Galactic Milieu TwoMoons

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    • Galactic Milieu TwoMoons

      Greetings.

      I have been developing a meta-game known as the Galactic Milieu for quite a few years now.

      Unfortunately the Devtome wiki where most of the documentation lives is down right now as the DeVCoin project prepares to move all the useful content to the STEEM platform else I'd give you a link about the Milieu.

      Instead I shall just briefly explain that the general idea is to find all the massively multiplayer free open source games that actually work and weave them all together into an over-arching multiverse using Cryptocurrencies.

      Since TwoMoons seems to actually work, it has been slowly warming up ready for use in the Milieu for a few years now.

      The larger universe consists of one or more galaxies populated with FreeCiv-based planets, surrounded by a layer of galaxies implemented using XNova Redesigned, which in turn is to be surrounded by galaxies implemented using TwoMoons.

      The rationale is that it is known from things like O-game and its clones that the universe or at least the multiverse has many many many extremely aggressive "things" out there somewhere, thus the "home galaxy" or "home galaxies" where the FreeCiv-based planets live need a good deep strong layer of defense galaxies extending outward as far as possible in a pre-emptive attempt to protect the "home galaxy" or "home galaxies" and thus all the FreeCiv-based, aka "civilised", worlds.

      We started with XNova Redesigned mostly because we had to start somewhere, and at the time I assume it probably must have looked to be one of the newer and hopefully better free open source scripts for such a thing.

      The civilisations on the FreeCiv worlds use a number of "cryptocurrencies", and in particular two intergalactic Corps / corporations, Galactic Mining Corp (GMC) and General Retirement Funds (GRF) each have their own currency.

      Both currencies are, like BiTCoin, currencies of only 21 million coins total.

      Because back then (2012 or so by the look of it, to judge by how far back the tables of asset values at galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html go) players were mostly still just individual characters using CoffeeMUD or Crossfire RPG to walk around on parts of the FreeCiv worlds in individual-character scale and thus were not exactly rich compared to the FreeCiv nations some of them had managed to set up, it was decided that financing would be provided for players willing to take on the task of controlling robotic mining colonies in the outer galaxies (that is, to play XNova Redesigned).

      Thus, the backstory for people creating a colony (aka signing up as a player) in the XNova Redesigned galaxies was that they had borrowed 1000 GMC scrip (coins) and 1000 GRF scrip (coins) from GMC and GRF respectively, and were to pay off those loans by shipping DEUterium to GMC and/or GRF depots out in that same set of outer galaxies.

      In other words, both GMC and GRF sent out colony ships themselves (somehow...) to the outer galaxies, from the "home galaxy" or "home galaxies" of the FreeCiv worlds, and set themselves up out there ready to act as "depots" for receiving shipments of DEUterium, and then they started sending out such colony-ships on behalf of anyone else who wanted to get out there and start making mining colonies, at a cost to the new player of 1000 GMC and 1000 GRF coins, on credit.

      In order that any delays in processing financials about deliveries not mess up accounting due to the changes in the values of currencies and DEUterium over time, we started including a table, galaxies.mygamesonline.org/deuterium.html of DEUterium prices alongside each new round of calculations of the values of other assets such as the GMC and GRF coins.

      Thus you can look up at galaxies.mygamesonline.org/deuterium.html what the intergalactic mining corporations were being paid for DEUterium over time.


      If you are curious how much that might work out to in "real money", you can look at "Asset values expressed in BiTCoins" and other similar tables, all linked from the galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html page and all showing the same timestamps of when they were all re-calculated together.


      There is also a Latest Rates Include File, intended for including into shell scripts, so that various scripts can be built to automatically post buy and sell offers based on the latest rates.

      The "Latest Rates include file" is at galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc and shows values in terms of DeVCoins, partly because for much of history DeVCoins had been the cheapest-per-coin coin thus provided the finet "granularity" of values to show in the file. It is of course simple to make shell scripts to include that file and use its values to re-write in in terms of any of the other items or in terms of arbitrary values. (Such as if you want to figure out how much those values are in francs, or lire, or yen, or dollars or whatever, you can look up one of the items prices somewhere in the currency you are interested in and use that with a shell script to convert them all into that.)

