Boltgreywing

@Nate: How do I display an npc on a page? @kami: That is probably one of the issues that makes it kind of hard. @Aminirus: How does one setup one for a shop? 12 hours ago, NateTube said: Here are my takes on the questions for @Boltgreywing: A NPC is basically a scripted "character". They don't really exist as anything other then a placeholder for a real player to interact with. They are not actual players in the game. In the case of a pet site, their logic is usually very simple and they do very mundane things. As @Nate, depends on the purpose of the NPC. Depends on the purpose of the NPC. In some cases, they may always be available to the player. In other cases, they may be setup to be available by time periods, randomly, or by other events. You decide how they appear through your games logic. I will provide a usage scenario or a NPC asking for a loan in the bank thread. @Digital: I am kind of new to this npc thing as I have never used one before and my game development skills are still in its infancy though. I will check out the bank topic.

@Aminirus: I decided to let the age of 7 as the earliest age I would allow in my site. Why 7 well most children 6 and younger usually are not allowed on the internet. I believe 7 year olds have enough knowledge to keep themselves safe. The question to blood and graphic images is that it tends to be pretty ambiguous. Now the question is how graphic is the images in question? Is it like this? Or this? Or do you mean this one? Or is it like this?

@Nate: I just changed the title. The benefit of having a blog is not only does it provide the user with a set of points it also makes the user more visible to other users because now he appears in the news section. Currently the way my website is set up users have the ability to shout on each others profile but no way to be found publicly. Points are the currency that my site uses in the manner of purchasing pets. However since I don't have any pets this doesn't apply. I can't really say how common my points are going to be in the economy because I only have one source and relatively few sinks. I am talking about imaginary money not real money. The points could also be used to pay for npcs.

@Digital: I kind of have a hard time seeing things from a financial concept as I don't see the whole picture that well. I find it easier for me to see most things in the form of parts.

I am quite curious as to how one builds an npc in a virtual petsite? Does it require certain parameters to be filled out? How does it know when it should appear and disappear? How does approve or disprove an npc loan? @Nate.Tube: Mentioned that one could use an npc to help out the bank scenario. How advanced can an npc get? Would the variables for the npc involving the lone fit into these categories: Pays late, pays early, pays on time, never pays lone back, points in npc pouch, npcs income per minute and many more. Would the npcs setting be better based in hex, binary, string or integers? Any advice guys?

@Digital: I will have to give my system a bit more thought. I still need to figure out my sinks and sources before I can do much of anything else.

@Anoua: The way the user bank would make money would be off of loans. Basically other users would place money into your own bank and then you would loan amount some of that money to other users with a bit of interest attached to it. You would then pay your depositers a small amount of interest to keep the points safe there. I don't really know the length of the time the loan would be and as such would be dependent on what the bank owner sets up. However for small amounts such as 400 - 600 points for example many a few days at most to pay back the loan. The amount of interest that the bank would make would usually be higher then what the depositors are paying probably a 4 to 1 ratio. As to if users that can't pay back the loan maybe some of the items they have get converted to points to help pay off the loan. Of course if all things fail then it is possible that this could happen: http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/dune/screenshots/gameShotId,633337/ @kami: I changed the question to a question about bank features. @Digital: Its designed to be a sink initially but the points that users will off of it in the long run from loans will pay out well. Basically I am trying to perform the same idea as what real banks do. @Nate.Tube: I do like the idea of lending money to npcs but how does one create an npc? I do like the idea of an incremental upgrade in banking potential. The interest rate and the manual approval of loans. I thought it be kind of nice to have a shifty npc who basically runs a shop that users buy from and will at times steal the points out of users pouches. Just so there is a bit of variety. I'd like to create a bit of unpredictability in the npc as to its behavior like have some more likely to pay off the loans, others who pay late sometimes and ones who don't back the loan at all.

I am just curious from a virtual pet standpoint. Would users which to run their very own bank? Would users like to deal with run on the bank scenarios?

@Hare: I see, most of the time species will be unique but not the pet ones. That does make sense. @Anoua: One of the problems I have with ids is they are very hard to know who has what id since I id's can get pretty large. I am guessing the same would hold true for blogs, and private messages that it is better to use id's in those cases. What about making pet names unique only among the user they are owned by? For example if user a owned a fish, a cat and a dog would it be okay to name their fish Fred, their Dog Fred and their cat Fred as well? Or should they be allowed to only have a unique name for each pet they own?

