A request/suggestion from Butterfly (as seen in the comments):




@Captain X I would really like to see some kind of API to easily create systems for taxing players or creating services that cost and is handled on a programmable block (If not possible on prog. block then at least some way to do it in server config).

Also currently there are too many ways to get money but no way you can loose it unless you loose your ship and have to rebuild it (which arguably doesn't even have to cost if you have stored the resources).

What I'm thinking is some way to set up regular payments for players like insurance or something that would create a constant moneydrain, this would in turn make getting money a thing even when you got tons of each ore and many ships.

Lastly, love the mod! It really adds a new dimension to SE MP :D

EconAPI: already exists - has for a while. Just nobody has built a demo mod yet. I was in the process of it, but got side tracked, and had to scrap it while I worked on another project.

Entropy: Players that dont log on for 3 months get their account purged and their balance transferred to the NPC. The idea of insurance and loans has crossed my mind too - but how can you avoid insurance fraud? How to detect a ship was lost? Should the ship be replaced or a fraction of its value be repaid in cash. Loans are a possibility - but then how can you force repayments if they use the money to build a ship then never use economy again and default. Only solution here is reposession.. (auto transfer of grid ownership) that could get ugly...

Player trade zones dont have price scaling as player tradezones can place a limit on how much to buy, and the zone owner can adjust buy/sell prices when they like. (eg limit buying uranium ingots to 20,000.. once they have 20,000 manually drop the price, and reset the buy limit to 40,000 etc)

New price scaling logic: I certainly want to tweak that more at some point. The trouble I have is too many ways to rig the system if you are a rogue trader, which is why it has floor/ceiling limits on how far a price can drop or rise. (represented by the price set in the pricing table database) the logical fix here is limit volume, or have price as a proportion of transaction size; which adds a lot of complexity for a feature most traders dont use much - and those that do try to exploit it! Currently the scaling system only has access to pricing and stock too, so transaction size would require a lot of redesign; and potentially performance impact.

"universal market" this was how the original version worked, you could buy/sell anywhere out the same market. Side effect: players stopped travelling or interacting with each other. There is a setting to turn this on still. (limited range as i recall) but we have not worked in that part of the code for a while and later changes and assumptions may have altered how it behaves.

Multiple access points - the server admin can add as many NPC market outposts as they like. Each maintain their own stock levels, and share the NPC money balance. This allows "Elite" or "X universe" style trading between outposts to develop as natural over or under supply develops between stations. We also hoped at some point to create procedural "missions" to restock empty outposts.. which of course would attract pirate players...

Player trade zones:
Although we limit to one tradezone per player by default. This is a setting. You can allow more trade zones per player. Player tradezones can also be portable. (ie they can be a mobile trader that roams around buying/selling) want to be a economy tycoon then give players a higher trade zone limit. The limit only applies to /creating/ additional zones too, so a player could be allowed to register some extra zones and the setting turned down again and they still have more than one zone. Handy if you are an admin.. see possible solution point 2 below.

Issues:
1: Players can hide their loot in their trade zone.
2: Automated mobile traders will likely be destroyed

Possible Solutions:
1: Planned: force an active trade zone beacon to "always on" and/or if a tradezone is de-linked (ie beacon destroyed/captured) maybe have it throw out a random selection of the inventory stored in it as a punishment for not protecting your trade beacon better.

2: A server admin could set up Player trade zones on ships patrolling with autopilot, which for example stops if a player is detected nearby (sensor block). This ship using midspace admin helper mod could be set as no - destruct, no - grind. Effectively allowing indestructable "roaming traders" as an alternative to NPC trade zones.

I was wondering if there is way to sell ships from NPCs or to sell the thing is projected inside of a trade zone maybe combined with the Rexxars shipyard.
I'm treating to figure out a issue relating this on my server I'm working on:
I'm trying to gives the player nothing just a few credits when they spawn but the starting curve seems hard. My workaround is to sell them ships but I need to go and place ships I spawn or made manually on the starting trade zone but this counts towards my own PCU limit and if I'm not online i have a new issue.
Other feature that will be good are dynamic PCU so players can extend they limit using economy credits

Sell ship was really meant to be for automating the transfer of ownership when selling ships between players, on our server we had a player building ships for players, the way it transfers should also move the PCU to the buyer on completion of sale in theory which was a side effect of having to fix the remote removal troll exploit we found.

Selling ships from NPC should be in theory possible you would have to put a ship up for sale, then mess with the sales ledger database so that the ownership of the sale is linked to the fake NPC identity instead. Although I cant see any advantage to this, player has to pay the cash regardless of who gets paid for it.

Suggestion: Some integration to list favorable trade routes on an LCD. For example, the screen would say "Buy [thing] at [shop1] and sell at [shop2]" listed by profit margin or gross profit (configurable).

I'm working on an in-game script for the programming block for this feature but it's pretty clunky since it doesn't have access to data outside of in-game LCD screens. (Not to mention I'm uninitiated at C# and have to switch all my Javascript and Lua knowledge to be able to pull this off).

My method involves intershop communication using laser antennas and the handy LCD Network script on the workshop. Basically, I put each shop's entire inventory and stock on a single LCD per shop. My script reads each LCD and uses RegEXP to parse the pricing information from the PublicText. Then I run a method to compare the prices per item and list the favorable trade routes, parsing the information back to a designated LCD. Like I said, clunky and also reliant on other scripts.

Thanks for the great mod!

Well certainly that is an interesting approach, using PB's scan the prices off economy lcds using a script and then display on another lcd optimal trade routes. Good script idea. Good luck :o)

Update: Got it working, only to realize that the stock offerings price scaling system isn't in this mod yet, so only buy or sell prices scale for each product, not both, therefore making it impossible for dynamic favorable trade routes to work. Any suggestions?

the scaling works u need to re edit it to acomodate ur trade network
and u can set manualy some item prices in each place
i add a lot of items dedicated to trade so some stores have diferent prices for the same item

Can we get off storage accounting block or perhaps joint accounts?

faction banks? Want to, but implementation was the fiddly part.

Ah ok. It was a idea requested from my players. Thanks for the response.
Great system too. Thanks for you for the mod!

Request: tz export is amazing. Can we get TZ import?

Exact same formatting is fine. I just want to be able to set lots of prices at once :)

Screaming angel was working on a system to do that, (that was the original reason it was added) basically it allowed you to edit pricing in the LCD text editor. But they have since retired from the project due to real life obligations. We also have an unfinished gui pricelist editor as well they were working on which has stalled as well. If I can get the time and motivation I have been pondering scooping the price data up in my galaxies project experiment - which would give you access to it on a website.. but given my main dev pc died, and i work 6 days, my motivation has been somewhat eroded. We really need some fresh blood on the project i think. Keen added some interesting GUI additions that a motivated coder could probably do interesting things with.

GUI additions? you mean like the terminal actions?

I know C# fairly well and I would love to contribute but I do not know the API... yet :)

Well probably 90% of the code uses standard C# - the other 10% being made up of the code that scans the chat, outputs text to a players screen, or scans for lcds/beacons or creates the player/component data base. If you feel pretty competent on C# check out our githib for economy. We tried to do a lot of code commenting particularly to explain weird ModAPI stuff - since sometimes it is hard to follow.