Coin Wars

[markm]

With so many newfangled blockchain-based currencies around lately the Coin Wars are now underway at Villages Online

Apparently the Holy Books of some of these Villagers tell them to store up their riches "in heaven", so the Priests of the Virtual Coins are capitalising on that as a springboard for their Sermons In Praise Of Virtual Coins.

Tired of raiders attacking your village to steal your resources? Virtual Coins are for you!

Instead of storing stuff in warehouses, granaries and crannies, consider selling it to the Priests for Virtual Coins. This way you virtually "store up your riches" in Digital Heaven to redeem later from the same Priesthoods.

With resources being bought and sold for all manner of Virtual Coins, which Coins will prove to be the winner?

Play Villages Online to find out! Champion your favourite Virtual Coin, picking and choosing who to buy and sell resources from, who to give the best prices to, whose villages to raid to punish them for undercutting your prices. Business and Warfare go hand in hand in Villages Online ... will only the strongest Coins survive or will some happy free market trading all coins with all comers emerge? You can be instrumental in determining the outcome, sign up now at  Villages Online and bring the virtues of your coin of choice to the masses!

Note 1:  Villages Online is a development project, you can help steer the path of development as well as the course of history. Currently only three Tribes are implemented, maybe Battle for Wesnoth or some such source has resources we can use to add additional Tribes? Currently all Villages have the same mix of resource fields, maybe it would be nice to create different mixes for villages located on different types of terrain? Maybe Devana has some stuff we can use? Etc...

Note 2: I currently have it pointing at the DevcoinTalk forum since as a development project it seems appropriate that Devcoins be involved. But that forum seems to be un-moderated and full of spam so not sure how much use it can actually be...

-MarkM-

[FreeMoney]

Giving it a try, looks pretty cool. Generally though I prefer games where rules are enforced by the logic of the code and I don't have to do a lot of work to ensure I'm not f'ing things up. It's like a chess program that lets you move the rook diagonally and uses a moderator to 'punish' you for it.

For example:

In any 24 hour period, regular one-sided transfers with another player may only equal one hour of resource production, including marketplace transactions. One hour of resource production is the total of all resources produced in all villages without subtracting the upkeep for troops.
The abovementioned amount of resources must be split in cases of multiple regular one-sided transfers with more than one player. The size of the affected accounts does not matter.
Furthermore the player who sent as well as the player which received too many resources may be punished.

If your troops are reinforcing another player’s village which is under attack, you are allowed to send enough crop to that player to feed your troops.

I have no idea if this will actually be a problem, it's just not a great rule setup imo.

[markm]

It is total bullsheet is what it is. I think they might even have stolen their rules directly from Travian, of which they were making an open source clone. I have not expunged all the crap from the rules yet, I too find actual functionality of the code more important than the verbiage/eye-candy and mostly delegated all that verbiage to the eye-candy category other than when grep Travian brought it to my attention in the course of moving from a "look at me I am a clone of Travian" approach toward a "generic villages game" approach.

Suffice to say I am putting all the working open source games I can find online precisely in order to have games that don't have those stupid "trading of digital collectables is not allowed" rules. Yes, game stuff can be collectable and trade-able, that is what collectable-card games for kids have been all about since way back when. It is silly to let kids trade collectables then go all ape-shit over adults doing the same.

I am particularly fond of blockchain-base digital collectables...

So yeah, those rules either have to be re-written or, and this thought as well as general priorities led to me not re-writing the whole thing on the spot when I came across it, we could figure heck let outsiders think all that crap so they don't come barging in purely to complain that our rules do not include all that crap.

(Maybe even pseudocode for rules display along the lines of "if not logged on, then yada yadda blah blah bullshit crap all the usual junk else hey by the way, we are here to have fun with our digital collectables, wanna buy some blockchain based collectables or hire players as mercenaries by bribing them with your digital collectables? Meanwhile here is all the usual crap the people on the outside see, obviously we aren't particularly concerned about the blah blah fiat money blah blah government money blah blah crap. Oh and by the way if you wanna run robots or browser plugins how much you willing to pay for the privilege in what kinda coin?")

tl;dr Use some common sense fergoshsakes!

