Recognized Job/Bounty boards?

[Zaphord]

Not sure if anyone's suggested this or not, there's just a lot of posts to sort through.

I run a mercenary faction on my server and having a job board or bounty board would make finding work so much easier.

Players could post jobs, putting up a reward or payment for the job (paid upfront) which would then be given to the player that completes the job when they turn it in. So if the job is to mine so many blocks of x minerals, the blocks are dropped off, payment is given, and everyone is happy.

As for bounties, ships could drop a flight recorder or black box then they're destroyed which would be turned in for the bounty

Not expecting this to be implemented at all, much less anytime soon, but that's my suggestion.

Thanks and keep up the excellent work guys .

 

[Reilly Reese]

There are server scripts/plugins out there that add a bounty system to the game but whether or not the server owner uses it is another matter.

Feel free to check my bounty thread though :D (Link is in my signature.)

 

[Zaphord]

There are server scripts/plugins out there that add a bounty system to the game but whether or not the server owner uses it is another matter.

Feel free to check my bounty thread though :D (Link is in my signature.)

Thanks. I'll be sure to check it out.

 

[SomethingSlimy]

A Job Board could be fun in single player too. What if NPC bounty requests appeared on it, detailing reward, the type of ship, (displaying a miniature display of the ship?) whether it's wanted captured or destroyed, and the coordinates it is at. The ship would spawn when a player gets within navigation range of it's listed coordinates, and the bounty would disappear off the Job Board is no one takes it after awhile.

It would be a simple and effective way to add quests into the game.

 

[CyberTao]

I can see this being added eventually. I recall someone from Schine saying they plan to replace the loot clouds from pirates with a Credit bounty based on their mass/blocks, I can see players being able to set a bounty on other players (as well as maybe a bonus based on mass for overheating ships they pilot?) as an ingame thing.

 

[Zaphord]

I can see this being added eventually. I recall someone from Schine saying they plan to replace the loot clouds from pirates with a Credit bounty based on their mass/blocks, I can see players being able to set a bounty on other players (as well as maybe a bonus based on mass for overheating ships they pilot?) as an ingame thing.

Yeah, the loot clouds are a bit of a pain. I'd rather have a lootable container so I can pick and chose what I want rather than fly through a cloud of loot and fill my inventory with trash.

The job board would be good for single player, but I suggested it with servers in mind. More player interaction that way.

 

[CyberTao]

Yeah, the loot clouds are a bit of a pain. I'd rather have a lootable container so I can pick and chose what I want rather than fly through a cloud of loot and fill my inventory with trash.

The job board would be good for single player, but I suggested it with servers in mind. More player interaction that way.

Well yeah, Bounty boards are better for MP and such. I just brought up a related feature that they were doing since you seemed to think this idea had little chance, when it has a pretty good chance of getting in.

 

[Zaphord]

Well yeah, Bounty boards are better for MP and such. I just brought up a related feature that they were doing since you seemed to think this idea had little chance, when it has a pretty good chance of getting in.

Thanks. Wasn't too optimistic about it being considered at first, but it looks like they're already laying in the groundwork for it to be a possibility at least.

 

[Zaphord]

Sweet! Recognized.

Glad I could help, love to contribute more to this idea if you guys are interested.

 

[Valiant70]

The more actions we can figure out how to verify, the more possibilities there will be for missions. Delivering cargo is a common mission idea, but there needs to be a good way (code-wise) to figure out when cargo has been successfully delivered.

 

[Zaphord]

The more actions we can figure out how to verify, the more possibilities there will be for missions. Delivering cargo is a common mission idea, but there needs to be a good way (code-wise) to figure out when cargo has been successfully delivered.

Well, one way we could do fetch missions at first is to have the player drop off the requested items at the point where they took the job. If a shop is short a particular block, then a job could pop up requesting that block and pay out a slightly higher reward for those blocks than you'd get for just selling the blocks.

