[phreak]

Originally posted by Flipside
LOL That's the shole problem. An engine like that would need to run along the lines of the X2 engine, checking on the behaviour of thousands of ships at the same time. That's why x2's combat engine is so sucky, it's moving (though somewhat simplistically) loads of ships every 'iteration' of the game.

Never played X2, so i cant say anything here

But yes Phreak, that is the sort of thing I am thinking, races have 'characters' i.e. aggressiveness, defensivness, greed, thrift, it should be possible merely to make general assumptions regarding planetary behaviour using the government type, the character and a bit of randomness. i.e. if a world has a Feudal government that spends most of it's money on Military goods, you will probably get a good price for food. Though, because the money available to 'Trade' is reduced by the military budget they may not be able to buy much (I like the idea of the landing and finding that, even though you'd get more money for some goods, people just don't want to buy them for whatever reason)[/b]

I didn't even think of government types, but I was thinking about the amounts of goods needed to sustain a base/planet.  For example if a space station needs 50 tons of food per unit of time, and not enough is delivered, then people will leave (if possible)/die/or not produce as much goods if they aren't fed as much.  so in turn the space station will raise the price they pay for food so traders will sell food to them.  If there's too much then the space station will pay less due to the overabunance of food in storage.  The price will be dictated by the availability of food in the same system and then how long it takes to ship it in from out of system (if need be).  I don't think doing this in real time for an extremely large universe would be a good idea, unless its a stand alone economy simulator (how fun).  perhaps everytime the player leaves his base that this simulation will run.  I may want to write something up thats pretty detailing in what i was thinking.  its probably not feasable in a real-time game though.

Now, even if you have only 50 systems, with 7-15 planets, and 1 inhabitable planet per system, in an open game like this you have two options, either traders appear at random, which would completely screw the shole supply/emand thing, or you are left with the same problem that X2 has

let me think about this, i haven't played X2 at all (as previously stated)

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by PhReAk

I didn't even think of government types, but I was thinking about the amounts of goods needed to sustain a base/planet.  For example if a space station needs 50 tons of food per unit of time, and not enough is delivered, then people will leave (if possible)/die/or not produce as much goods if they aren't fed as much.  so in turn the space station will raise the price they pay for food so traders will sell food to them.  If there's too much then the space station will pay less due to the overabunance of food in storage.  The price will be dictated by the availability of food in the same system and then how long it takes to ship it in from out of system (if need be).  I don't think doing this in real time for an extremely large universe would be a good idea, unless its a stand alone economy simulator (how fun).  perhaps everytime the player leaves his base that this simulation will run.  I may want to write something up thats pretty detailing in what i was thinking.  its probably not feasable in a real-time game though.
 

You may not even have to dynamically calculate it, if you can develop some form of ruleset, i.e. a very complex if case, which links actions to consequence.  Kind of like the way they create rulebooks for chess/gameplaying AIs.  Obviously, you'd have a more flexible underlying system to pick up cases which aren't caught, i.e. so every eventuality can be handled (but mostly by the fast rule statements)

Obviously, the issue there is specfying a sufficient depth and quantity of cases (presumably in some form of scripting language) to be effective.  But, if you have this fallback economic AI, you could simply use that as a generator for common cases - i.e. run the economy sim for a few weeks and let it create a set of input-output processes you can mine for common scenario cases.

[Flipside]

I think if you made each system stand-alone, with limited contact between each other, you could get away with computing a lot of stuff when you dock or hyperspace?

You'd only be able to access last known prices in other systems from space, though the latest prices would be available in the station. So a lot of workload could be shifted away from Real-time? The only thing that could complicate matters there is ships jumping in/out of system?

Edit : Oh, and the 'X2 problem' I keep referring to is exactly the computational-volume problem you are concerned about, the game tries to keep so many balls in the air at one time (something like 100 systems with 30-50 objects in each system, including traders, pirates, bases and aliens), that much of the game is over-optimised, and still is alas jerky, especially when your own fleet increases in size.

2nd Edit : Also, as far as freindlies/hostiles are concerned, just have a Star Trek system that auto powers up shields etc if a ship locks weapons onto you?