-MarkM-

[FreeMoney]

ohh, you just acquired this game? I assumed you'd had it and were just adding some kind of (bit)coin functionality. So you are planning on allowing all the 'one-way' transfers people want, most of them I assume would be sales for bitcoin? are you even going to add the "sell to so-and-so for X bitcoin" functionality explicitly into the interface?

[FreeMoney]

So yeah, those rules either have to be re-written or, and this thought as well as general priorities led to me not re-writing the whole thing on the spot when I came across it, we could figure heck let outsiders think all that crap so they don't come barging in purely to complain that our rules do not include all that crap.

(Maybe even pseudocode for rules display along the lines of "if not logged on, then yada yadda blah blah bullshit crap all the usual junk else hey by the way, we are here to have fun with our digital collectables, wanna buy some blockchain based collectables or hire players as mercenaries by bribing them with your digital collectables? Meanwhile here is all the usual crap the people on the outside see, obviously we aren't particularly concerned about the blah blah fiat money blah blah government money blah blah crap. Oh and by the way if you wanna run robots or browser plugins how much you willing to pay for the privilege in what kinda coin?")

tl;dr Use some common sense fergoshsakes!

-MarkM-

I wouldn't mislead outsiders as to what they are getting into. Just embrace what you (we) think is a better way and attract people that agree.

What I think would be most fun would be allowing everything to be bought and sold for bitcoin credits on your account and not worrying if people give stuff away or trade for other currency out of the games system. I would expect a lot of people buying things with the expectation that they could use the things to make more stuff faster and resell for profit, essentially a skill game played for money, with a sort of built in freeroll for everyone.

[markm]

I wouldn't mislead outsiders as to what they are getting into. Just embrace what you (we) think is a better way and attract people that agree.

What I think would be most fun would be allowing everything to be bought and sold for bitcoin credits on your account and not worrying if people give stuff away or trade for other currency out of the games system. I would expect a lot of people buying things with the expectation that they could use the things to make more stuff faster and resell for profit, essentially a skill game played for money, with a sort of built in freeroll for everyone.

Yeah misleading has its drawbacks. It shouldn't be necessary unless the games come to the attention of some busy-body who doesn't even play but doesn't think games with whatever terms we purport to have should exist, or should not be reachable from their part of the internet (like they never heard of Netnanny or something, sheesh...)

Part of this worry about busybodies is the idea of maybe not using bitcoins directly as cashable-out officially. Oh sure there might be some places out on the net where one could trade Ixcoins or I0coins or Solidcoins or Devcoins or Groupcoins etc etc etc for cash, but I was kindof thinking that maybe we could even enhance the perception of Bitcoin by treating Bitcoin like it is "real money", so kind of put it aside somewhat from all the "game money" varieties.

So basically people would be playing for all kinds of "chips" or "tokens" aka "coins", and what they do with them between themselves outside of the game isn't something the game can do much about, other of course than simply not letting people bring their toys into the playground in the first place. Which seems like a somewhat silly idea.

Basically the more kinds of "things" the deeper one can dive away from all the bullsheet, we are trying to play games here, and if we end up liking and enjoying edible toys and toys we can live in and toys we can drive and toys we can fly or cruise around the world in fine and dandy but toys are just not as much fun when a bunch of playground bullies come along and start messing with our enjoyment of our play, games, and toys.

I originally happened upon Bitcoin when I went searching for source code for markets, in order to have all the stock markets on all the Freeciv worlds of the Galactic Milieu be useable as actual playable stock markets, with local companies whose fortunes revolve around the locality of the city they are in and regional companies traded in various markets in a region and even interstellar companies (such as Galactic Mining Corp aka General Mining Corp (GMC) and Galactic Retirement Funds aka General Retirement Funds (GRF)) traded at markets on many planets.

I still don't have market code for that though. I keep looking at Open Transactions but so far its client doesn't even seem to let its user specify which server (IP address and port, or hostname and port or whatever) to connect to so it doesn't seem much use yet even for games.

