ODBC, TSE, MMO's Oh My!

After a large restructuring of Forbidden Dawn, an indie company has arisen: Last Straw Productions. Forbidden Dawn (FD) has gone from a team of around 6 to a team of over 15 and it has gone from a 'pet project' to a commercially viable production. We've gone BACK to design mode to flesh out the 60+ page design doc into a dozen design docs on various systems for the game. This has been done for many reasons, a few of them being: We are moving from TGE to TSE officially; We had several systems with basic descriptions that needed a LOT of work to actually be a guide to development of the game (such as the in-game economics); I've brought a lot more people on board with wonderful ideas that are helping to improve the game.

We've opened up forums for Forbidden Dawn at www.nightfallcity.com/laststraw/phpBB2/ with basic descriptions of the game and a 'jobs' section for listing what we're currently looking for. I'm very excited about the way things are shaping up now with the game. We are going to spend roughly 2 more months on the design documents and paper testing of the systems before starting on actual code. Then, a 2 year development cycle is planned for the actual art, sound, and code.

I'm going to use these blogs to post updates on various systems we're implementing and get feedback on what you guys think about them. Last time I talked about our dynamic sound system and basically what it's going to do. This time I'm going to talk about our economics system. We are still a few weeks and several meetings away from a finalized design, but I'd like to outline a few basic concepts to get feedback. One of the major concepts is having an adjusting player economy (APE). Some key points of APE is having vendors change pricing that they buy and sell items for, depending on: supply and demand; inflation/depression; previous PLAYER selling/purchasing rates.

What our system will do is keep track of how much items are being sold and purchased for in the PLAYER community, then adjusting vendor pricing to match this. FD will track trades and sales between players to see how much certain items are selling for. If weapon A is being sold constantly from player to player, then the vendors will start BUYING weapon A for around that price and selling it for around that price. NPC vendors will purchase just about anything, however they will keep those items it purchases basically in their inventory. If players go out hunting for spider poison for instance, and they sell 10 units to an NPC vendor, THAT npc vendor will have 10 units to sell to whoever wants them at a higher rate than it paid for them, based on supply and demand. If the NPC vendor already has a ton of spider poison, he may turn down the player and not purchase it from him.

NPCs will adjust their pricing based on inflation and depression. When the economy starts to inflate, NPC selling prices go up, purchasing prices go down. When the economy starts experiencing a depression, NPCs will purchase things at a higher rate and sell them at a lower rate. This obviously wouldn't ever get drastic, as it fluctuates with the game. So any time a little bit of an inflation starts to occur, the system reacts and 'nips it in the bud' before it has time to be a large deal.

I'd also like to mention that I've slowed down quite a bit on development with the MMOKit after finding out about some licensing issues with GG. Serves us right for not reading the dang EULA for TGE ;). Sorry about that GG. I'll be releasing several resources based on work Last Straw does for FD. I feel the resource section for TSE is pretty much FULLY lacking when it comes to MMO, so that's where I'm headed.

I'd also like to point out that my ODBC resource is getting an overhaul as well as ported over to TSE over the rest of this week. I'm expanding it quite a bit with not only bug and memory leak fixes, but also to use more datatypes and databases. I could use some help with databases I don't have currently such as Oracle, SQL Server 2000, Interbase, DB2, Sybase, Informix, Ingres, and more (full listing will be on the resource itself.)

In closing, I'd like to ask if people would be interested in a tool for creating dynamic stored procedures for various databases? What the tool would do is basically give you a template for a sproc, which you would edit and customize which would then 'pump out' a sproc for a selected database engine. In the beginning it would have sprocs for SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, and MySQL 5.0+ This sound like a tool people could use?

- Jonathon