It definitely needs more brainstorming, but I can't see it being too difficult to set up.

The tough part, as far as I can see, would be setting up resistance to such a job. If I have to pick up and drop off cargo at said location, then will I have to deal with AI pirates or will I have players to contend with? If it's players, then there would have to be a job available in opposition to the one I took.

 

[jayman38]

Cargo delivery missions should not involve "deliver x number of y commodity to z location". That's hard to code and is prone to breakage. A lot of the space games, including the original Elite do it and it seems out of touch with real cargo delivery. Instead, cargo delivery missions should involve delivering a pre-built structure, like an over-engineered box, to a destination. This requires space, like cargo should, the entity can be tracked easily, and you can code for things like "the customer doesn't want you snooping into the cargo for any reason" and "if the cargo is damaged in any way, you will not be paid". Plus, you can code for fun one-off situations like high-explosive cargo designed to destroy the delivery target, and if you take too long, it blows up in your cargo bay.

 

[Zaphord]

Cargo delivery missions should not involve "deliver x number of y commodity to z location". That's hard to code and is prone to breakage.

That kind of mission is more of a mining style mission, but the delivery mission you described is pretty much bang on if you're looking to haul cargo for a living.

It could get tricky since you have to account for how much space your ship has for cargo, too small and the container won't fit in your cargo bay. External cargo moorings would solve this problem, but now your container is exposed and could take damage if you run into pirates (or greedy players).

I do like the idea of "deliver x cargo to y coordinates" but not as a job posting, maybe as a commodity trading option of sorts? Trouble is, all the Trade Guild shops I've seen use the base price for items. So buying low and selling high only works with player owned shops. Anyway, that should be a different thread altogether. I'm a merc, not a caravan trader.

 

[jayman38]

That kind of mission is more of a mining style mission, but the delivery mission you described is pretty much bang on if you're looking to haul cargo for a living.

It could get tricky since you have to account for how much space your ship has for cargo, too small and the container won't fit in your cargo bay. External cargo moorings would solve this problem, but now your container is exposed and could take damage if you run into pirates (or greedy players).

I do like the idea of "deliver x cargo to y coordinates" but not as a job posting, maybe as a commodity trading option of sorts? Trouble is, all the Trade Guild shops I've seen use the base price for items. So buying low and selling high only works with player owned shops. Anyway, that should be a different thread altogether. I'm a merc, not a caravan trader.

1. I like the idea of commodity delivery as a mining-style mission. Good call.

2. Again, good call. You should have to take cargo space into consideration, even to the point of making massive modifications to your ship to hold the cargo. Generally, unless StarMade goes down the path of procedural blueprint generation (which I would love to see with both cargo -and- pirates, mirroring procedural fauna!), most players who take on cargo missions will have ships with generously sized cargo bays that will hold anything thrown at them.

3. That is interesting and informative. It's been a while since I've used trade guild shops. They used to have variable prices, and an enterprising spacer could earn a lot of money by finding an adjacent high/low set of stations.

Thanks.

 

[Lukwan]

I was going to suggest this...then I did a search...
...now deploying necro-bump.

My old server had some hilarious stories crop up when disputes started to be settled with 'contracts'...and I don't mean the kind you put on paper. When people got upset after being ganked they could blow off steam by hiring a hit on the perpetrator. You might think this led to a lot of bad blood but the players really got into it. It made an otherwise horrible experience suddenly blossom with RP opportunities and strangely enough it brought people together. So long live the public bounty board.

I would like to see it work like this: The bounty block sits in the spawn area. I go up to it and enter the interface. I choose a category of quest/bounty (name a target if applicable) then deposit credits to pay for the reward. The bounty hunter should get paid automatically when the conditions for the bounty are met. The more simple the system the better.

