I got to thinking - what if the person I choose to help out doesn't cut me back any of the profits or help me back in any other way? Well then, the next time I find a distant system possibly laden in valuable ore, I'll send my own subordinates to that system instead, even if the round-trip takes days or weeks. And this turned into a little fantasy:ThymineC wrote:For instance, say I point a long-range scanner at a star system that's 10,000 light-years away and discover that there's a fair probability that it is rich in latinum. That information may not be immediately beneficial to me - however, I pin a note about it to the distributed star map, which other members of the community playing with the same map seed can then see. Now say that you're only a few dozen jumps from that system - then you may very well be interested in checking it out, so you go exploring and discover that my analysis was correct. Now, you may be inclined to pay me back in some way (perhaps a cut in whatever profits you make off of all that latinum wink wink nudge nudge).
Captain's Log, 11235.9 Standard Galactic.
One of Admiral Thymine's Surveyor-class vessels recently spotted a system apparently brimming with trionium, zirilium, parxite...really, quite a lot of things, all very valuable. Anyway, the admiral's put me and my crew in charge of extracting it. I can't say it's going to be easy, though - the system in question is ZYGHH-3, about 1500 light-years from our current location. Getting there and back will take about a week, and that's assuming we survive; most of the systems in the ZYG sector are dark, and according to the historical records of the region there have been quite a number of ships that have gone missing when trying to cross it, though those that made it through reported nothing unusual at all.
For now, we're docked at corporate HQ in Zaranis while my navigation officer charts a course, though we should be heading off within the hour. To be honest, I'm not quite sure what to feel right now - excitement, fear? It's been a long time since I've been given a job like this, and never through such a dangerous area of space. If the admiral's right about the system, though...within a week we could be pulling back here with several billion credit's worth of ore in our hold, and that isn't small change. And if we do run into trouble in the sector? Well, we've always beaten the odds. And if we survive, we'd certainly have some good stories to tell.
I've proposed the idea of having an automatic log-keeping mechanic in the past, in which the game logs important events that occur or actions that you take while playing the game and perhaps develops a story out of them. I know that some, such as Flatfingers, are very much in favour of such a system as well. But can this system also be applied to NPCs? Or should it solely be applied to NPCs? The point of this poll is to see how you guys would like a log-keeping system to be implemented in LT, if at all. I don't expect these logs to be anything like the one I posted above, but a string of entries giving brief information about events perhaps along with what the NPC feels about them could suffice.
The idea behind NPC logging is basically that NPCs keep logs of what they do, what they see, etc., and at any time I can request those logs from my subordinates and read them. This will work as a procedural story-generation system then, where I get to read the story of each of my NPC's. This would be particularly appealing to me if I send an NPC on a long-distance mission in which I may not be able to keep track of it or have any idea of what happens to it unless it survives the mission, returns back and I can study the log.
Furthermore, if a logging mechanic should exist for the player, should their logs be auto-generated or should they need to be manually entered? Should there be a hybrid option in which logs are automatically generated but the player is free to edit them?
