An .OBJ exporter or something would be wonderful. (Please stick with standard formats, and not Autodesk/Valve/etc proprietary stuff).

"As long as it's not lens flare"...

Camera effects really do work, if applied subtly. I agree rim lighting should scale with specular intensity of said object (dirt asteroid should produce less light than a metal or ice asteroid).

Hmm, I thought that the textures of ships in LT look pretty damn good. Granted they are a bit too reliant on overlapping squares and could use some more rounded, angular, and polygonal shapes, but they are pretty good. Looking at the sim city videos, Texturewise I would only really agree as to the ...

EVE for instance uses regional markets, and there's a pretty substantial wall of separation between regions (even if stations are adjacent). Faction borders for instance seem like a natural border. Asynchronous message passing could be done between intra-regional markets, depending on NPC "capabilit...

Regarding the Hierarchical Market Data History dev log, I have one request for consideration: Offer the ability to "save" historical data for particular commodities, regions, and/or timeframes. While I like saving space, I also have a particular interest for market microstructure data: stuff like wh...

"If it doesn't work, change your frame of reference". Natural structures don't "look" orderly like the 1st picture; the orbits in our solar system are actually quite out of the ecliptic (which you can appreciate by looking at the orbits for pluto and neptune, much less the extremely wild, eccentric ...

I respectfully disagree with that. I think there are innumerable examples in the real world where -- unless one is a practicing "everything is connected" Buddhist -- some events are clearly not causally connected. Believing that they are is, I think, properly understood as superstitious behavior. (...

Note that Josh hasn't implemented an agent (at least to my knowledge) that engages in speculation. Furthermore, the system is vastly sped up for the purposes of the demo, which increases volatility (quadratically, I think). Setting parameters to more "realistic" values, as well as damping volatility...

I presumed sarcasm doesn't transmit well over the internet ;) Regarding the rai stones (love that example), note that even in that case, what is actually traded aren't the stones, but the rights to the stones -- in fact they were probably the first (surviving at least) concept of modern banking. (Th...

Congratulations, you just reinvented economics. Seriously though, the purpose of money is an intermediary. As I repeat often, money is potentially anything that is a) scarce, and b) useful. Money solves the barter problem, which can also be understood as the O(n^2) search problem and relieves the ne...

I'll try to keep this short and simple. While it can be neglected in some economic models, the role of credit and debt and of the financial system in general is a pretty important one in fully understanding our capitalist economy as it functions in the real world. Specifically, it produces cycles o...

Josh's job programming the AI is to try to make it as capable of performing approximately human-esque actions within a fixed framework of possible actions as possible. That framework has to try to simultaneously allow maximum freedom for a human actor operating within the same framework and using t...

Multiplayer is definitely a feature of LT. (There, I said it). From interacting with people on forums, reading dev logs from a crazy insane developer, looking at animated pictures on a collaborative video sharing website, to sharing ideas for ships/planets/weapons when the game is eventually release...

Discounted cash flow ? All activites, after all, have a time value of money associated with it -- exploration opens up new ores/derelicts/etc, combat rewards you with loot and reputation (which translates into salary in future), mining is directly related to the market price of ores. Using some sor...

Relative value ... wonder where I heard of that before. Anyways, this is a problem that markets can solve, after all: "The purpose of a financial system is to solve a collective optimization problem whose solution we cannot guess a priori." - Seeking alpha So here's the proposal 1. Base EVERYTHING o...