Questing: The same block could be used by the admin to create quests or plot-missions. Here a new mechanic would be helpful. When certain quests are created they will provide a 'quest-item'. This would be a meta-item like a log-book, a heavy (rare) weapon) or a gold-brick. The game-master (admin) then hides the 'MacGuffin' item where ever they are staging the quest-event to happen. The player simply keeps the item when it is found causing the bounty board to be updated on the job's status.

Letting players create their own missions in the vanilla game would lead to all kinds of mayhem. The good kind.

 

[Benevolent27]

There are server scripts/plugins out there that add a bounty system to the game but whether or not the server owner uses it is another matter.

Feel free to check my bounty thread though :D (Link is in my signature.)

Do you know of any stable ones for linux? The only linux wrapper that I found that had it, which functioned, was very unstable. It used a bad method to record the whole console and then parse that, and this caused frequent crashes of the server. So I built a non-invasive wrapper, myself, that does not parse the console at all, but rather only parses chat rooms for commands. But this makes it impossible to verify if a bounty was fulfilled. I'm working on other methods to parse the log file instead using C+ compiled programs (instead of scripts, which can be thousands of times slower), but it'll take me a bit of work. And even when that is done, it may bog down the server, since there are times the log file literally has over 50,000 lines added a second. If there is an existing solution that I can test and then perhaps build upon and integrate into my current wrapper, I'd much prefer to do that.
[doublepost=1475339910,1475339555][/doublepost]

I was going to suggest this...then I did a search...
...now deploying necro-bump.

My old server had some hilarious stories crop up when disputes started to be settled with 'contracts'...and I don't mean the kind you put on paper. When people got upset after being ganked they could blow off steam by hiring a hit on the perpetrator. You might think this led to a lot of bad blood but the players really got into it. It made an otherwise horrible experience suddenly blossom with RP opportunities and strangely enough it brought people together. So long live the public bounty board.

I would like to see it work like this: The bounty block sits in the spawn area. I go up to it and enter the interface. I choose a category of quest/bounty (name a target if applicable) then deposit credits to pay for the reward. The bounty hunter should get paid automatically when the conditions for the bounty are met. The more simple the system the better.

Questing: The same block could be used by the admin to create quests or plot-missions. Here a new mechanic would be helpful. When certain quests are created they will provide a 'quest-item'. This would be a meta-item like a log-book, a heavy (rare) weapon) or a gold-brick. The game-master (admin) then hides the 'MacGuffin' item where ever they are staging the quest-event to happen. The player simply keeps the item when it is found causing the bounty board to be updated on the job's status.

Letting players create their own missions in the vanilla game would lead to all kinds of mayhem. The good kind.

Oh crikey, I didn't realize this was a necro'd thread. lol
[doublepost=1475342529][/doublepost]I feel I can add something new to this thread too. I just recently finished a quest wrapper for the server I admin on, Light vs Dark. I put a bit of time and thought into how to actually make quests be added and removed. Now, I am limited by the current functionality of the wrapper we use and the game commands, but here is my opinion on how instanced quests could be implemented:

Quests should NOT be created entirely in game because that is untenable, but there can definitely be some in-game commands that help them out (and which also could serve other more general use purposes for admins).

Here's how the process might work for instanced quests:
1. The admins go to a sector, build whatever they want there, and then export that sector.
2. The admins can save the text responses from the server to a text file to grab specific info, like coordinates within a sector. So the admin might go to where they want players to spawn in that sector and run "/record start" and then "/player_info [TheirName]" to grab their exact coordinates. This would be used later in the "quest builder" to specify the player start location. Once the admin has all the info they want, then they run "/record stop". This stops writing the command outputs to the text file. I realize that an admin can always open up the log file for this information, but if you've ever had to search through tens of thousands of lines of the logs, you'd realize why this would be annoying.
3. The admin opens up the "quest creator" program. They can then select the sector export to use as the starting sector. There would be options the person can use to set up this imported sector. Here are some possible examples:

• "Quest is instanced, in a private sector for the individual player."
• "Quest is loaded at specific coordinates: "X Y Z
• "Quest sector is reset upon starting of quest." / "Quest sector is reset upon ending of quest." / "Quest sector is reset every [X] days/weeks/months/years -or- never"

4. The admin can then copy and paste the exact in-sector coordinates (example: 100.4534534 50.23423 20.23423) to use as the starting place for the quester. If they want there to be more than one spot, they can click a plus sign to add an alternative spot that the player might spawn into either randomly or by cycling through it (if the quest allows multiple players to take part at the same time, together).

