21 Oct, 2013, Kelvin wrote in the 21st comment:
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I'm drawing pretty heavily from FTL and EVE Online. Neither of which gives you much of a reason to ever take your shields down. I don't think you even can in EVE.
22 Oct, 2013, quixadhal wrote in the 22nd comment:
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Real players hull tank in EVE.
22 Oct, 2013, Chris Bailey wrote in the 23rd comment:
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I thought having to manage energy between weapons, speed, and shields would be an interesting dynamic. I haven't really played any space themed games with ship combat though, so I don't know.
22 Oct, 2013, Kelvin wrote in the 24th comment:
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Chris, try out Faster Than Light. It's super cheap, and worth every penny. You'll get all kinds of ideas.
22 Oct, 2013, Chris Bailey wrote in the 25th comment:
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Ok I'll go grab it.
22 Oct, 2013, quixadhal wrote in the 26th comment:
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I also suggest X-Tension (or X3: Albion Prelude, if you have beefier hardware). First person "4X" games in space, with you piloting a single ship (at a time). Very reminiscent of the classic "Elite". You can buy it for $5 on Steam.

If you want to see what X-Tension looks like graphically, I posted the credits screen (fraps capture) back in 2008. I think the game came out in 2002? So it runs on very old hardware.

BoKaRVs8K..."> BoKaRVs8K..." type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350">
22 Oct, 2013, quixadhal wrote in the 27th comment:
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If you DO happen to pick up X3, here's a nice guide on how to start out as a merchant, rather than the typical combat missions. It'll also show you the purdy graphics. You should probably watch in at least 720p, if not 1080p, so you can read the text.

6jcFIMc2x..."> 6jcFIMc2x..." type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350">
22 Oct, 2013, Chris Bailey wrote in the 28th comment:
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I'll try that out also. Currently, I'm downloading EVE online. Quix, would you like to give me a referral code or something?
22 Oct, 2013, Dean wrote in the 29th comment:
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quixadhal said:
Real players hull tank in EVE.


Real players use covetors as their primary combat vessel in EVE.
23 Oct, 2013, quixadhal wrote in the 30th comment:
Votes: 0
Heh, I haven't played EVE in a few years. At my peak though, I had two accounts (ONLY game I ever "multiboxed" in) so I could fly a hulk in one, and an orca in the other (giant mining ship + giant mining support/cargo ship).

And yes, one of my few deaths was in a covetor…. which I *thought* I had left AFK mining veldspar in 1.0 space (legitimate tactic, a single small mining laser takes more than an hour to deplete a single asteroid). Unfortunately, it was actually 0.8 space, so eventually a rat spawned near enough to notice me and BOOM. :)

Fun game. :)

I would suggest making 4 throw-away accounts to have a 14-day trial for each of the four major races. It doesn't matter much, other than where you start out and which factions will like you. Caldari ships use shields, and concentrate on missiles and rail guns. Amarr ships use armor, and lasers. Minmatar ships focus on hull strength, and use artillary. Gallente ships are armor based, and use drones. You can learn to fly any ship, or use any weapon, but whom you start with will give you a leg up on those techs.

Also, once you start doing missions for one faction, it will inevitably have you doing things against their foes… Gallente/Minmatar are one side, Caldari/Amarr are the other.
23 Oct, 2013, Chris Bailey wrote in the 31st comment:
Votes: 0
I've been playing a variety of games that involve some semblance of supply and demand, and simple economies. I've noticed a lot of similarities but a lot of minor differences as well. Two of the major differences that leave me unsure of how to proceed are as follows: Some games (I'd say the more successful ones) appear to have static economies. Certain locations seem to always have high/low prices for certain products regardless of their current supply. If it says a location produces an abundance of X then the price is always low even when they are sold out. I had imagined something more dynamic (Buy 100 units of X and X becomes more expensive at that location) that is visibly impacted by player action, is there a good reason why this isn't usually done? Secondly, most of these games don't clearly display your net gain/loss when performing a transaction at a specific value. Sure, it's easy to calculate it if you bother to do the math but I would like it to be clearly displayed. If I buy 10 units of X at 1.27 credits each, 30 units at 1.55 credits, and 70 at 1.76 credits then I want to know that I spent an average 1.66 credits per unit and selling them at 1.78 will yield a return of .12 credits per unit. Obviously that is a trivial addition to a game so I have to assume there is a reason it wasn't included. Any ideas?
23 Oct, 2013, quixadhal wrote in the 32nd comment:
Votes: 0
Heh, look in the EVE-Online market system. Note that they hired a full time economist to help them manage it. :)

If I were going to seriously make a game where trading is a non-trivial part of the gaming experience, I'd follow their lead. There would be regional markets, each of which had their own distinct economy. Ideally it would be player driven, but you can also make NPC's that sell and buy items, just do it smart. Don't just make stuff appear out of thin air.

