Well from my limited knowledge of ini's you'd just be randomizing floats in the commodities ini. But that wouldn't really be desirable as say gold might be worth 1200 and diamonds might be worth 0.0000005 or something like that.

Using Argh's cleaned up market_ships.ini codebase, you could conceivably change this to a random order on the fly. But why?? The you'd have kusari ships in Liberty etc etc.

I can see your point about the ships..Suppose you could alter the price that stations were offering the ships for each week...along with all equipments relating to them.

Lets suppose that the cheapest you can buy a diamond for is 500 and the most you could sell it for is 1500, suppose this could change on a weekly basis Where Diamonds go up in price to 800 one week or 750 the next week or suppose one space station doesnt want diamonds for a week and so on..

I forgot to mention Patrols, rather than having the same patrols by the same factions week in and and week out, perhaps you could have an increase in Pirate patrols in New York for a week but the next week the security forces fight back by stepping up their own patrols and so on.. maybe you could throw in some odd occurances, Nomads attack New York for a week but next week they are fought off...

Well, im sure people can use their imaginations but what i find really interesting is this whole idea of providing a really easy Auto Update system for Freelancer, so that nothing remains the same ever again.





Edited by - Freedom9 on 6/15/2005 12:03:35 PM

Edited by - Freedom9 on 6/15/2005 12:13:07 PM

well it's easily within our grasp,the media-wrapping internet protocols for this already exist in rss 2.0,simply write a FL rss publisher/streamer(or rip some code from opensource ) and you've got your auto update through which new ships,weapons,systems,goods,effects,sounds,rooms,hmm uh NEWS and ah actually anything.of course the new FLMM would need to add a little support for this program but basically what it would need is a mechanism for modding mods to update their XML at the same time the ini's are updating so progress isn't lost,and a serializing system for clients to to give the rss xml a build date

about 'dynamic' economies. 1.there is 'dynamic' and then there is random,don't confuse the two,random is just chance whereas dynamic implies stimulus & response. 2.dynamic economies sound nice but all you really need is a trade-path rotation that will move the most profitable routes and switch commodities on them.besides some predictability would be nice & this is a simple yet effective method of creating the illusion of a dynamically changing economy.of course there's no reason serverops/rss publishers couldn't mix it up a little its just most ppl are too busy to mess with economies

Edited by - Cold_Void on 6/15/2005 4:05:51 PM

you could just modify he base costs in goods.ini, then the prices of all of the same commodity would be affected.
Not quite the same as each base being given the random prices but simpler.

Thanks for sharing that information.

Who knows, somebody might like the idea of a real changing freelancer world half as much as I do and that person might go and make it happen in the most convenient way.. I dont know any effective way other than the ideas above.

In my oppinion, its the number one most significant overall thing that anyone could ever do to freelancer, such a feat should be considered a standard on all servers.

The only other magificent idea that I begged and pleaded for - was the ability to buy wingmen and my god did the community members here come close to pulling it off too, but it wasnt to be to much roadblocks




Edited by - Freedom9 on 6/15/2005 3:13:55 PM

well this can actually be done. But could still mean a bit of work on the mod dev teams side.

Take a mod launcher, like the one for Total War. Add that to a dev team that would want to do this much updating regularly and you now have a pretty good random trade market.

I wish to better show the things that could be done using this idea, it doesnt necessilarily need to be about trade only.

First Section of the application - Buy and Sell Values

Buy Diamonds at Station X
10 Possible values depending on what the application churns out.

500, 600, 700,800,900,1000,1200,1400,1500
The community gets lucky if the stations selling it for 1500 on a particular day/week. However, if they arnt lucky, then:

Diamonds are not sold at all!! and tuff

This should apply for every single commodity in the game along with every single piece of equipment in the game. Of course different price possibilitys for all the different items.