5. There needs to be starting conditions and ending conditions.
Some starting condition examples:

• "Start quest with a blank inventory and restore the original inventory after the quest is done."
• "Allowed player to bring personal ship to quest" (then sub options for this) "Restore personal ship to previous state when done: yes/no"
• "Quest is not instanced and is accessible within the real universe." / "Quest is instanced for specific player" / "Quest is instanced but allows multiple players to participate." (and then sub-options) "Who can participate together? Public/Allies/Faction Only
  
• If a quest is NOT instanced, but can be navigated to in the real world, should the quester be teleported to that sector upon starting the quest or just given information about the quest?

6. There needs to be "objectives" for every quest. The quest creator program then has some options and allows the person creating the quest to specify the objective and then action that occurs when that objective is done. Here are some examples of what this might look like for an instanced quest:

• Objective: "Obtain item, [StarDust], count [5]." / Title: "Obtain 5 stardust!" / [Show Progress] / [Display in list of objectives]
  Action(s): [End Quest]
  [Return player to whence they game]
  [Message player: "Melvin: Congratulations, you have got all the StarDust we'll need to build the telecronkiter! Here is a toaken of my gratitude!"]
  [Reward item: (silver bar: 2), (credits: 50,000) ]
  
• Objective (2): "NPC death, 'Captain StarDust'"
  Action(s): [End Quest]
  [Return player to whence they game]
  [Message player: "Melvin: Oh no! Without Captain StarDust, we'll never be able to build the telecronkiter!"]
  
• Objective (3): "Player death"
  [Message player: "Melvin: Oh no! You appear to have died. But no bother! I will return you back to the start!"
  Action(s): [Respawn player at: (quest start coords)]
• Objective (4): "Obtain item, [Secret Ball], count [1]" / Title: "Find my ball." / [Show Progress (Only if completed)] / [Display in list of objectives (Only if completed)]
  Action(s):
  [Message player: "Melvin: I see you have found my secret ball! Here's a bunch of credits for no apparent reason! And thanks for finding that for me!"
  [Give item: (credits: 2,000,000)]
  [Remove item: (Secret Ball)]

7. When done, then the player or admin saves the quest and adds it to the list of quests for the server.

Ok, well I think that should be enough to relay the basic premise. But as you can see, it would take some work to allow the kind of variability that players would need. I did not include everything that would be needed. I just though I'd add some considerations to this topic.

 

[BravoHotel]

Not sure if anyone's suggested this or not, there's just a lot of posts to sort through.

I run a mercenary faction on my server and having a job board or bounty board would make finding work so much easier.

Players could post jobs, putting up a reward or payment for the job (paid upfront) which would then be given to the player that completes the job when they turn it in. So if the job is to mine so many blocks of x minerals, the blocks are dropped off, payment is given, and everyone is happy.

As for bounties, ships could drop a flight recorder or black box then they're destroyed which would be turned in for the bounty

Not expecting this to be implemented at all, much less anytime soon, but that's my suggestion.

Thanks and keep up the excellent work guys .

Gimme gimme, I got a ton of Vaygr Bounties to fulfill. Would be interesting to be able to hire mercenaries for a fight with an In-Game system to handle payment.

Should allow us to pay bounties with items too though. 1M hardened hull for Zoros head

Note: Better to Necro a suggestion than re-write it. XD

 

[Reilly Reese]

Meantime I've reactivated this Thadius's Bounty Office