Eve has done it successfully but they do have economist on staff I believe.
The static galaxy
- Thread starter Tikanderoga
- Start date
In ED there are no ships to transport the quantities. The cargo space of the flyable ships are ridiculously small. It needs cargo megaships sup supply worlds. Especially low margin mass commodities - noone would waste Anaconda cargo space for food pills or hydrogen. With the ships available these goods might as well just get struck from the manifests since noone transports them in the game.
Yes, see one of my previous posts.
90% of the goods would be produced my the system, it's the 10% that get shipped by NPCs, to which we can influence. And yes, i do believe that players could have a significant influence on a system's economy.
A system would always produce enough food to sustain itself, but no excess, thus preventing growth. As it is, you could leave a system with 10b people in famine, and 4 weeks later, it would still have 10b people. Wait another 4 weeks, and still 10b people. After 8 weeks of famine you'd expect the numbers to drop, no?
You mean the PMFs?
They don't do sweet all.
It's really just a label swap, that's it.
I know, I don't expect anything like that to be implemented ever. But curious to know what others think.
Got it already. I've had all the X games ever since the first one was released, where SETA wasn't installed in every ship at the time of purchase.
Working out the numbers in the background would be fine and NPC traffic could increase/decrease with x percentage proportional to demand / market fluctuations so that it's visible that things are booming or not, but not overwhelming the servers as you say. I won't say it's trivial at all, but the server currently calculates the orbits of ~400 billion systems so I have a belief that Frontier could handle it.
I would suggest Empyrion fits that description better, if anyone hasn't given it a go, I would recommend taking a look at it.
They are not. Only what has been discovered. And we are just about at 0.1% of the galaxy. so 400m systems. Not to mention: What is there to calculate in a system that no one is in?
If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a noise?
If there is no player in a system, what is there to calculate? Some planets might take 3 years to circle a sun, so what if they don't budge? Who's gonna check if they did or didn't?
Nonsense, why would the server calculate the orbits of bodies noone sees? Why would anyone waste money on that?
Nope. Only what is being instanced with.
The X Series... well, X2 Beyond and up... are pretty good at being an economy simulation. If you flood the market with something it affects the manufacturing in that system. If you buy too much, the prices spike. Once you get to the point where your factory can set prices, you can actually see in real time the amount of traffic your factory gets in relation to others. I like the X series... have for 20 years. But once you make enough to make a factory, the game just hands over massive amounts of money. In X4 I have fleets of trade ships that are escorted and I just sit and run it on high speed compression and watch the credits roll in.
Unfortunately, I cannot see a living breathing economy like that happening in an MMO like this where there is Open, SOLO, Private Play, etc. The economy is set and that's ok with me.
Unfortunately, I cannot see a living breathing economy like that happening in an MMO like this where there is Open, SOLO, Private Play, etc. The economy is set and that's ok with me.
I see what you mean, though I imagine that some calculation is done to keep the orbital paths in their correct positions relative to time when a player enters a system, probably during the frameshift jump? My mind was thinking that it was all updated in real-time after the galaxy was generated but what you say makes more sense from a server resource perspective. I hadn't thought about it till now, though I dare say that market / economy information couldn't be handled in a similar way?
The two are very different.
The positions of planets are calculated according to an extremely simple algorithm which needs one variable - the current time. All of this happens on your computer when you enter the system, and then is updated in the background as you go along. The systems don't really even exist unless you look at them - it's all generated dynamically as you look at it: one of Frontier's great successes with Elite Dangerous is to have fully automated "just in time" generation of systems for an entire galaxy - down to the surface features of planets - in a way that looks like it was all there in advance, and all remains there when no-one's looking. But it's just a very clever illusion.
The market / economy information is handled entirely on Frontier's servers, because the quantity of goods available in a market at any given time depends on what every other player is doing as well. That said, the amount of information involved really isn't that large on a computer scale, and it still only needs calculating if a player docks at that market, so I wouldn't expect that to be a technical barrier to implementation. The existing system already stores market data for hundreds of commodities over hundreds of thousands of markets, and processes in near real-time all the trade transactions on top of that which adjust supply and demand. Changing the algorithms that on a per-station basis determine what happens to the markets with no players around isn't the difficult bit: making the result fun is.
Realistically it would be 0.05% done by commanders in most systems. Only the really small systems maybe effected and they do get affected when the demand from players is high.
Well, minor factions as a whole really (yeah, player named or not makes zero difference in of themselves). Different faction types can change a system somewhat though. Flip a dictatorship to democracy and you open a black market. Flip an non- anarchy independent system to Imperial/ Federation/ Alliance/ anarchy and you gain superpower ships in the shipyard.
Of note is places like Arjung, where because the Li Yong Ri supporters have left an Imperial faction in control, Cutters have a 15% discount there. So player actions can make a difference.
My main point though was trying to counter the argument that players wouldn't/ shouldn't have enough impact to affect an entire economy. If we can affect the political direction of a multi billion population system, then changing it's economy is equally realistic (or unrealistic, depending on your point of view). Hypothetically it does seem like it would add something interesting to the game.
Beats another 'Odyssey is broken' thread anyway.
The answer partially is that it's an MMO. But mostly because it's an MMO in space. Most, if not all, MMO's are on a surface and really are only using 2d coordinates. Adding that 3rd coordinate adds a whole dimension of complexity, literally! But how about comparing it to another single player space simulator? Space Engine is fantastic, looks amazing, and I think it has some ships (not sure on that part). But cant they just add in a few factions to it, lasers, the stuff X4 has, and voila, you have a single player milky way simulator? Lots of folks say to FDev to just do this, or just do that, but how about telling the folks at Space Engine to just add X4 into what they have? Sounds pretty simple. If there's a mod either way to make that happen, that'd be nice.
SETA has never been installed at purchase, you always had to add it manually, either directly at time of ship purchase at the shipyard, or later at an equipment dock. It's even "worse" in X4, since it's not a ship module anymore but a personal device you have to craft from spare loot.
Anyway, long story short, a "down-top" fully-fledged economy model like X4's is fine (and barely at that) for a single player in a limited universe, and totally pie in the sky for a procedural MMO the likes of Elite. Different tools for different trades.
I'm sorry if I'm wrong here, but isn't EVE an MMO with a fully fledged economy that players can influence similar to what the OP suggests? Or perhaps it's more simplistic than it appeared to me when I played over 10 years ago.
What if there's a deaf person there? Or deaf in one ear?
In a backwater frontier system that sees a ship every couple of months or so yeah a player ship might be expected to have some impact, in a core system with ships queing up outside the slot you should be a drop in the ocean.
As such it should only apply to orbital docks or the smaller surface ports if it was implemented and should have no impact on a 10billion pop system.
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Server does not calculate such stuff. You can easily see that when you look how much bandwith Elite uses when you jump to system. System you are in is generated by your computer. Planets, orbits and so on.
Singular, it's just one guy.