Next section of the application - Patrols

Lets assume that there is normally 3 Rogue patrols in New York... Make it so that, at a click of a button - the random result could be:

3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15 possible patrols
0% chance of an Invasion
10% chance of Nomad Invasion
10% chance of Corsiar Invasion
10% chance of Lane Hacker invasion
---
10% chance that Bretonia attacks New York (Bretonia Patrols in New York)
"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""Rheinland
"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""Kusari and etc
10% chance that Rheinland attacks New York (Rheinland Patrols in New York)
"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""Kusari
"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""New York and etc

etc etc

Third Section of the application - Trade lanes!!!!!

The chance of a trade lane being out of order.. normally theres no chance, suppose there was a random chance of:

10%

See that messes everything up because then you gotta plan a different route to your destination, rather than depending on the same old route that conveniently always works

And so on for the other sections of the application, News, Whos at the bar, etc

In this way..... soooooo much stuff changes in the game each auto-update that it never gets boring, because you never know what to expect

Well, im not gonna rant on about it, but enjoy yourselves if anyones gonna give it a shot.


Edited by - Freedom9 on 6/16/2005 4:58:00 AM

Well, there`s some ideas there on what we could use it for, but how would you implement the changes automatically?
I think it would be easier to add all of the patrols and encounters to the systems but modify the ", 0.2" chances of seeing them to be 0.00 when not available. Would this work for multiplayer? Or would you need to download the new system`s ini file?
I`ve had times when i`ve turned off mods and gone onto a vanilla server for multiplayer and the system i`m flying in hasn`t gone back to the original and its my modded version. It didn`t cause a crash, but i did have to get rid of it with SDK.
Comparing it to TOTAL WAR, it would need to have server admin interaction. Maybe creating say 10 different versions of each system and 10 different market_commod or market_misc files and creating a batch file to copy the files automatically to the right folders.

no no no you've got it all wrong.All the updating except downloading CAN be done by FLMM with just a little modification to
1.updating of XML/inis in the MODS folder while at the same time running the same updates on the ini's with the mod activated.perhaps some sort of new xml script actions log could allow old nodes to be rolled back to allow new script to work with both modified and unmodified values,or the new sectionmodify(or whichever the new contextual command is)would allow flexibility here.2.alternatively maybe flmm could selectively restore the modded files before rerunning their dependent scripts & so whole scripts could be redownloaded(easily,XML is very size efficient) and reran without troubling the user to wait a whole minute for reactivation & copying of unchanged files.. 3.stamp the XML with a unique build number as well as the EXE,or perhaps as an alternative FLMM could update your server passwords as build numbers. now of course there has to be a side app,this is the RSS reader that subscribes to feeds and determines how often to update the feed.its also responsible for passing XML updates to FLMM through commandline arguments.this and the publisher will most likely have to be made or modified from existing code.


Edited by - Cold_Void on 6/16/2005 5:08:22 PM

I know this was posted a long time ago .. but ... I'm also looking to create an auto-update program..

Anyone had any luck?



What I'm looking to have it do is this:

1) Connect to server & check user's files against files on server.
1.a) If files are different, download and overwrite current files.
1.b) Continue checking until all files have been verified.

2) Once complete, the program would open the MOD and allow the player to join the game.



The reason for this is a few things.... If there are ADDITIONS to the game, it'd be MUCH easier to be able to download the updated files and then just join the game instead of having to download a whole new thing..

This would also allow for continuous updating of the MOD, as well as a dynamic economy as new files could be available at any time and this auto-updater would download them.

It would just make things all around easier for working on the MOD and updating it and testing it, and then for the live version, would make it easier for users... they can open it up, verify their files and then play.




Anyone had any luck with this or tried anything? I'm trying to search the forums more to see what else is out there...

such a tool does exist already
check the Crossfire mod

Or look at www.evolvedones.com
Our market-prices are depending fromthe deliveris of the players !

What he is really asking is would anyone allow us to use what they have created and adapt it for use in our mod we are working on.

I know it has been done on a few mods and is being used, so, if we could use what has been done already, this would assist us in not trying to recreate the wheel.

Thanks fadius...

Yes.... I want one that I can play with; one I can edit and change.

I need the SOURCE CODE essentially..

Otherwise, maybe some sample codes I could use... I'm sure I can figure it out; I know VB and C++ ... I just don't use them all the time so I'm quite rusty and am looking for some help