Topic: Crypto Kingdom - 1991 Retro Virtual World(City) - page 172. (Read 632696 times)

Version Ultima stuff
NOT TO AFFECT THE DEVS OF V.4


Factory is the enabler of a conversion formula.

There are many subtypes, and a large number of individual Factories. For instance, a Field is a Factory, because it provides the capital goods (the tilled field) and the tools (farm tools) for conversion of nothing() to potatoes. To effect the conversion, a set of Labor points must be allocated. The skills embedded in the Labor, affect the quantity of potatoes received. The Field reloads only once per gameyear, because the growth season allows only one harvest. The Field requires much Labor during summertime, but in the winter there is slack. You can only save the Labor for 2.3/7th of a gameyear (gameyear is redefined to equal a realweek), a careful balance allowing flexible gameplay but not the accumulation of raw Labor for an extended time. If Labor is converted to Work, it can be saved for a longer time (or in the Field's case, Labor was directly converted to potatoes without the intermediate Work phase).


Health is the one single metric showing how your character is doing physically, mentally and spiritually - and it goes to zero in the end and you die

It is possible to have many character stats, but we'll aim to manage with one. The UI shows only the approximation of the true 0%-100% value. The real value takes into account everything, including how often you go to library (or shopping) and do other variable and interesting stuff. Often you experience strange symptoms, and by reciting them to the doctor, you may get a diagnosis, which sometimes is correct. Then you need to afford the treatment as well.

The health system is intensely aimed at raising the bar for character farming, which is always an issue with games where the time of the character or playing time can be converted to monetary value. We aim to require that one character is played about 10 minutes per day for it to stay alive, and you can take 2 days off in a row with (nearly) no penalty, and a week off until a significant health penalty kicks in. Giving your character to a wealth and sustenance manager for short or long time is, however, easy. The health system gives the characters Depression if they are farmed ie. never do anything interesting such as talk to people or attend activities. Talking and attending take time, which is OK for real players but the farmers see them eroding the profitability. A quick calculation reveals that an unskilled character's labor is worth $0.08 per day, of which maximum $0.03 can be saved if the character wants to live any longer without dying of slavery. This makes it $0.18 per hour, to which the $0.025 from the new gold is added. This much can be made by farming characters.


Skills are extremely important, because most Factories require some Skill to be present in sufficient quantity in the transformation, or the presence of skill makes a dramatic effect on the conversion result.

There will be at least 30 Skill tracks with 6 levels each (no skill, Beginner, Novice, Expert, Master, Wizard/Doctor). Once you get to the higher levels of skill, you start to get the entry level skills in other tracks for free or small effort only. To gain a Wizard level in anything, you need to have supplementary skills, for example a Wizard Stonemason is necessary an Expert Artist, or Expert Engineer, or both.

To advance in skill track, depending on the skill, a combination of the following is required:
- spend Labor in Studying (an armchair Doctor is 14 years of study)
- work on the profession (Master of some craft is about 23 years of work)
- pay money in some form or another (speedups available, some skills like Manager cannot be graded effectively except by selling them)
- write a thesis (yes, actual, several pages, cross checked against existing material upon grading to detect plagiarism; to make sure the "Doctor of Chemistry actually knows anything about Chemistry, and to give edge for the professional people to play)
- see a youtube video and do an online test
- attend to ingame activities

The skills core is just points which accumulate to skill level upgrade. This makes it easy to make the skills grow as part of the allocation of Labor to a Factory. If your labor is used as Skill, it feeds the skill even more. If not, there is no grow of skill and the advance in the track is slowed.


Logistics and Item localization are mostly new concepts, which are not coming in V.4, V.5 or V.6 yet. In Ultima, every Item has a location, and the location is called Space.

In the countryside, the Spaces are large tracts of land, in the urban area, the Lot owner can determine the Spaces so that at maximum, a Lot is a Space, at minimum, a Space can be the inside of some secret hole in the wall. Hollow and moving/movable objects such as closets, ships, carts and characters are also Spaces to attach the Items on. The size of the Space determines how many and what kind of Items it can hold.

Incity transport will likely be organized around a pool, which determines the courier fee, and the money is dealt to the owners of paperboys and ox carts. Intercity transport will be required to happen realistically, so that the item is given to the freight company that organizes it to move to the other place, attached to some vehicle that is going there, and after a time of several real-hours, it's completed.


