Need help with modding market_commodities.ini

[daladim]

Well, I hope this forum has enough traffic to get me the help I need. Seems Freelancer has lost a lot of patronage over the years.

Anyway, I'm working on a mod and trying to rebalance the economy, but it's been years since I tinkered with any modding of this game. What I'm looking for is someone to tell me what the numbers mean after the commodity entries in market_commodities.ini.

They look like this:

MarketGood = commodity_gold, 0, .4, 150, 500, 0, 1.080000

Now, I believe the .4 is rep needed to buy, and the 1.080000 is the price variance per base, but I'm not too sure. And I have no clue at all what the other numbers are.

Is there anyone that can help me identify all these numbers?

Also, I noticed the write up here about making a dynamic economy by adding price_variance = 0.001 to each base.ini file. I tried this and it works quite well, but it's still too basic for me. Is there any way to get this random variance for individual commodities?

Say I want to emulate an unstable value on a commodity that sells in the same base as a commodity with a stable value. How would I do that?

For instance, in real life, the value of gold fluctuates much more than food. This is what I want to emulate. I tried adding price_variance = 0.001 to the commodity entry for military reports in goods.ini, hoping I would see some change when playing, but it did not work.

If this particular issue can't be resolved, it's no big deal, I'll just go with emulating unstable local economies instead of individual values.

But I still need an answer to the first question.

Thanks!

[Gibbon]

Hi & welcome.

This will help explain the values for you

base_nickname : The nickname of the base the items in this section are bought or sold at

commodity_nickname : The nickname of the commodity.
rank Required rank to purchase the item. Only works in single player.

rep Minimum required reputation to purchase the item : For example, if set to 0.2, you would need 0.2 rep minimum with the faction that owns the base to purchase the item. For reference. -0.6 is hostile, 0 is completely neutral, 0.6 is friendly, and -0.9 / 0.9 are the minimum/maximum possible reputations, respectively.

min Unknown : code suggests it might have once been a minimum and maximum desired stock back when the game had a dynamic economy planned.

max Unknown : code suggests it might have once been a minimum and maximum desired stock back when the game had a dynamic economy planned.

nosell 0 = Base sells item, 1 = Base does not sell item.

Price multiplier : 1.08 means that the price is 1.08x the value listed under goods.ini


The price variance option simulates a dynamic economy for single player only. The value is a universal value that's applied to everything, commodities, weapons, ships and equipment. Sadly you can't single out one particular item and give that a different random pricing structure.

On the server i have a dynamic economy based on supply and demand which is obviously another way to achieve things. This only works with lots of players as then things can get really interesting, very quickly due to prices changing dramatically depending how much of any particular item is being traded.

Hope that helps

[daladim]

Thank you very much, this is very helpful. Seems I did remember what the two most important numbers do, but your explanation was very enlightening on the rest of the numbers.

So, the price variance only works in single player? I guess I misunderstood your post explaining it, because I thought I read something about players abusing it if it was set to .1.

Could you explain to me how you created a dynamic economy for your server? Do you just go in and modify prices on occasion to reflect what people are buying and selling? Or do you actually have a way to do it so it works by itself without outside influence? If this is the case, would you be willing to supply me with the files for use in the mod I'm working on?

The mod I'm doing will initially only focus on the economy, due to the amount of experience I have in modding this game. But I would like to eventually expand it to include a major overhaul of the game itself. I currently use the TNG mod, because I love the ships available, and haven't found another mod that I enjoy as much.

Sadly, after many years of not playing the game, I have found that nobody else plays TNG anymore. At least, none of the servers have anybody on them when I check them. I am trying to get a few old friends of mine back into the game, and then set up my own private server so we can have some occasional dog fighting fun. But I really want to make it a more enjoyable experience by adjusting the economy, for one. And then I would like to possibly add more encounters, and more hostile enemy ships. Maybe even cap ship encounters. I think it would kick butt to get some cap ships to attack in Liberty space, or Bretonia...

Anyway, yeah, if you could offer some assistance in this endeavor, it would be greatly appreciated. Seems like you know your way around modding this game.

[Gibbon]

I tried to get the price variance version working in multiplayer without success. I played with that a lot but sadly no joy. In SP however, a different story, works there for sure.

As to multiplayer dynamic economy, i can help you out by explaining how it's done but this won't help you much because..... I use a server operator system called FLAC. It's payware. One of it's features is dynamic economy. There's a custom dll the client has which is controlled by the server software, so no interference from me regarding prices. It's player driven, the server does the math.

As to TNG, most players went over to Discovery, not the greatest mod modwise, as in features etc, but nonetheless a well run mod with a massive community of diehard RP fans who love it to death, hence the player numbers. Plenty of far superior mods out there regarding game content, but that's not always what sells a mod, it's the community it's built up. I mean i have nearly 200 downloads a week of my mod, yet hardly anyone is on the server lol