If region A has lots of pine forests, you'd expect pine lumber, and goods made from pine lumber, to be cheap and plentiful. Have NPC's that harvest the trees and process them into materials, and then sell those on the market. Have other NPC's that buy the planks and turn them into weapons, shields, furniture, whatever, and sell THOSE items on the market. Have more NPC's that buy those items for consumption, or perhaps to build larger items.

Now, make anything but the most basic items require other components that are NOT so plentiful in this region. Maybe to make a pine mage staff, you need iron shoes and a ruby. Iron is scarce in region A, but there are iron mines in region B, not too far away. Now make NPC traders that will take pine lumber to region B for sale, and buy iron ingots to bring back to region A and put on the market (at a substantial markup). Maybe rubies are very rare, and only come from region F, a long ways away.

As you get players, they'll figure out that while they can make some money by harvesting pine locally and undercutting the NPC's (who should react to that)… the real money comes from cross-region trading. Either they harvest and journey outward to sell… or they bring back exotic goods to sell.

As for calculating profit… that's why EVE doesn't show you any such thing. The market prices are in constant flux, and they can't know what you paid for any given item. Maybe you bought 30 of item X here, at $40/each. Maybe you bought them for $20/each elsewhere. Maybe you crafted them yourself. Maybe you killed another player and got them as loot. All they can say for sure is, there are currently 3 buy orders open for item X, and the highest price one will take 20 of them for $33. The next one down will take 50 of them for $30. So, if you put yours on the market and want to sell them RIGHT NOW, you will get ($33 * 20) + ($30 * 10).

The cool thing about EVE's market though, is YOU set the price. If you want $50 per item, you put them up for sale and set the minimum price to $50. They will sit there until somebody is willing to buy them at that price, or until you decide to lower your price (or take them off the market).
23 Oct, 2013, Chris Bailey wrote in the 33rd comment:
Votes: 0
The system that EVE has put together sounds very involved and I'm sure it works well with their playerbase. I'm intentionally designing for 10-20 players (I don't expect to see that many, let alone more lol) and I don't know how well that would work there. I have no plan to allow trading between players (although you can loot their cargo!) or any sort of crafting. Region specific goods are a definite yes as well as NPC traders. I haven't put any NPCs in place but my idea is to give them a variable amount of money based off of their *level* along with fairly generic trading AI so that they are commonly seen along trade routes. The quest system will generate npcs that only the requesting player can interact with and they might have cargo that isn't manually purchased or collected. I want the trading and harvesting system to allow a fun aside from combat but I don't plan for it to be a focus unless player demand calls for it.
23 Oct, 2013, Nathan wrote in the 34th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
I might download that Nathan, just because it's been years since I've even thought about MUSH code. It would be kindof fun to see how that side of the MUD universe has evolved.

Idealiad said:
Don't bother, it hasn't ;D…

Seriously though and somewhat OT, a space-themed mush recently released their Pennmush/Ruby hybrid codebase. It's quite interesting and they had a simple but well-designed IMO space system.

http://tkrajcar.github.io/wcnh/


Actually, it looks like it's done in C. I'm not sure how they integrated it into the game. I thought the space bit was pretty cool (I saw it on a development mush they were running at the time), especially flying between planets and buying/selling goods to make money, but there's probably some level of nuisance involved with MUSHes. Really I was just pointing it out as something that the code for might be worth looking at to help with thinking/conceptualizing. After all, a working system, even a primitive one, is more useful than one in your head that you have to theorize about the inner workings.
24 Oct, 2013, Chris Bailey wrote in the 35th comment:
Votes: 0
Very useful, Nathan. It seems very similar to what I'm working on and I appreciate the resource. =)
29 Oct, 2013, Nathan wrote in the 36th comment:
Votes: 0
Chris Bailey said:
My system typically requires shields to be down (or at low power) outside of combat. Leaving them up while traveling puts a lot of drain on the rechargeable energy system.

Kelvin said:
I'm drawing pretty heavily from FTL and EVE Online. Neither of which gives you much of a reason to ever take your shields down. I don't think you even can in EVE.


