Posts: 6,068
Threads: 304
Joined: Aug 2007
Staff roles: Story Dev Economy Dev
This is unfortunate but intentional, for the time being.
Where all commodities are now valuable, testing revealed that there were were some serious problems with cargo piracy creating completely busted profits.
We definitely want to restore NPC cargo and reimplement PvE cargo piracy, but its going to take a little while to get the balance right.
Posts: 3,116
Threads: 97
Joined: May 2012
Staff roles: Balance Dev
Yep. This is a temporary band-aid until we can make sure there's no NPCs spawning next to Fort Carthage with Hull Panels worth 89 credits (or, that if they do, they're hard enough to take on that it's not an issue).
What would be easier: To customize and restrict a commodity on a spawn point in a system - e.g. Fort Carthage OR
- Increase armor / dps/ hp (but players can group up and still farm) and run-time (e.g. they start cruising to 7K distance on spawn) OR
- Implement eliminatory script that denies spawn on "commodity = hull.panels" where "price = max"? This can be adapted to all spawn points, to deny max price commodity spawn there, and can be applied or modified to cover neighboring sectors.
This is just a suggestion. Thank you and I apologize for any inconvenience.
(10-13-2023, 01:16 PM)R.P.Curator Wrote: customize and restrict a commodity on a spawn point in a system - e.g. Fort Carthage
As far as I'm aware, this isn't possible to make in convenient way: yes you can make a separate loadout for an NPC ship, write it to specific ini and etc but then you'd have to make too many extra loadouts for such, rather than using commodities_per_faction.ini which specifies in general what NPC faction would carry. So its a convenient way (commodities_per_faction) or to bother with reworking all NPCs' loot in the game which require a much more work than we can make as we now focused on fixing bugs.
Your proposal would work if we had access to Freelancer's source code but we don't and have to work with its original mechanics, barely extended by FLHook and Limit Breakers. Thus - have patience, eventually everything will be done.