Dynamic Economy
So. Snoopy's use of the term dynamic economy in that other thread inspired me to revisit an old idea I had for implementing a psudo-dynamic economy.
There are a few ideas I had rolling around several months ago for achieving this, and I know they are all possible, but whether they'd be wanted is a whole other story. I'm just going to post some of them here, and let you guys say what you think about them.
Idea One
Idea one is the simplest. I created a small test case to make sure it works (as I've done with all of them). The idea is to make it so every day (or week, whenever) when the server is restarted the prices will be reloaded, similar to how we already do, with the ore prices, and we specify a system, base, or whatever we want, to have the prices of all it's commodities, and or equipment, multiplied by a certain value. This could be up or down. This solution would be infinitely scalable, so we could do it for every base in the game, should we so desire.
So imagine one week we have a random base, let's go with Planet New London. This base is selling Diplomats at 1000 credits per unit. We have our solution to target the New London system and multiply everything between a value between -0.05 and 0.05. So the price of each commodity could go up or down by 5%. So you could revisit the base a day later and find out that diplomats now cost 1020 credits per, or maybe 950. We could set the two values it picks between to whatever we want and then change that per system, if we want.
Idea Two
This one concerns the idea of dynamic mining. I've been looking into it and I believe it should be possible to create a mining mechanic similar to the one found in Elite Dangerous, and similar games. This would be we use a mining laser and shoot a rock (we'd probably use a NPC like the anomalies) and while we shoot it chunks of the rock start flying off into space, a bit like pre-FLHook mining, if you can remember that far back.
We could make it pick random numbers to drop and add various restrictions, similar to the current system, but add a little more RNG into the mix (if made, this would most likely run concurrent to the current system). Again, just an idea.
Idea Three
By far the most simple, this one would simply select a certain commodity (or commodities) everyday and pick a sellpoint for them a certain distance way using various bits of logic to define where it would be. Things like normal price, distance away, faction reputations and such. The main problem with this one is that, while it is easier to implement, it would be rather difficult to ensure that it would make logical sense that certain bases would start importing/exporting certain things.
It's an idea none the less.
These are all just ideas for now, and I'm more giving them out so people consider the idea and then chip in their own ideas/opinions. If an idea comes along that has support and is implementable, perhaps we can actually get it to be a thing.
