Mod Advent

[w.evans]

Hi Uni,

stumbled upon something I don't quite understand with your account sharing mod (the first advent mod you released which you named UTAdvent02).

Set-up:

- running game with existing stations,
- each station manager fully-funded (accounts range from ~83M to ~720M Cr),
- one architect has some money (19.519.750 Cr) and is in the process of expanding a station,
- the rest of the architects have no money in their accounts.

1. I first told the managers to share their accounts with their respective architects one by one.
2. I then told each manager to share his or her account with the manager with the 720MegaCredit account (let's call her rich dude. and yes, she is Teladi).

Worked as Expected: Rich Dude transferred lots of money into my account, each manager is amply funded and, when asked, they each report having the expected amount of money in their accounts (which is now really just the one account that rich dude is managing).

Did Not Work as Expected: The architects now report having more than 1 trillion credits in their accounts! That is more money than I have plus the money that the managers are sharing with each other!

Are my shady architects running a counterfeiting operation? Should I be worried? Should I report them to the police? (That last might be a good idea, except the police in this case is PMC so they're more likely to chum up to my architects and kick ME out!)

Am running wysiwyg's Enhanced Money Transfer in case that proves relevant.

[UniTrader]

hmm.. the order was wrong (first you should tell your Managers to use a diffrent account, and then tell him that the architect should use this account, too) but that still doesnt explain where this money comes from..
does the Amount vary wildly, but always in a ridicusly high range? thats a sign that a Faction account is used, but that shouldnt happen (it should default to the Player Faction Acc if none is used afaik)

* explaination for the Order:
from what i have found Accounts are Pointers so if you tell someone to use a diffrent persons account this pointer will be changed to the other account (but only for that specific NPC, not for the people also using the same account as this) and the Money of the old own Account is transferred there
from what i have seen so far removing the "master" account (still not sure what makes it diffrent) either by creating a share loop or by creating a new one didnt cause any harm, but possibly this Account/Adress is set free in this case and may be used for something diffrent and i just didnt wait long enough for this to happen when figuring out all this stuff..

the EMT Mod shouldnt be related in any way to this...

[w.evans]

does the Amount vary wildly, but always in a ridicusly high range?

Now that you mention it, yes I seem to remember one account being in the 700+ billion range while the rest were around 1 trillion. Tried to repro, but my game was lagging horribly my second session, probably due to something unrelated that I was playing with. Will try again later.

edit: Thought to mention EMT because the architects' details themselves didn't show accounts (which is as I expected), but using convo to ask to give them money brought up the EMT window which exposed the huge sums the buggers were feathering their nests with.

Faction accounts, eh? Money laundering?

[w.evans]

Whoops! Ahem. Better get my hat off.

Follow-up:

Looks like it's reliably reproducible with the steps I described above. After those steps, the player account had:

929.916.916 Cr

and the architects had:

768.642.943.344
1.234.014.421
755.172.473.364
1.101.047.180.615

I had Mr. Moneybags there (the last on the list above) give me all of his money except for 15 Cr.

Player account then had:

1.101.977.097.516

and the architect's account had:

1.158.079.606.743 !

Didn't try to save, and haven't tried to reverse, but it looks like it might be harmlessly reversible in case it proves dangerous, and might even be safe to let them keep their newfound wealth. Thought you might want to know in case you want to patch out the exploit, though.

edit: ooh, and a request. When telling managers to share their accounts, it pulls up the zone map with no way to zoom the map out to sector/cluster/galaxy. Not a big deal since the player can just go to the zone where the master account is to be managed (if managed that way). But might it be a good idea to either be able to go up the map to sector/cluster/galaxy, OR to pull up the property list instead? Please?

[CommanderTM]

Thanks UniTrader!!

I am keeping my eye on universal account mod... not sure if it is right time to install it since it has some bugs as w.evans pointed out... but i will look forward some patches for it. Feels like it should have been in vanilla game!

[w.evans]

Just to clarify, the mod works fine! Just have to be careful how you set up the accounts.

And the worst that could happen that I've found if you don't is that your people end up with more money than they ought to have.