But hey, the Digitalis D'ydii Cluster supercluster of galaxies is a project that has been on the go since back before the Internet came along so if it takes a while it takes a while...

-MarkM-

[indicasteve]

I can't register.

The 'Bitcoins accepted here' banner at the bottom of the screen covers up the register form's submit button.  

My display is 768x1024.

I tried with firefox and chrome.  I tried resizing my screen and stuff, but the banner still covers the submit button.

[markm]

I can't register.

The 'Bitcoins accepted here' banner at the bottom of the screen covers up the register form's submit button.  

My display is 768x1024.

I tried with firefox and chrome.  I tried resizing my screen and stuff, but the banner still covers the submit button.

Weird. The whole thing is all .css and maybe even .js, I only just in the last hour or so came up with a trick for actually displaying images myself from HTML without all the .css and .js stuff vanishing the image.

I want to mess with that image anyway, since I cannot figure out how to make it clickable (except on the index page, which has its footer in the html instead of having the .css and/or .js do it).

...Aha, I now see why they had that stupid chunk of blank space pushing the footer below "the fold" on the registration page. Maybe I'll find it and make it less large an expanse, on my screen it had seemed to precisely push the footer out of site and only just push it enough to get it out of sight.

I will put it back, as I think it is not the logo that is your problem but the entire footer area.

Try it now, and let me know if any other pages have that problem. I hope none inside do as the footer-pusher thing seems only to have been used on external pages, I hope that was because it is not needed inside.

-MarkM-

[indicasteve]

 yup...better.. thanks!

Scratch that....

The register page is fine now...but the same problem exists with the log-in screen.

[indicasteve]

Ok...I logged in and started playing...

I was using the assistant guy and doing the tasks he assigned.

I did the task where he asks for 200 food.. and he gave me a rat to protect my village...yay!

Then he asks me to raise the level of the rest of my village plots to lvl 1.  But it won't let me... and now I'm stuck.

It tells me that I can not build anything unless I increase my crop land.  But it won't allow me to build any more crop plots.... it says I don't have enough crops to build a crop land....

But, my inventory shows I have 454/800 crops, and my village is consuming 7/9 crops per hour.

So, something must be wrong...

[markm]

Ok...I logged in and started playing...

I was using the assistant guy and doing the tasks he assigned.

I did the task where he asks for 200 food.. and he gave me a rat to protect my village...yay!

Then he asks me to raise the level of the rest of my village plots to lvl 1.  But it won't let me... and now I'm stuck.

It tells me that I can not build anything unless I increase my crop land.  But it won't allow me to build any more crop plots.... it says I don't have enough crops to build a crop land....

But, my inventory shows I have 454/800 crops, and my village is consuming 7/9 crops per hour.

So, something must be wrong...

Well for one thing I think the crop income isn't shown correctly. I got around this problem by spending 5 of the gold he had given me (for reading the message he sent me) on a one week 25% crop bonus. That bonus actually increased yields by closer to 50%. I think there ar a few people eating food who aren't being counted and also what they eat isn''t counted, in the display of total yield per hour and total consumed per hour. I think this because searching all over for .25 seemed to indicate that unless you are somehow imagined to have an oasis or something the bonus is done in the code as plus 25% and thus it must be the total crop that it is multiplying by 1.25 must be higher than what we are being shown as our total crop yield.

Also, it seems that at about 3 or 4 crop left per hour in the display, it thinks there is not enough food. So I think there must be 3 or 4 consumption not being shown, or some reason why it thinks 3 or 4 per hour is not enough.

Most things you try to build want a certain amount of crop per hour once they are built, is your yield so low that it is not enough for the hourly needs of what you want to build?

You only get 6 fields for crops, what you are building is a level of improvement, you can build a second level onto a field you already built up to first level.

Did you get to the quest where he gives you gold yet? So far everyone who hit that problem simply threw gold at it.

