IC rehaul

One of the most makeshift concepts ever in the history of the game, AIC, was originally created to allow the addition of ancient items. There needed to be a way to backdate stuff realistically and equitably, so the promotions, buildings and culture created allowed the item generation for the year when they were received, built or acquired.

It served nicely for that single purpose, but the concept was not very smartly transformed to the current extended google version and the reconstruction era.

We go back to the simplicity with the original idea, but scrap backdating which honestly does not serve a purpose any more.

So, from now on:

1. IC can still be used as a "foreign exchange currency", while more and more stuff is produced domestically as well (part of their production may require IC).

2. All IC is normalized to the current year, so unused IC has an implicit carry cost (cf. stone) - each year passing makes the opportunity cost lost, while the long-term value of 1 IC is not likely to appreciate.

3. IC shop will be opened for easy conversion of IC to the most needed imported items buyable - silver, wine, etc. Buying from this shop creates these new items and consumes the IC. (In Ultima, this will be called "Duty Paid" referring to the fact that prices of silver and wine include the Town import duties.)

4. IC will be generated as a spinoff of CUL (CUL will be received for some NPC's, your own residence and having buildings designated as CUL), as a spinoff of installing (not demolishing) luxury, and for reaching certain levels. The exact formulas will be fixed soon.

5. Backdating of items will be possible at a higher IC cost (tentatively price doubles for each 25 years of backdating), although nothing prior to 1600 may be created.

6. These changes can effortlessly converted to Ultima version, but take effect already as soon as I can make the changes.

Hope you like it!

Hmm... I have learnt to trust my expert butler serje, with 157 years of being the manager of the Royal household.

He has more experience of drinking vodka than anyone in the game (both IRL and ingame). I don't know of the "die instantly" part - it seems that his health as recorded has degraded during the experiments, but that might be also bad luck, or a consequence of him being more than 200 years old, or not having access to wine.

Nevertheless, let this advise be recorded and duly taken heed to. There might be mystical effects when consuming VOH "in moderation" such as 20 or 50 bottles at a time - an amount that nobody else has ever tried, perhaps due to the already rather high price of VOH - or because W1603A is better distributed among characters than VOH (that is concentrated to people that in general have plenty of other stuff to drink as well).

Tavastia went to his shop to adjust the prices and found it was cleared once again, perhaps due to the problems with import. He scoured the remaining bottles for sale and true to serje's word, adjusted the VOH sell price a notch upwards, and buy price 2 notches. If all wine gets sold at these prices, it can be substituted with spirits, he thinks.

1984 posts before this one!

The government debt is not, never, intended to be paid back. It is a product of the incest between banksters and politicians, where banksters add zeroes to the ledgers (which did not cost them anything to add), and the politicians get the money to apparently enlarge their power (the real power is with banksters all the time though, politicians only enlist to be the tools in this process).

Banksters never get the money back and they know it (it did not cost them anything so why stress).

Politicians never pay the money back but the debtor relationship makes them want to do what the banksters say (handy!).

Because the state has grown bigger as product with getting the money, there is a continuous pressure to maintain the "credit standard" (just a measure of slavery of your population, because credit standard means the government's ability to maintain their debt, and the only way to maintain it is to tax the people!).

Holding wealth in the system-approved forms (stock, bond, fund, IRA, bank account) is like standing on the edge of a high wall: the risk of falling seems small, but especially it is not in your control (someone may push you), and there is nothing that you get from such activity! Long-term returns are guaranteed to be less than inflation. Complete surveillance. Equally vulnerable to "liquidity crises".

I will be lecturing about investing to the junior college students in a few weeks. The course is all about investing (and maybe some entrepreneurship). Other guest lecturers are from banks.

I had thought to start the slideshow from a mock-up of a generic bank presentation, with title "diversification" and then 2 classes: stocks and bonds. Then the next slides would zoom this out so that eventually the listeners would realize that what was presented to them as the extent of diversification by the banks, would fit in a tiny corner of mainly-correlated instruments with mainly the same risk profile and total loss profile.