I'm pretty sure you can take down your shields in EVE (or at least/disable remove), but there's always the hull and whatever plating you might have. EVE does have a sort recharge style system in the sense of the max stuff the capacitor can keep going without draining out.

I think you'd want it setup so that someone can hammer their way through your shield/take it out with enough firepower. Also, as interesting as it would be to watch dumb players forget to raise shields, it seems more reasonable in a mud to assume that you will automatically raise shields either once you notice the enemy or after being shot with the shields down unless you don't have enough power for them. If you want to avoid everyone shield tanking (i.e. they just have huge shields and can't be hit) just make it so they can't fire with them up or the ships are designed so that you have to divert power from shields to fire weapons. Maybe when you fire your lasers, your shields are at 65% of full capacity thus making it easier to take them out. Probably be good if, like FTL, you let people target specific parts of the ship. I.e. I can try and blow your shields away and then make an attempt to take out your shield generator or whatever allows you to have a shield.

Making a space/ship system that's a tenth or a hundredth as complex as EVE is probably still a ton of work.

If you have hyperspace/warp gate travel then you don't need to shield while in transit, just on either end. Only people travelling with constant shielding would be paranoid or if their ship could only go at slower speeds.
29 Oct, 2013, Kelvin wrote in the 37th comment:
Votes: 0
Nathan said:
I'm pretty sure you can take down your shields in EVE (or at least/disable remove), but there's always the hull and whatever plating you might have.

Nope, you can only remove shield-related modules (not the shield). The shield itself is something built into the ship, and it can't be disabled. It's always on. The most you can do is damage it down to 0hp, but it'll start recharging almost immediately.
30 Oct, 2013, Nathan wrote in the 38th comment:
Votes: 0
Chris Bailey said:
I've been playing a variety of games that involve some semblance of supply and demand, and simple economies. I've noticed a lot of similarities but a lot of minor differences as well. Two of the major differences that leave me unsure of how to proceed are as follows: Some games (I'd say the more successful ones) appear to have static economies. Certain locations seem to always have high/low prices for certain products regardless of their current supply. If it says a location produces an abundance of X then the price is always low even when they are sold out. I had imagined something more dynamic (Buy 100 units of X and X becomes more expensive at that location) that is visibly impacted by player action, is there a good reason why this isn't usually done? Secondly, most of these games don't clearly display your net gain/loss when performing a transaction at a specific value. Sure, it's easy to calculate it if you bother to do the math but I would like it to be clearly displayed. If I buy 10 units of X at 1.27 credits each, 30 units at 1.55 credits, and 70 at 1.76 credits then I want to know that I spent an average 1.66 credits per unit and selling them at 1.78 will yield a return of .12 credits per unit. Obviously that is a trivial addition to a game so I have to assume there is a reason it wasn't included. Any ideas?


Hmm. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense for the price to actually fluctuate based on supply. That at least is realistic with minimal overhead since it says nothing about whether more of the resource is difficult to obtain. On the other hand, an implied abundant supply means they are certain to have more later. In the real world, I might choose not to up my prices because even if I sell out, there'll be a shipment next week. I don't think they should show you net gain/loss, since that makes it a little too easy. It could show the price/unit for the last X transactions, leaving you to aggregrate your own data in the long term? Maybe you could have some kind of in-game purchasable item/device that will do that for you? WoW and other MMOs prove that players are more than willing to get their own data though, why make it so easy?

Kelvin said:
Nathan said:
I'm pretty sure you can take down your shields in EVE (or at least/disable remove), but there's always the hull and whatever plating you might have.

Nope, you can only remove shield-related modules (not the shield). The shield itself is something built into the ship, and it can't be disabled. It's always on. The most you can do is damage it down to 0hp, but it'll start recharging almost immediately.


Hmm… I see. I guess I just associated the shield-related modules with the shield itself. Granted that I only played it for a month and I was using hull plating too… That and when you're just mining in high-sec because you haven't reached the point of comfort with craziness you don't need shields really.
30 Oct, 2013, quixadhal wrote in the 39th comment:
Votes: 0
Nathan said:
Hmm… I see. I guess I just associated the shield-related modules with the shield itself. Granted that I only played it for a month and I was using hull plating too… That and when you're just mining in high-sec because you haven't reached the point of comfort with craziness you don't need shields really.


Except during Hulkageddon….. :(
30 Oct, 2013, Kelvin wrote in the 40th comment:
Votes: 0
Only a problem if you're a care bear :)
20.0/40