The earning of coins by playing is what we refer to as
CPU mining.
We are currently using
CoffeeMUD to work on basic economics for that.
Basically there seem to be two main potential sources for coins that the players could earn:
One would be they earn coins that they paid as the fee to play the game.
Two would be they earn coins mined by hardware that was bought with the fees they paid to play the game.
That only addresses basic built in coin-earning as part of the game itself. Obviously if one can find other players who are willing to pay coins of some kind for some in-game consideration or for characters or player-accounts and so on, then one could also earn coins by selling stuff to players.
Basically the higher the price per year to play, the more loot per year there could be to be won.
I say per year because ideally players who actually play the entire year they paid for could benefit from any players who pay to play but then fail to utilise their entire paid-for year, leaving loot on the table, so to speak, for players who do persistently play.
3-D needs money, yeah. One freeciv map tile, about 100 kilometers square, would be about 16,000 OpenSimulator "regions".
A service that stores regions on Amazon storage and only actually fires them up live on Amazon elastic computing servers when players actually enter or come in eyesight of the region used to cost maybe a dime per region per month to store it, and maybe a quarter per hour per region to actually run it, but I think they raised their prices. 16,000 regions just for one tile of a possibly 21-tile city, without even considering the surrounding terrain, would add up to a lot of money to have a complete depiction of an entire Freeciv planet in OpenSimulator!
Currently played nations are only being charged something like 1/16 of a cent per "square mile" that Freeciv reports their nation as owning, or some such figure. (Three or four bucks a month for a single-size-one-city nation, several thousands of dollars a month for e.g. the Martians of the planet known as M4, or the British of the planet known as B24, or the Canucks of the planet known as C24.)
(M4 is a 4000-tile planet, B24 and C24 are 24000-tile planets, and the nations are only paying for the square miles Freeciv actually claims that particular nation directly controls/utilises. Who will pay for all the wildlands and all the square miles even within nations that aren't counted in that "square miles utilised/controlled" figure? Furthermore we are treating those square miles as if they were square kilometers, that is, a four-by-four block of regions close enough, since a region is a 256 metres by 256 meters square.)
-MarkM-