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Topics - sandbags

#1
General Discussions / Trade computer
May 04, 2015, 03:11:15 AM
So I got bored of tracking trades in a spreadsheet or on paper and knocked up a little application to keep score for me. At the moment it works well for me locally but it wouldn't be super difficult to put it online if other players would find it useful. I thought I'd check here and see if there's any interest before potentially wasting time on it.

What it does is allow you to record each trade you make, the good, quantity, and buy price, then record your sell price, and profitability on the deal. It highlights open trades and shows for each commodity data on what you've sold for in the past so you can get a feel for whether the sell price you're seeing is good.



Pretty simple but I've found it helpful for keeping score.
#2
Ideas and suggestions / Mining probe
April 26, 2015, 12:05:17 PM
I've been searching for that really expensive ore for ages and found none.

It occurred to me that it would be great to be able to dispatch mining probes to sample the asteroids in far off systems.

With appropriate caveats about how long it might take, how much of any system one probe might sample, probes breaking down or getting destroyed, etc...
#3
Ideas and suggestions / Replacement drive sounds
April 26, 2015, 12:01:28 PM
I think the one thing I don't like, from an aesthetic point of view, about the game is the sound the engines make.

To me they sound like a small electronic motor under strain and not a spacecraft in flight.

Is this moddable I wonder?


#4
As others have mentioned you seem to be able to kill traders and miners with impunity, even in the Order home system (where I wonder why there are pirates about? Where is the Order fleet?)

I think traders and minders should be affiliated to factions and, if they get a distress call off, someone should come looking. If you get caught attacking them, there should be consequences.
#5
Ideas and suggestions / Not all hulls alike
April 26, 2015, 07:55:48 AM
I think it would make the game a lot more interesting if hulls had characteristics within ranges, rather than fixed values (especially using a normalised random distribution as I have discussed previously).

That would mean you'd actually have a reason to trade in a hull you liked for the same hull in better condition. Or perhaps be a source of missions for parts to upgrade a hull.

It would also add a little excitement looking for that "perfect" version of a certain hull.
#6
Ideas and suggestions / How do goods & pricing work?
April 26, 2015, 07:54:01 AM
It seems like stations just randomly have a certain number of goods and a price. Is there any economic model at play? Or is it entirely random?
#7
Ideas and suggestions / Show me missions nearby
April 26, 2015, 07:52:34 AM
I would like to be able to see, at a glance, which missions I can do in nearby systems. Rather than having to browse then look at the map and figure out how far away they are.

Maybe this just means being able to sort the missions by number of jumps or something equivalent.
#8
Game discussion / Please stop using Documents on OSX
April 19, 2015, 05:04:40 AM
I mentioned this in the Steam forum but I'll repeat it here.

You put the user configuration stuff for VE in the ~/Documents folder where it really doesn't belong. OSX has ~/Library/Application Support as the place for applications to store ancillary configuration and such like.

You could make a case for save games going in Documents but it's pretty atypical since these are not files a user is meant to interact with or use outside of the game.

It's not mandated but good practice to follow the customs and idioms of the host platform.

Best,

Matt
#9
Game discussion / Whither time?
April 19, 2015, 04:16:08 AM
I wanted to get a better sense of how trade works in the game so I decided to create a spreadsheet of different goods at various stations to see how quantity and price changed over time. It was then that I realised that the game does not seem to have any notion of in-game time. No "star dates" here.

Is this deliberate? Or an omission due to it not having been necessary in game terms?

A couple of the quests do say "come back later" with only a fairly fuzzy definition of what later means but this does suggest that there is an internal representation of time of some kind.

Can anyone give any more detail?

m/
#10
Mods / When are asteroids spawned?
April 11, 2015, 03:50:11 AM
I'm thinking about a mod to add more interesting types of asteroid. I'm wondering when asteroids are spawned though, is that when the galaxy is first created? i.e. will this require creating an entirely new game?

Matt