Forays Into The Unknown (EJ Builds A New Game Economy (Still))

[EmperorJon]

What with Atheism seeminly working in its current state I've been attempting a SonOfGod working on business methods as a primary integration of my "All stations have an account" etc. idea.
Well, I can say it's been interesting in the least.

In order to test the functionality of basic scripts already existing, I created a loop which checks a solar power plant for the number of ships it owns buying crystals, and if it has less than 3 it spawns one and sets it to do the standard (not the player) buy for best price crystals command.

This worked fine, until all the ships stopped doing anything at the same time.
I also noted, most interestingly, than when the ship dies (I killed the 3 stopped ones using a script) my loop didn't get enough time to create a new one... because it automatically did! It ordered a Mercury and a Mercury Hauler XL from Argon Prime's shipyard, and a Dolphin in Kingdom End to replace the 3 freighters! Part of me is amazed and happy, whereas the other part of me is confused and annoyed; I'm going to have to change or stop this behaviour if I want to control what it buys, where, and when.

I'd also like any insight into what 3 of the ships would just stop instantly, still running return to homebase according to Additional Information, and still all destinationed to home. But at 0m/s...


EDIT:


The Story So Far
What's done, or planned, is listed here.

All standard factories belong to a company.
All these companies are randomly created at the beginning of the game.
All the factories are at the start of the game assigned to one of these companies.
The companies expand to fill holes in the economy, grow when there's surplus to be used.
The companies hire ships for their stations, both for trade and defence.
All of this, and all trade, comes straight out of the companies account.
If the account goes negative the company is forced to start selling off its assets.
The company might be taken over by another rich company.
The ships and stations might be upgraded over time, either with new equipment or better ships, or in the case of stations an upgrade from M to L for example.
All freetraders and docktraders have an account too. They are now customised to only find trades they know they can afford.
They too spend their money on upgrades and better ships.
All of these upgrades and weapons, for example, have to be bought with real money from an equipment dock.
A central business news system is provided (for a fee...) for the entrepeneurs who wish to be up to date with the news.
An attempt at not using AP commands, to make it compatible with TC. (Will require a few specific changes such as not-not messing with the war sectors)

[EmperorJon]

Ok, I have a set out plan now for how it all works.

[Lord Dakier]

I like the testing for this but how dynamic can this economy be I mean we still need the player to make money. So we need a world where resources are constantly changing, one day worth of gameplay we may be low on e-cells whereas the next ion disruptors. I like the idea as we may see the more expensive products become more demanding which is really how it should be.

[Litcube]

I think what you might be experiencing is GOD automatically respawning homebase ships. I think. It'll do that.

[EmperorJon]

@Litcube Yeah, is there any way to stop it?


In other news (), I got bored of doing things I couldn't do so I made the company name randomiser. I'm getting Goner companies called "Green Peace" and "Red Light". Although putting a racial modifier phrase in for pirates "Totally Legitimate" was so worth it. "Clan's Totally Legitimate Foodstuffs" was one of the companies...

EDIT:

[Litcube]

[EmperorJon]

What, so the only way to stop it is to manually kill off all spawners?

[Jack08]

[EmperorJon]

Heh, I was using home base for the entire purpose of there being the nice vanilla owned ships interface... real shame. I'll see what I can do though...


Also, now I'm getting names like

[Litcube]

"Totally Legitimate Foodstuffs" hahah. That's awesome.


If you still want to see a homebase, you can use my method. I am currently using it to stop all xenon spawn with my Revelation mod. And to stop all god create blockade ships. I have exceptions for laser towers, nav beacons, jump beacons, etc.

If you don't need to "see" the homebase, and just need the logic side of it, use Jack's method.

[EmperorJon]

Well I also need to be able to quickly get a list of all ships which are homebased to a station...

It's just, deleting all the ships which spawn only for them to spawn again gets messy... especially considering it'll be for EVERY station in the universe.

EDIT: Also trying to use the "arrays in arrays"... I'm aware of the 2D array concept, well... ND arrays. I understand them and have used them in other things, therefore I have a suspicion that I'm either misunderstanding the MSCI forum's explanation or there's a mistake (Would anyone else that sub array 3 element 4 should be yellow, not element 5?). Anyway... I tried putting a value into array[0][0] and taking it out of array[0][0] and I get null of course...

[Litcube]

No. Once you remove the homebase for the ship in the run script and then destroy it, it will not respawn.

Re: arrays, you need help in understanding 3 dimensional arrays?

[Jack08]

expanding on my solution, you could use somthing like this:

xtl.lib.sethomebase
Arguments:
Refobj([THIS]): of the ship who is getting the homebase assignment
$HomeBase: The target ship or station to attach as homebase

[Lord Dakier]

[quote="EmperorJonThere should be an even number of each type and race there, but I'm not sure. It was developing too many that sounded similar, but then I had a stroke of genius to put sector names in some of them.[/quote]

Just to pull you power rangers away from the hard work of modding. Why not just get the community to come up with names like what was done with the early stock exchange mod. Be pretty cool if they all messaged you a list of like 10 for several races.

[EmperorJon]

I'll keep all this in mind...

@Litcube

I understand multidimensional arrays, but Mark's description seems to A. only describe how to put things in and out, not actually define them, and B. be slightly wrong, what I said when I linked to it.