      Once we commenced play, of course, various facts began to emerge. No plan survives first contact with the enemy, as they say. :)

      For one thing, it was eventually discovered that XNova Redesigned has never even really begun to implement combat. Oops!

      Well hey, for us that turned out to be a feature, not a bug! Because it means our first layer of defense galaxies around the "home galaxy" or "home galaxies" is by-design peaceful. All those mining colonies the civilised worlds sent out all live in peace with one-another, and hey for all we know maybe whatever is making them all peaceful might not even just be programming we built into the colony ships we sent out but could even turn out to be some kind of "ancients" or the leganday / mythical civilisation known as the Hackers, or gosh knows who, enforcing peace using "technology sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magick".

      For another thing, it turned out that allowing random passers-by on the internet to sign up and play resulted in the majority of the colonies being abandoned.

      Some people literally just signed up, looked around inside, and did not even build anything!

      Some started a few things building then never came back.

      A very few developed far enough to build one or two additional colonies for themselves but then vanished never to be heard from again.

      Meanwhile, having discovered the lack of combat feature of XNova Redesigned, we had gone hunting again for some alternative script to use.

      That led us to TwoMoons. A few years ago, so not the latest version certainly.

      Somehow an "Admin" colony was sent out to those outer-outer galaxies; and for a few years now it has slowly been building. Now it has eight planets and can build Deathstar type ships and is working on the tech for the huge gravitics-powered star-freighter type of ship. So we are about ready to set the details of how exactly the process of colonising these outer-outer galaxies is going to go.

      Partly because we figured that we should check whether combat actually works in TwoMoons before going ahead with mass colonisation, and partly because not all the players who came into the Galactic Milieu from the "play an individual character walking around a city or dungeon or whatever" scale of MMRPG have no familiarity with "O-game clones" at all and might like to play-test the same scripts the "real" game will be using, we set up a test server at twomoons.mygamesonline.org/index.php

      IT IS IMPORTANT TO NOTE that that "test server" or "demo server" is NOT (yet) PART OF THE GALACTIC MILIEU!

      THAT MEANS no Milieu currency, no stargates for shipping between that server and actual / "real" Galactic Milieu servers and so on.

      It is a demo of how the scripts are set up though, so for example it has way the heck more galaxies than you are probably used to, and they are much farther apart (the gap between galaxies being comparable to the width of a galaxy) so that a standard colony ship had to be modified a little even just to be able to fly right past one galaxy to another one beyond it, using 90% of its cargo space for fuel to do it. (In the default setup, there were typically only about 9 galaxies and a colony ship from galaxy one could typically fly all the way to galaxy nine.)

      There are 250 galaxies of 500 planets each.

      But there are no GMC nor GRF depots buying DEUterium.

      The Galactic Milieu cannot really afford to have entire colony-ships pop up out of no-where and stuff like that.

      It is bad enough that at the individual-character scale a layer could create a character, drop its starting-gear, delete the character and create another over and over and over thereby "creating stuff out of no-where"; the economy can maybe survive a little of that but entire intergalactic colony starships appearing out of nothing would really mess up the economy. So the demo / test server, which allows random passers-by to simply create an account and play, necessarily cannot be part of the actual Galactic Milieu.

      But recall that I did say a rationale for this whole setup is the idea that "somewhere out there" galaxies full of agressors presumably exist.

      So when the time does come for all these layers upon layers of defenses of the Home Worlds to be put to the test, it does seem more likely that the denizens of this test/demo server will be put into play than that some other random O-game-clone-server run by someone else be chosen to gain the ability to build stargates capable of connecting to the Galactic Milieu galaxies.

      So, first step here is do feel free to go test our test/demo server, twomoons.mygamesonline.org/index.php

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