Reminds me of the SSS Plan. Let's consider a reckless investor (hindsight is always 20/20) who did not have any bitcoins before they cost $1,000. Then s/he invested 50% of his total wealth (let's say it is just the absolute maximum that can be lost, not an amount that cannot be lost, which would have been an erroneous investment).

According to the plan, somewhere in between $2k-$10k, the raking should have started. But alas, the price turned down!

The bitcoins are only 20% of the purchase price 

So what to do? The answer is very easy: nothing. After the crash in price, the amount of BTC in the portfolio has gone down to 17%, which should be an amount that can be lost (if 50% was, why is 17% suddenly not? Do you even math?)

With the double-down, that is tricky. I advise against. If you had double-down in your palette, you would have done it multiple times already, dragging your whole net worth down and giving stress by constantly having tied your fortunes to BTC.

But selling is also incorrect. Cutting the long, fat tail of improbable but +EV nice returns for ... nothing?  Why would you do it? Adding +20% to your non-BTC portfolio is not worth it. There is no gain in hedging (a loss instead). The mental strain for keeping the long tails in investments must be overcome! In other areas of life, it is good to clean up. In investment, that is called throwing good EV and hedging away!

If you don't want to think of BTC, don't think about it! Just don't buy nor sell unless you are sure that inaction will lead to forced decision soon, in which case you need to reconsider.

Yes, it is my main project, anything between 50-100 hours a week. It becomes a lot because I seldom take days off.

I am not counting my hours, and only occasionally I am the bottleneck in development so there is not that much stress. I also like the style to be constantly online if I have a project going on, (and then take large breaks between projects).

I am not taking salary (even ingame) for the town admin stuff that I do. I seek to do only the things that are better for me to do. If someone else is capable, they get the job (and ingame payment) instead. Also designing and coordinating the devteam are non-payable currently. I got the initial gold as part of the deal, and if I want to get paid of the full-time work, I can sell gold. King is making money as a character, and this I have tried to invest wisely.

Point is that construction happens in voxels and pixels (1x1 m surface of a voxel).

Voxel types:

A voxel where you have stone, costs 300 stone + 18,000 m.
A voxel full of dirt "pedestal" is 3,000 m.

Stone voxels can be covered by:
- very, most and elaborate facades (outside)
- luxuries (inside - though for ease, they are counted based on sqm)

Dirt voxels can be covered by:
- paving (100 stone + 2,400 m)
- gardens (5,000 m).

When the building editor allows automatic calculation, every voxel can be of one of the several types of materials, and every visible surface inside and outside wildly customizable with for instance:
- mirrors
- paneled inside and outside walls
- paintings in floors and ceilings
- doors in varying majesties
- windows likewise
- different facade materials
- gilded and silvered panels, amber etc
- expensive colors (purple, blue, red)
- roof types (tiled, base metal).

The customization of the surfaces of the voxels (aka pixels) has not been started in a real way yet because:
- Players are so rich they don't have time to customize every pixel.
- Calculating and recording them automatically is not yet there.
- Showing them for the owners and others to see is a pain.

Ah, there is so much to do

The tab /BUILDCALC shows all the current cost formulas.

Luxury currently influences dividends as is shown in the formula in /BLDG "BF". The formula has been changed 4 major times in history, with smaller revisions. It is never advised to build structures that are too much off-the-reality to harvest the formula, they may fall severely in disfavor when a new grading comes. Advisable is to build things that you would actually believe can fetch well in the rent or land market given the state of the town's economy and the location of the unit.

I had a very elaborate set of pool formulas made for the previous development project, and that aimed to imitate the real rental market with having a set of pools with their different grading formula. The player would need to find a pool where a certain building gets the best payout.
- rental/commercial: payouts much better on shopfronts and areas with good centrality
- rental/office: important things are status eg. windows, room height, lux
- rental/apartment: small apartments get better value, park ratio.

This way some bldgs are clearly of one type, which is good because it gives high payout but if there is overproduction of that type, it cannot be flipped to another type easily. Others are versatile, meaning they can easily flip pools and earn the steady income especially if checked occasionally that the pool is the best.

A new formula is coming quite soon so instead of trying to optimize based on the current, estimating based on how it changes is more profitable.

