lol if i had that kind of cash i would hire a team and make a game way better than elite and star scam combined.
Ten million would pay for - including non-salary costs - probably around 125 dev-years. That sounds like a lot, but probably only gives you two years to do the whole thing. Still enough to make a really good game provided you don't do something silly like try to make an open world multiplayer space simulator.
...anyway
Looking at your list - firstly, it's not just "engine" stuff ... they'd need to release the code for the engine, the game, the data, the lot. Which, absolutely no chance... but even if they did?:
The chance of a team of network programming specialists showing up who are able to do a better job on this and choose to volunteer to do so for free is exactly zero. Thinking about the "top 8" big open source games (I couldn't actually get to 10 of sufficient complexity)
... two are singleplayer
... one is turn-based multiplayer
... one is split-screen multiplayer only (network multiplayer has been "coming soon" for most of this decade)
... the others have 4-8 player limits and most of them are 'executive control' games where the network sync can be relatively relaxed
-combat logging fix
-prototype legs
-atmo planets
Different teams of programming specialists needed, but still absolutely zero chance they show up to work for free.
Texture, modelling and art specialists primarily rather than programmers ... but in my experience they're actually less likely to work for free than the programmers are. (At least, the ones capable of doing work anywhere near the standard of the current ED assets in the quantities required). There's a reason all of the big open source games have very stylised graphics...
-QoL UI improvemnets(color change)
I suspect if this was easy they'd have done it by now.
-in game EDDB
-Outfitter tester(Coriolis)
These took quite a lot of work to implement out-of-game in a web browsing interface designed for very dense data display. The outfitting ones are pretty fiddly even then.
Making one which works in low-res VR but still gets across that density of information, can be reasonably controlled with a joystick rather than a mouse, etc? Much tougher problem.
(With no code access required, people could already be prototyping suggestions to solve that problem with Paint or similar.)
Nice to have, but hardly a high priority. Might actually be the only one on this list practical for volunteers to add in a reasonable timescale, though.
-PVP/ engineer re balance
Given how many wildly different ideas people have for how this might be achieved, I don't see anything productive coming out of this. Anyway, all the ship and engineering data is already known - people can and do suggest updates to this all the time. The difficulty is in working out if it's a good idea, not in changing a couple of numbers in a weapon data table somewhere.
The issue here is not simulating the economy, but doing so in such a way that it doesn't instantly collapse when players don't "do the right thing" to keep it running. And thinking of ways to simulate the simulation so you can be fairly confident it won't collapse the moment you make the changes live - you only really get one chance...
Can you think of any existing games which simulate a resilient but still interesting economy with 100+ commodities over 50,000+ markets? I can't think of one, but if you know of one I really want to play it!
This is also another case where the community doesn't need
any access to the game code to try to develop this.
1) We have lists of all the stations and their economy types and positions
2) We have lists of all the commodities, their prices, imports, exports, and so on.
3) We have pretty good ideas from observation and experiment of a lot of the existing underlying variables too, but that's not a big deal.
...so there's nothing stopping anyone getting started right now setting up economic simulation rules for all of it, building a simulator which has quantities of fake players moving particular goods between stations according to various assumptions about how players will participate in the economy, and then tweaking the rules until it actually works for all sorts of different player behaviour patterns.
Once they've done that they could add a little interface to let people give orders to their personal simulation agent, to see if that makes a difference to the stability when it's actual players rather than idealised ones.
And once they've done that and got it both reasonably stable and interesting ... well, to be honest at that point the sensible thing to do is to rename all the commodities and trading posts and set it on a planet rather than in space (so there's no interference with FDev's copyright), and sell it as a completely independent game (I'd buy it) ... but if they chose not to do that then they'd have something to at least start a conversation with Frontier.
