Years ago now we set up an instance of the free open source web-based game "Galaxy Forces" at
https://GalaxyForces.MyGamesOnline.org/As seems to happen often, it turned out to be ridiculously lucrative, showing right off the bat that we had vastly underestimated how much game resources would be reasonable startup costs for the kind of venture the game launches new players upon.
It took what seemed like mere moments for the players to pay off their startup loans, and soon they were hauling in vast profits.
Naturally registration of new players was disabled to give us time to work out how this interesting game can be reasonably fitted in to the overall
Milieu.
Its internal currency is called credits, and after some discussion we decided to directly correlate those so called credits with the platinum coin used in our Crossfire-RPG servers, which in turn correlates directly with the goldpieces used in our CoffeeMUD servers. (Ten silver to a gold, five gold to a platinum, a hundred platinum to a jade, a hundred jade to an amberium; on HORIZON gold pieces are tokenised, in integers, as MGOLD (for MUD Gold), on Stellar it is amberium that is tokenised, with decimals, as CCAMB (for CrossCiv AMBerium).)
It is a rather advanced-technology region of space, which seems even possibly to use "super-metals" (theoretical island of stability of atomic nuclei way out in transuranics range) as its so called metal, probably pretty much ignoring our mundane range of metals as just another cheap crap replicators can churn out or something like that.
Its main power (energy) system seems somewhat akin to the naquadah type stuff we see in the Stargate mythos, an unstable substance used in reactors. They call it Uran but it seems unlikely it is actually uranium.
Basically the players arrive with the right to start a colony and whatever gear and people it takes to do that.
They also have a small starship, seems akin to Star Wars mythos small personal starships, but maybe a little bigger than the one or two person Xwing fighters.
Either everyone who goes there was sterilised up front or it just totally ignores breeding; one gets population for one's colony at what amounts to a personnel shop, one cost for normal civililians then maybe five or six times that cost for "scientists".
Soldiers are trained from civililians, you build an academy for that or use someone else's academy (some planets offer that service).
The main "cash crops" out there are weird "crystals" left behind by some alien race; some attempts to implement aliens as players were started in code but none of the code developed sufficiently to make them playable.
Events like reactor meltdowns and such can happen, reducing population satisfaction or happiness or morale type score, but no mechanisms are in the code for countering such reductions; however it also appears the code might not cause that score to have any actual effect yet on population productivity.
The prices of the things you build for defense of your colony and for attacking other colonies have a very interesting feature of getting higher and higher the more you build of a given thing.
I call that interesting because it seems a nice way to imply a whole bundle of social issues like guilds, professions, unions, workplace safety regulations and on and on and on like that, whereby as industries become more established they are less and less about the initial cottage-industry starship-mechanics building stuff in their backyards and more and more about guilds and professional-societies and unions and so on making roles in the industry more and more defined with higher and higher wages and probably more and more bureaucracy amd regulations and bylaws and zoning and certifications of qualification and so on and so on and so on.
So it is maybe as if simply by that price formula twist a whole complex social phenomenon is simulated.
The "crystals" seem used in artificial intelligence, since many of one's workers are robots and building the robots requires crystals as components.
However since the fantasy worlds typical in Crossfire-RPG servers also have magic crystals, maybe the two instances of crystals can be correlated, providing Galaxy Forces with a potential export product to export to Crossfire-RPG fantasy worlds.
Obviously in any play to earn game it is important to identify its "cash crop" exports, the features it is going to use to bring in imports of the "cash crops" of other games, even if ultimately the only "cash crops" involved are actual currencies, each game producing a currency that can be traded for the currencies of other games.
Since we already correlated the currencies so that our Crossfire-RPG servers, our CoffeeMUD servers, and our Galaxy Forces server all use the same "in game fiat", by correlating this game's "credits" directly with one platinum aka five gold of the other games, we kind of need imports and exports other than currencies, if possible.
Since they are all free open-source games, we are of course very open to ideas from anyone, and even to anyone adding code to any of the standard distributions of the games toward helping the standard code as released play nicely with the
Galactic Milieu as a whole.
-MarkM-
NOTE: I re-posted this on HIVE. Turns out they do identity/authorship checks, awesome!
Yes HIVE, this is me...