Buildings need to have a roof and an area covered by the roof and walls. Exterior features not fulfilling these are NOT to be added to /BLDG and they will benefit the lot in other ways. They can be had as Items in Building Features.

I heard that even "ownership" is something you don't care when you have the power. A study can be found in the web that ownership of the corporate world is a large network which does not lead to any people.

A very simple example is that I have 2 companies that 100% own each other. Since I founded them, I have selected the management and in the beginning been the management. When I step down from one, the owner (the other company) can appoint the CEO. When enough time passes, it is forgotten who actually owns the companies, they seem to own each other.

The above is illegal in most places. But having 3 companies typically is not. The reality with hundreds of core companies (financials) and myriads of others is very complicated, and it took the computer era before the structure was possible to be mapped.

Nobody "owns" it.

When you have enough power, you have control. When a new board, or a new management is selected, or important decision taken, the collective makes sure that no too radical people are let to positions where they might cause harm.

Almost nothing can cause harm, though. If company A succeeds, or company B - does not matter - they are both in the system. (And the system controlled by people who control the money supply). What kind of products are made, does not matter. Even what policies are taken, seldom matters. What matters is:
- You are not allowed to reject the system's authority, nor disclose its operations.

Punishment includes death. It can be classified to a 2x2 matrix: (ex-members; outsiders) x (rejection; disclosure).
ex-member, disclosure: JFK
outsider, disclosure: David Crowley
ex-member, rejection: Saddam
outsider, rejection: Qaddafi

For the record, I have utterly renounced the system (never been part of it, so "outsider"), because I am a Christian and nobody can serve two masters. I also disclose whatever I happen to hear, so if I start writing movies that might gain millions of audience or become a leader of an independent country, they might have to add me to the Hall of Martyrs.

But as for the facts: check them out. Corporations are cross-owned through a very complex and evolving structure. As long as you can follow the ownership of some company, and if it ends in known humans, it is usually true that those guys own and control it. But if the path does not end (funds, foundations, holding companies, banks &c, hidden registries), chances are that the company is part of the pool owned by nobody, paying no taxes, controlled by TPTB, and used as a tool to keep all the sheep where they belong.

About BI costs


There have been questions regarding what is public service and what is not, regarding lands/buildings database. Public service is something that the admins do upon request and the town pays them. Private BI is something the same guys do so that the requester pays them.


Public service:

Creation of new boroughs so that each chapelry is zoned to be 1 lot.

Changing the owner of a lot if nothing else changes.

Recording Quarry subgame.

Everything that the character Public Works does as a character.

"Pre-1600" buildings were created so that 2 mil fee was levied and paid to the admins from Town but not yet charged from the owners. The rationale was similar as why the gold reshaping fee was not charged when all the gold was reshaped - it would not have added game value, nor changed the relative situation, so (in absence of both fun and fairness) the real-time required to calculate it would have been waste. (Also there was no incentive effect, because the transition just "needed to happen" with the cost having no change on the actions of the people since no action was requested.)



Private BI:

Rezoning ie. making one lot to become several, or the other way round.

Changes to lot (/LOT)

New Building Projects, Repair Projects etc. (/BLDG).


We hope that everyone understands that tax money is not collected so that it could subsidize this or that group, in this case people with much needs to beautify their land (especially as without exception such people have the rights or could get the rights to do it themselves, so there is nothing resembling a few-admin cartel here!). The principle has been in force since the beginning, and will be in Ultima as well, with only the core being a "taxpayer-funded" development, and everything else starting from King's Coinshop is paid by the operator.


The list is not conclusive, and we welcome the discussion whether this is "too strict" or "too lenient". Until now the principle has served us well. Admins work does not become obsolete when Ultima launches, so we need to take care that we have enough motivated admins. I apologize for complaining about the work, which I admittedly sometimes do.

When people did not trust USD (free banking era, late 1800s), it was common to make debts payable in gold.

One of the most shameful acts ever in the history of central banking (not that it in any way lacks shameful acts to compare with) was to retroactively declare such terms void in 1933 (in addition to forbidding making new ones). So people who had lent gold to other people in full accordance with all existing laws, got only about half back.