I will go look now though to try to figure out what it thinks it is doing. I recall one of the changlelog entries in the Devana game has something about a bug possibly along these lines, maybe Devana derives from some common ancestor code, I will check the Devana code too to see if I can find what exactly they fixed.

-MarkM-

EDIT: I am pretty sure the programmer miss-typed, it was checking $crop == 2 which seems stupid since if 2 isn't enough why would 1 be enough? So I changed that to $crop < 2. Its possible it was meant to be <=2 but if so maybe some other hint will occur hinting we need to revisit it.

Edit again: It seems to rule out villages intended to rely on trade for food. In Freeciv and other civilisation-building games part of the usefulness of granary/foodbox is you can survive a while of eating from stores. Hmm.

[fellowtraveler]

I still don't have market code for that though. I keep looking at Open Transactions but so far its client doesn't even seem to let its user specify which server (IP address and port, or hostname and port or whatever) to connect to so it doesn't seem much use yet even for games.

Hi,

The connection info for the server is stored in the SERVER CONTRACT.

The user doesn't work with a server address, he works with a contract ID. (The ID is a hash of the contract.) OT is smart enough to load up the appropriate contract, based on its ID, and find the connection info inside.

This way, you can store connection info for Tor, I2P, Freenet, etc, and since the contract is signed, you don't have to worry about getting a bad address to a malicious server.

Presumably if you were using OT to handle the monetary system of a game, then you would be running your own transaction server, and you'd make your server contract available to your players, or have it built into the client, or whatever.

I suggest you watch the OT walkthru video, and market video, to get a better understanding of how it all works:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=39255.msg479354

-Fellow Traveler

[FreeMoney]

Sometimes the option to upgrade something is completely missing. Was gone, back, gone again now.

edit: Back again. Improving cropland (and everything else) tells me "Not enough food. Improve cropland." I don't actually have enough resources yet, so maybe it will let me when I do, we'll see.

[Tasty Champa]

post screenshots

[markm]

Sometimes the option to upgrade something is completely missing. Was gone, back, gone again now.

edit: Back again. Improving cropland (and everything else) tells me "Not enough food. Improve cropland." I don't actually have enough resources yet, so maybe it will let me when I do, we'll see.

Yes, I have been trying over and over again to get it to exclude cropland from that, as it was just blindly saying it without even checking whether you were in fact at that very moment trying to build cropland.

-MarkM-

[indicasteve]

Seems to be working for me now.

I thought about buying the crop bonus, but I didn't want to spend my gold yet. 

[FreeMoney]

Slightly different than before, but still no good. No link to actually upgrade the thing.



 

[FreeMoney]

Started working, no noticeable trigger.

[markm]

Started working, no noticeable trigger.

The trigger was your previous post plus me reading it.

Stand by for complaints from newbies who suck their granaries dry due to not growing any crops, because I did not unravel the warning from the convoluted set of conditions and reasons why not to build etc, I simply commented out the compare part that made the initial decision that there was not enough food being grown. That leaves nothing for the warning to be triggered by so, with no warning, some idiot some day will eat every scrap of food in their village and... aha... maybe the real reason for all that logic was the lack of a starvation consequence for running out of food! Hmm...

I think I will have to make sure population start dying, thus leaving less workers to work the various things, thus making the player choose what to dismantle to free up a labourer to go home and die...

...Or have another go at unraveling the logic and getting a proper warning in there. The thing doesn't seem to understand when crop fields are what the player is trying to build, and my every attempt to tell it has mysteriously failed so far.

-MarkM-

EDIT: Okay, one more try. I moved the check for type of thing being built into the place that checked how much crop was being grown so now the warning should again be able to be triggered but hopefully in this part of the code the variable purporting to identify the type of thing being built might actually do so, allowing the check whether a crop field is being built to maybe work this time. Cross fingers touch wood.

[markm]

Whoa, you were consuming 11 of the 10 units of crop you were growing.

Somehow you had gotten into a crop supply deficit. I hope that was an artifact of my various attempts to fix the problem allowing you to somehow slip by or something.

-MarkM-