[CommanderTM]

Just to clarify, the mod works fine! Just have to be careful how you set up the accounts.

And the worst that could happen that I've found if you don't is that your people end up with more money than they ought to have.

Yeah, since i take pride of all of the money i raised, it would kill all those emotions if any budget anywhere would have magic money.

But i may try it out though... As i understand, you cant screw up when telling everyone just to use my account? It may fail if i do some cross budgets or assigning architects to use manager account?

[w.evans]

As i understand, you cant screw up when telling everyone just to use my account? It may fail if i do some cross budgets or assigning architects to use manager account?

Sort of, and yup. I suspect that it'll still result in a problem if you have your architect share your manager's account BEFORE you have the manager use your account.

If I understood correctly, the thing to remember is that when you tell someone to share his/her account with someone else, that person's account is gone. If someone was already sharing that account, it won't have an account to point to, so ends up pointing somewhere else.

Say three managers [A, B, C] and an architect working for C [X].

If you want them all to share A's account:

1) Talk to B and have him share his account with A.
2) Talk to C and have him share his account with A.
3) Talk to C and have X share his account with C. (which will then point to A.)

If you want to set it up in series for some reason:

1) Talk to B and have him share his account with A.
2) Talk to C and have him share his account with B. (which will point to A)
3) Talk to C and have X share his account with C. (which will then also point to A.)

To have them all use your account:

1) Talk to B and have him use your account.
2) Talk to C and have him use your account.
3) Talk to C and have X share his account with C. (which will then point to your account.)

Problem in all instances is when #3 is done before #1 or #2.

[CommanderTM]

Right. Thanks. Now i understand... Ill try it when i have time tonight! Cant wait...

PS: Its already getting bad to manage all accounts with 20 something stations i have, cant imagine what would be like to manage three times more...

I now consider this as absolutely essential mod.


My request
Most tedious task for me now is to hunt down crew for ships.
My request would be new kind of trader - who trades crew. There could be many variants of, for example, engineer. Random skilled (lowest priced), good skilled (random around 3-5 stars), best killed (all 5 stars, highly priced). Maybe even some salvage packages - captain, engineer and defence officer all as a single "product" with 5% of discount.

The trader should obviously take a cut that increases prices of crew significantly, even random starred ones and especially high skilled crew. 5 stars could be a million/person. They could be transported via shuttle/pod.

If the trader mod is too much and hard to do... then i would be very thankful for full crew coming with every ship i buy. It would be best if ship price would reflect added value.

I currently use a mod called something like 5 star commander that puts 5 starred captain to every ship i buy and it works well...

[Terre]

well, here is the one for this Week
based on the first Request by Terre - it enables queueing for the Notifications of Collected Stuff, not more (feedback welcome since i didnt test it extensively yet)

Thanks, I'm testing the current beta which has "Beta 5 Improved event monitor display when picking up multiple containers in space at the same time", all appears to be working, although I'm not sure as to the time period over which the reports are listed, crates picked up over a second or half-second, as if the player picks up a group of two, then one more after a fraction of a second gap, only the singleton is listed.

[jth]

The map is a bit of a nuisance as you have to be in the same zone as the station manager that you want to set as the target

If you change

Code: Select all

<open_conversation_menu menu="MapMenu" param="[0, 0, 'zone', player.primaryship.zone, null, null, 'selectplayerobject', ['cStaff_shareaccount_selected', null, null, null, false, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null, null]]" comment="Share account with this Station"/>

to

Code: Select all

<open_conversation_menu menu="PropertyMenu" param="[0, 0, 'player', 'selectobject', ['cStaff_shareaccount_selected', player.primaryship, null, null, true, null, true, true, null, true, null, null, null, null, null, true]]" comment="Share account with this Station"/>

you can have a list which can be used from anywhere

jth

[mr.WHO]

+1 for CommanderTM idea.

The NPC HR director who could buy & spawn needed NPCs for $ (more expensive than normal recruitment) is badly needed - I hate flying all over the univers like an idiot trying to find the specialist for my stations.