I am telling this just to present the playing field. Unfair statutes have been made as long as government has existed, and will. The freeman's responsibility is to select the ones he wants to comply with. In this thread far too few have realized the name of the game, so please forgive the old grump.

- They represent less of the total supply than 1.5 yr before
- The time since Satoshi's disappearance is longer, and nothing has happened, giving markets more time to account them
- Bitcoin is older, proving that it is not dependent on Satoshi any more
- Market valuation is not in a bubble anymore - adding more supply suddenly would have turned the tide of events in the boomtime, now hardly
- They represent much less in dollar amount as well.

When I had a coin shop back in the days, a man approached me with an offer to sell 1 kilo gold bars with swastikas on them and (he) offered spot-20% due to the stigma. I laughed at him and said that buy a sledgehammer instead and you get about spot-5% from anyone.

He apparently did since I never heard of the guy anymore. Shame, lost even the 5% by being too much of a smartass 

(5% of a kilobar in the days was $2,000, each.)

Morale of the story: gold is fungible.

Short term bitcoin price movement is very easy to cause. To make a 10% move in exchange rate happen as a flashcrash, only 0.02% of the coins need to be sold (or conversely bought). Satoshi coins' percentage is hundreds of times bigger - so selling some of them could collapse the price totally.

But, on the other hand, the rational response is to keep the previous marketcap [all - satoshi] equal to the new marketcap [all], which would mean that the price suffers less than 10% total when the dust has settled.

If you fear short term things and buy and sell based on rumors of them, on average you lose money. The factual significance of satoshi coins has become much less important in the last 1.5 years.

Bitcoin's exponential progress is strongly violated now already, and lack of fungibility is the only real objective reason behind it. Blocksize debate is an annoyance.

Why no other crypto has surpassed Bitcoin, is of course because they have the same problem! Jumping between leaking ships...

The merchant wondered why the display was empty, but then found 2,500 bottles remaining in the cellar. Half of them are now listed, so please all who are short, make your purchases now (or be prepared to do business with saddam later..).

Thank you for the kind offer! King's cellar of wine and spirits (12,000 bottles) should be enough for about 60 years, if all of it was used to uphold the personal health. We have on occasion bought from Zenon and Tavastia, in addition to own imports.

It has been rumored that there will be a command line command: IMPORT item_id amount, which will create amount new instances of item_id for active_character and deduct the IC cost automatically starting from newest allowed. Perhaps this will be ready when the war ends (or the other way round )

This is a classic deception case. In the time of the founding fathers, revolution and constitution (2 amendment), it was clear to everyone, even the illiterate, that the reason to have guns is to keep the government in check. Then they had some peripheral uses, now that is pretty much the only use of a gun.

Now, everything the government does related to gun ownership, is to confuse people from understanding and sticking to this fact.

I won't hold my breath to ever see a tax-funded ad promoting gun ownership as a means of keeping the government in check, nor disclosing that the real reason for trying to disarm the people is that the government could grow ever more tyrannical with less and less possibility to be contained. Ever. Prove me wrong, servants of the people! 

Good guys should give away their automatic weapons and leave only the government to have them?

....kay 

Revolutionary war heroes - you did not die for nothing, but there is nothing left of what you died for.

Availability of Wine and the Health of the King

Alarming reports have surfaced from our trading partners. War is currently ravaging the trade routes and IC cannot be converted to wine. This should not pose a major difficulty since the kingdom has quite nice stocks, and the disturbance is expected to be temporary. Not yet this.

Another rumor needs to be confirmed. The health of the King is 5,000 points worse than previously announced. This is not a new development, it has not gotten notably worse lately. It is a long time thing, dating back to the very ancient times (before 1400):


We repeat that the revelation should not be thought as to pose any danger to the Throne. But also that we will arrange the succession without undue delay. At present it seems that the health can be maintained at the present state many more years.

The King feels so much the pain of the other 2 weak characters (Kushed and Munny) that he gifts both with 12 bottles of W1603A, the best wine available.

