library would provide an API which simply would be called at the appropriate times, to initialise and run the economy, and to extract economic data.

So for example, there would be a function which initializes the galactic economy, which is called exactly once, when the player enters a galaxy (actually, having said that, it would be better to have all eight galactic economies running in parallel, so that should be a player do a quick set of galactic hyperspaces, he would come back to find things just as they were, rather than the narrative discontinuity of a reset).

There would be a function which on a per planet basis lists available commodities. Right now I'm think in terms of a set of commodity items which are usually available (computers, minerals, etc, although with interesting modifiers such as computers are worth more the greater the tech difference between the place where they're bought and the place they're sold) and a large set of randomly-named items (a la planet names) which may or may not be in demand elsewhere.

The information of prices would be available galactically, so players can check commodity availability and demand at any planet, and could see it displayed on the galatic map.

Profit on non-standard items would be significantly higher than commodity items, but of course the demand for them might go away in the time you take to travel to the destination.

There would be a thread in the library which keeps the economy moving in the background.

But for all of this to happen, there needs to be developer buy-in. I'm happy to write and maintain the economy library but I have zero interest in playing around with ObjC code to get screens and such like going.

If there is adequate buy-in, a spec will need to be thrashed out.

I also have zero interest in playing around with ObjC code to get screens and such like going, because I have no interest in this economy server project.

This isn’t personal, or discriminatory; it’s just that the quantity of stuff I want to do with Oolite grows much faster than the quantity of stuff I actually get done.

I intend that the economy will be moved into scripts, with the ability to override economies for specific planets, planets of a given government, entire galaxies, or all planets. Scripts will never be allowed to connect to servers, if I have anything to do with it, but the use of encapsulation and inheritance means that it will be possible to implement a “script” in Objective-C, within the game, and possibly at some stage via loadable code modules.

Ahruman wrote:

I also have zero interest in playing around with ObjC code to get screens and such like going, because I have no interest in this economy server project.

This isn’t personal, or discriminatory; it’s just that the quantity of stuff I want to do with Oolite grows much faster than the quantity of stuff I actually get done.

It's fine, Ahruman - I don't have an issue with it or take it personally.

It's exactly what I needed to know, because otherwise I'd end up writing code and it'd never get used.