Resource management is based on the material:elaboracy matrix. Just as the current Items management really.

There is a long but limited list of materials existing on Earth (and even outside). The Factories (note ingame usage: Factory is any action that changes the state of the world) are ways to raise the elaboracy of the materials so that stone becomes ore, which becomes raw iron, which becomes iron beams, which becomes a sword. For every material, there is the skill how to handle it, and different tools for handling, based on the technological level of the society.

There will be a huge number of significant stuff such as crystals and gemstones. Crystals boost your health, and who knows what uses except decoration will be found for the gems.

Oh what a surprise...

I was just thinking I need some gold because I now have a subcontractor who wants to be denominated and paid in CKG, not in the volatile XMR, nor in the legacy currencies such as BTC or USD.

I think I'll have to wait until the release, and then start buying the gold by the gram from the new players who accumulate it.

Remember - It's all about the gold!

I'm certainly not the one that wil be selling any CKG (or XMR) anytime soon

Very interesting news indeed. 

Thank you for the offer, but there is no way I'm going to sell my CKG.  Hodling that.

Because of the recent developments, the King's Coinshop has reset the gold price upwards.

You can now sell your gold to us at 500,000 m/CKG. This is the all-time-high gold price denominated in XMR.

That sounds interesting!

Are you a designer or developer? In what phase is the project? What are the most important lessons we should learn?

This all sounds very similar to what we are doing with MUDgaard and such, except that MUDgaard and its ilk are a little closer to the cryptocoin-mining experience in that just like you start a mining machine or program and leave it running 24/7 to mine cryptocoins you start a character or characters and leave it running 24/7 sleeping when it is tired, eating when it is hungry and so on, mining stuff or harvesting stuff or making stuff or heck even conducting campaigns of aggression.

That is, in our approach the player's computer takes on the burden of controlling the player's characters, instead of the server-side doing all the character-control logic for you while you are offline.

(The civilisation-type-game aspects of the Milieu we handle at a different scale, by using FreeCiv to run an entire planet per FreeCiv instance providing the larger-scale backdrop in which the smaller scale can be placed, such as by using MUDs and Crossfire RPGs and such to allow individual characters to visit on the small scale cities and such that on the larger scale are part of a FreeCiv planet.)

-MarkM-

The specification process of Crypto Kingdom - Ultima has started

The version 4: Reconstruction is proceeding. I have already seen the gaming software, which is not yet playable but contains most of the UI functionality and (I cannot verify) the backend functionality. The scope is as previously announced. The betatesting will be carried out with the people who know they are selected. We have 2-a-week meetings to hone the details.


But the subject of this post is the concurrent specification of the Ultima. The design philosophy is different from the current design process (which as we all know had issues). This time we start from all possible future features, and work backwards, cutting and merging features that are redundant, and generalize the rest as much as possible. It currently seems that the resource based economy can be abstracted to as little as 3 main subsystems(!)

- Human subsystem creates the characters, who emit labor, and require food, drink, clothes and shelter, and eventually die
- Grid subsystem is the registry of physical world from duchies to items, and their locations, logistics etc
- Transformer subsystem is a collection of conditions, rules, and formulas, which govern the changes of state of the world.

 
CK Ultima (I repeat the title so that you would not think this is V.4 )

Human subsystem

- one realyear = 52 gameyears, one char may live up to a year
- PC and NPC are equal, with NPC having an AI to make some choices for it
 Labor generation
  - generates a unit of labor 3/day = about 1,000 units per lifetime
  - essential component in work, study, and many activities
  - a few units of labor can be saved, the excess is lost if unspent
 Food sink
  - daily a meal and a drink need to be enjoyed in the restaurants
 Health, sickness and death subsystem
  - health starts at 100% and is displayed to the char in a 5-scale; 0%=> death
  - main drivers of health are age, food, drink, sickness, injuries and living conditions
  - temporary health changes from boosters or light sickness are reversible


Grid subsystem

- Defines the world and its structures, both countryside and urban
- Countryside has a huge potential to yield minerals, food etc, when harnessed properly
- Urban is important for communication and production of consumer goods etc
- Items are localized at rooms, and one room can be as small as desired (and as big as up to an undeveloped chapelry in town, or a huge land in the countryside)
- Items have weight and volume
- Logistics are realistic, the ox drivers actually order the caravan to move to a place, and it arrives hours later, no (or very little) shortcuts, only in things such as automatic emptying of small rooms


Transformer subsystem

Defines all formulas (the list of formulas can be expanded at will) how:
- Work is achieved from Labor (labor units with skill) and Capital (consisting of tools, machines, organization, etc)
- Work can be used to convert items to other items (very broadly), for example a building company might set up BuildingSiteArea51 to the Lot where a palace will be built. First they select the appropriate "Work generation formula" that makes use of their resources, and then summon the resources to the site. When time passes and Labor is poured to the factory, BuildingPoints (Work) come from the other end, and once enough of them is generated, the Palace can be built.