Development News

As you have noticed, I am not bombarding the threads with every day "it is migrating NOW" posts anymore. The reason is that we have a good situation: our google DB is working much better (than in March for instance), and we also have the Ultima platform that can handle all the static data (ie. data that defines the status of the game). In some ways Ultima is more advanced, which is a reason to hasten migration, in others it is still more clumsy, or lacks features such as dynamic UI scripts. Periodical status_change scripts eg. the year_change (which all in all now takes me two full days each week in google DB) is also not ready yet, or even rigorously specified.

Emphasizing how much work especially me and Roopatra have done to make the items, lots and buildings lists correct and the world interesting is not needed. Work well done rewards the worker.

In a word, it is our choice to migrate when the new platform fulfils the goals:
- Enables WOW! 1991 experience to the users
- Lessens admin load.
Our Ultima project is milestoned until the end of December with the original release schedule being in the november-december.

With PJ we have spent time in discussing about the architecture of the game. As it is, it has a quite limited number of objects, with the foremost ones being:
Character (PC and playable Corp, but not NPC)
Lot (a customizable subdivision of chapelry, which in turn is a fixed area inside a borough)
Borough (map grid unit in global map)
Building (an economic pool share generator, technically a link list of resources located on a lot)
Item (everything else with very variable characteristics from NPC to shares of stock, coins and consumables)

We have devised that the way to most quickly open the game up to programmers, even for those with limited skills in particular technologies. With such a limited number of objects to be handled, we are making the command line to be quite handy for instant actions. There have been talks about resident batch files triggered by the changes in global variables as well, making it possible for instance to have a command batch file that is automatically called to update the King's Coinshop prices based on the change in gold_midprice. And especially that this is not done in a hardcode privileged way but a way that enables anyone to do the same, as we already saw in the Google DB.

Then we will build an API as well, which has a somewhat different mode of operation and purposes.

The graphic/music/UI design is a task that consumes a lot of resources, and is for many reasons best to do in a distributed way. Having the rights management in place, this can be completely crowdsourced (sandbox), which has of course been the plan all along.


More commands/routines to be specified:
(Difference of a command and a routine here is that routine may not be called directly from the command line regardless of the permissions, but in practice there is no big difference)

These are all admin-level commands, which can be used as part of the game scripts (signup of new player, year_change), building editor interface, IC conversion to items, etc.

NEWCHAR needed_parameters


NEWBUILDING needed_parameters


NEWITEM needed_parameters
makes a new item (note: "item" may have any number of instances 0...N)

CREATE item_id new_owner amount
adds the amount of instances of item_id to new_owner and increases the number of "made" of item_id.

(Chapelries cannot be created because they are defined as subdivisions of a Borough. Boroughs cannot technically be created since they always exist at their gridpoints. If they are urbanized, ie become a part of CryptoTown or another town, they are added by the dev as a toggle_urban=1 action. Since urban land always belongs to lots, they cannot be created either. Zoning happens in a different graphic editor, it would require a lot of commands to be able to make it cli and nobody would use it anyway.)

DIVIDEND payer_char_id recipient_item_id dividend_item_id amount
Dividend is used to give the owners of recipient_item_id a bonus in the form of amount*dividend_item_id.
Normal use case: DIVIDEND 87 S-RW M 400000   // RWWC gives 400,000 m dividend to its own stock.

note: it is possible that in case of non-monetary dividends, several recipient_item_id is required to get one dividend_item_id, for instance the current script gives new IC based on new CUL as follows (note pseudocode, this is not a valid command - NewCUL is not an item_id):
DIVIDEND New NewCUL IC1606 0.333
therefore the amount does not need to be an integer, and command should floor the amount actually given, down to the nearest integer.


UI features/admin tools:
(there are different "admin" ranks, with some of the current admins dropped out of all of them since the manual entry of stuff is not needed as much as before, then at least BI/sheriff admin for access to land zoning (given to all who have a chapelry), general admin for all kinds of needs and technical admin for overseeing the year_changes etc critical stuff where things might happen despite and because of automatization).


TBD

Just want to quickly add that yeah, while that is true, their power (as is the power of wind and waves even) is also bounded, this time by God.


We should not fear TPTB because even if they kill our body, they cannot kill the soul. God alone has the power to destroy both soul and body in hell forever, and if we propagate this fact enough, there will not be anyone who dares to work for the enemies of God.