Thus spake William Leader...
> Now this is all well and good, but I can't expect any kind of real
> economy to develop without currency. Mainly because I can't figure out a
> way for NPC merchants to determine what is a fair trade. I figure that
> for NPC Merchants to function they are going to have to know a price for
> any given item, and be able to sell the item for a price, and buy the
> item for a price. The question becomes how?
Can't NPC's work it out? I don't know how much granuality you have on
your property descriptions, but checking things like "how well do my
skills match up with the skills required to use this item" (if any) or
"when was the last time I used this type of item?", then comparing
previous items with the quality of the item being offered should provide
a rough estimate of "value". Include a check for "how many of these in
the game are there?" to keep the value within reasonable scales.
<snip>
> Let me take another paragraph to collect my thoughts. I want multiple
> currency support so if I break down and add a currency field to the
> objects and database, then this won't be possible without having a
> currency table that has a composite key of Currency Type+Character and
> value indicating how much of that currency the character has. Thats not
> quite so clean I feel like this would create a great deal of work to
> get the code working. The other option is to create currency objects
> using the existing object system. For this to work, NPC's will need to
> be told what objects they will accept as currency (this is kind of easy
> for me.)
With the above system, you might want to specify the things they won't
take - you probably wouldn't want bakers accepting loaves as payment for
things, for example.