The building is a conversion operation where this Work, the Stone, Windows, and other resources (luxuries will be phased out), are merged to become a Building (or several).
- A much smaller example might be to use a Blacksmith'sWork point and some metal to make a small amulet, or a big one why not.


Discussion

This is a very fundamental way to think what actually happens in the game. It is Human Action (thanks Mises) that is directed to other characters, concepts and virtuo-physical things in the game. To the extent that the state of the virtuo-physical world is changed, the characters set up transformers to refine the resources into a more desirable form. They always need to apply labor of some kind at least, in some stage of the process.

The ultimate sink of value is the sustenance system. When characters eat or drink, or their clothes or houses undergo wear and deterioration, this is the value (in kind) that leaves the equation. (Of course excess housing, industrial capital, and luxuries also undergo depreciation.)

The new value that comes, is the labor the characters generate. With higher skill, the labor yields more Work. With more capital, better technology, and more efficient organization, the productivity can be increased. This requires more skilled workers, and better working conditions, which translates to higher standard of living, so the factories in some distant future will pour out iPhones for all the characters...

Until now, I haven't mentioned money. Money is a unit of account and a means of transferring and storing value. It is not involved in production. Some people say that we could do without money. I haven't found this credible just yet at least. What Adam Smith said, and many before and after him, it is the common unit of account that makes financial planning possible both in the big (whether to build a new factory) and in the small (how the pencil is most efficiently assembled using up to 80 production steps by dozens of actors, none of whom could make the pencil by himself, all of whom guided by nothing but price information alone).

A restaurant from here onwards, will be a transformer of raw food to enjoyable meals. The monetary side is of course there - all inputs cost money, so it follows that the output must cost as well. But the structure of Pools in V.3-V.4 will be phased out in most cases and replaced by atomic interaction driven by the basic needs of sustenance (blindly enforced by the game) and vanity (enforced by the players themselves).

All monetary economy will reconstruct itself as the most efficient means of brokering between the actors in different stages of the production and economy.

All other game concepts from highway robbers to space program will be able to be defined in terms of the 3 Subsystems.

He means that CK is threatening his worldview in which all the cryptocoins should exist as speculative instruments only, without any use or purpose, real or virtual.

Thanks, I will check it out.

I read another good book recently:

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
"A hilariously funny and deeply serious meditation on the nature and uses of the mind."

The expectation is for CKG to go above 1 XMR at some point, at this embryonic stage I don't think anyone has much incentive to part with gold OTC right now.

That would make the current King's sell price of 0.473 XMR/CKG a bargain.

Of course, my viewpoint could be biased as I have about 30k CKG. But I'm not interested in just making money, I enjoy playing the game. So I would perhaps consider selling some when price reaches 10 XMR each, or if I am in some dire financial straits.

Hello players, do we have an ETA when the online version will be released?
Thanks.

Normally I'd be all over some CK transactions, but I think I want to hold onto the gold that I have. It's hard to come by these days!

If looking for some entertainment to fill some of the waiting hours, may I suggest a good book?

REAMDE by Neil Stephenson (Snowcrash, Cryptonomicon, et al)
"The breathtaking tale of a wealthy tech entrepreneur caught in the very real crossfire of his own online fantasy war game"

TY!

Hello gents and gentelerets,

I would be interested in buying some gold (1000 - 5000 units). I will pay with blockchain Moneros. Please drop me your offers in a pm and we conclude the deal there.

Why yes, there is the "Quickstart" guide that I wrote here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bSAIQjnhEIZfuIX7IaYiuw1Y-3PvnNPfQqAfl_AFOcY/edit

perhaps that will help you a bit

Welcome back proride!! - Let the others answer the questions!

We will be waiting 

btw, as there's a finite amount of CKG, and with only a 100 users we're already at 40% XMR price, I do expect us to overcome monero one day