[Nuke]

the friend or foe system works on transponder becons, if one turns their transponder off it can be assumed that ship is hostile (why transmit a signal; if you are a bad guy). transponders are used by air traffic controlers (or space traffic controlers in this case) to identify craft that are requesting landing clearance. so in a game id figure make your transponder player controlable. you can turn it on when youare in a civilised system and off when you are in less repitable systems so as not to make it easyer for hostiles to track you. a ship with its trasponder on will be detected at longer ranges and would brodcast craft info. if its off you need to be closer to detect and wouldnt know what it is. alternativly one could have a sillouette identification system which could identify a craft type based on radar cross-section. it would still have the same rage limitation but would identify non- transponding ships. however it could not determine who is flying the ship. a ship without a transponder could be a military ship on radio silence or a pirate or even a merchant trying to avoid detection in hostile territory so it should issue a warning but not assumed to be hostile. sorta like yellow alert (defense systems come on line and weapons are on stand by). if the ship fires at you you would go to red alert and the ship is marked as hostile.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Flipside
I think if you made each system stand-alone, with limited contact between each other, you could get away with computing a lot of stuff when you dock or hyperspace?

You'd only be able to access last known prices in other systems from space, though the latest prices would be available in the station. So a lot of workload could be shifted away from Real-time? The only thing that could complicate matters there is ships jumping in/out of system?

Edit : Oh, and the 'X2 problem' I keep referring to is exactly the computational-volume problem you are concerned about, the game tries to keep so many balls in the air at one time (something like 100 systems with 30-50 objects in each system, including traders, pirates, bases and aliens), that much of the game is over-optimised, and still is alas jerky, especially when your own fleet increases in size.
 

Yep.  The thing about programming this sort of thing is that it doesn't actually have to make sense - it just has to look like it does.

[Flaser]

I wonder why no one mentioned this one:

Hardwar.

It's not spacesim, but so many things are simply the same the effort of the Hardware hacking society could be used for this idea too.

[Zarax]

Hardwar was pretty good for it's scope, even though it might get very complex (X2-ish) when applied to larger systems...

[kasperl]

Nuke: What is stopping someone from using a false transponder code?

As for the computing load, as Flipside said, you can do a lot in advance when you're not in combat or stuff. Mind, inter-stellar travel might take more time for this reason, but that'd only enhance the realism a bit. You would have to do some on-ship crew interaction to keep the player happy. (Think about having to manage a proper XO, someone who knows what the big red button does in engineering, etc. Kinda like Starfleet academy did, but more worked out.) That could perhaps be done with something not all that processor intensive, so you could use the rest of the power for economics.

[Gloriano]

my favorites are:

Elite (Still best nothing has beaten it yet... okey maybe in graphics.

I-War 1 & I-WAR 2 (both are just awesome)

Hardawar (good game

X2:threat (well i kinda like this one)

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by kasperl
Nuke: What is stopping someone from using a false transponder code?
 

The likelihhod of getting shot to **** by their own side & iff-seeking missiles, I'd guess.

[kasperl]

I was talking about pirates and things like that. Or a warship disquising itsself as a trader, putting on some odd IFF, and wait for pirates to show up. (Honorverse, anyone?)

[Flipside]

Hmmm... Well, the transponder idea opens lots of possibilities, and you can still have a 'Yellow alert' system in case people are playing silly buggers

I suppose one of the more annoying things is that, if you are a trader, for example, you want your trading system to show things like 'price bought for' or possibly even 'closest known best sale/purchase for items'. X2 has the ability for bolt ons to do this, but they are awkward to use.

It amazes me how unhelpful most trade computers are for highly advanced technology.

[NGTM-1R]

EV: Nova's explanation is that it detects when a ship has gone weapons-hot and/or is painting you with fire-control radar. But you need a special sensor package for that; it don't come standard.
Needless to say, that's one of the first things to grab...

[Nuke]

Originally posted by kasperl
Nuke: What is stopping someone from using a false transponder code?

nothing. actually it could make some awesome gameplay. you can say buy transponder codes from pirates to say pose as a military warship to say, sneak a load of drugs through tightkly controlled space. im not a big fan of the infoulable radar systems in games, i want systems that act like real ones, ya know they mislable similar craft, show ghost readings,  take things like radar crossection, line of sight, energy output, into account. a craft witout a trasponder is much harder to detect than one trasmitting codes and using radio equipment. im sure even the use of energy weapons would light up a target. i like the mechwarrior targeting systems. use enough heat sinks and you could sneak up behind anyone.

[phreak]

then there's the fact that if you're using a stolen iff, a simple scan and it shows your ship's shiny (or not so shiny) transponder belongs to a military fighter that was lost when it hit an asteroid.

[Flipside]

Depends how determined they are to find things out about you. If you are carrying dodgy goods, expect the full ID thing. If you aren't, it won't happen every time your ship gets scanned, a simple clean traders license and a clean cargo would probably be enough for all but those real pain in the ass cops