@Sparren: When I was talking about donations I was referring to points instead of real money. Basically a group of users donate points to another user in form of points. I am not planning on using real currency with my site. The donation box will feature a retrieve button where the user retrieves the amount in the box for a small fee to use the feature. Only on retrieval will points be subtracted but not on donating to it. I am looking to use it for point commision artist. One of the key things I want as a gameowner is for people to use my site within reason, I don't want individual users to be on 24/7 all the time or even being addicted to it. Those are things that don't really help me out. Taxing the donation box during tax season will only occur once or twice per year which will be a small chunk of the revenue. The taxes i collect would have a potential effect on the soup kitchen so that it keeps running. If the soup kitchen doesn't get enough points through taxes it will shut down. The points would be used to buy the bowls of soup to keep it running. Each owner or pet could visit it for a free meal and for those with points a portion of the money would be taken out to help the less fortunate.

For example take the Neopets sites what the creators decided instead of calling Scorchio species Scorchio they decided to call it Chomby instead even though there is actually a Chomby creature which looks completely different. http://neopets.wikia.com/wiki/Chomby http://neopets.wikia.com/wiki/Scorchio How would one decided between the two Chomby's in this scenario?

@Sparren: I do need to think as to how my users will react to a tax system. The maximum poor people limit I want are users who have up to 5,500 points in cache. I am thinking of breaking my tax system down into 4 different tax system. Each will be calculated independentally so that one can't really be taken advantage by the others available. Pouch: Will be in its own tax bracket Bank: Will be in its own tax bracket Shop: Will be in it own tax bracket Donations: Will be in its own tax bracket @Syntax: I see, I do agree with you in that respect. One of my biggest considerations right now is trying to find where to draw the line from tax considerations. The tax system will be an additional add on to any tax on services. I want it to be a bit more realalistic. What I am looking to find is which users income get marked as 0% tax and which get marked at a higher bracket. This is the US tax system from 2017: Table 1. Single Taxable Income Tax Brackets and Rates, 2017 Rate Taxable Income Bracket Tax Owed 10% $0 to $9,325 10% of Taxable Income 15% $9,325 to $37,950 $932.50 plus 15% of the excess over $9325 25% $37,950 to $91,900 $5,226.25 plus 25% of the excess over $37,950 28% $91,900 to $191,650 $18,713.75 plus 28% of the excess over $91,900 33% $191,650 to $416,700 $46,643.75 plus 33% of the excess over $191,650 35% $416,700 to $418,400 $120,910.25 plus 35% of the excess over $416,700 39.60% $418,400+ $121,505.25 plus 39.6% of the excess over $418,400

So currently 80% of the blog is done with the blog comment section not even yet started. The blogs and blog comments or replies as they would be called will be my first revenue resources with a couple of restrictions. The blog section will also be a source of a sink as well for my virtual pet site Duelingpets. Blogs and replies are my first revenue sources and this is kind of a whip but gives a bit of an idea what I am shooting for. Any advice? The proposed sources and sinks are as follows: Source: +35points Blogs = 30 points (Only available after a blog has successfully past review section and without any ads) Replies = 5 points (Only applies to replies by other users on the blog itself and not the blog owner's replies) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sink: -95,000 points (Only available after a blog is published with ads and the owner has the required points in his pouch) Banner = -63,000 points Mascot = -20,000 points Large images = -3000 points per image Small images = -600 points per image

@Anoua: I think the problem is not the name itself but the coding itself. For example take this for change: http://duelingpets.net/pets/Space Cat Suppose someone decided to also create a Space Cat called SPace CaT or Space Cat in addition to the original one. These two spacecats will not show up because /pets/[name overide] is in effect and it will default to one of them and you don't know which one will be used. That is where the problem occurs and how do I deal with a case like this? @Anoua: Do you have any suggestion as how to deal with this type of issue? This one crops up a lot for me. Syntax: In your database you should probably always store unique ID's anyway. @Syntax: Sometimes there are cases where I can't use ids at all and need to use names instead.

@Syntax: Yeah I am using weird logic. The lower the tax bracket the more you pay. @Anoua Good question. The tax system that I have in place will be on a yearly basis or a biyearly basis either sometime in the summer or a combination of summer and winter. It will take money out of the system since I currently don't know what to do with the extra points. However I am open to ideas of how to do other things with it. The thirty percent thing takes only 3 coins out of the 10 coins from one player. However the player who has a hundred coins is charged a 15% tax which takes out 15 coins out of the system which is 5 times as much as the one with 30% tax applied to it. As the tax bracket gets lower the users higher up have to pay more. It kind of works backwards. 10% can only be charged on users in the 10 category, 1% tax can only be charged to users in the 100's category and .1% can only be charged to users in the 1000 range and so on. I am guessing the taxs could help fund features I am guessing. @Nate.Tube: This sounds kind of like the system I have but its kind of like a big experiment. I don't know if this will actually work well.

I am doing pretty well. The new rebuild progress is going great though.

Some of the old Dune forums are kind of dead.

I just thought I try out a really strange idea for a tax system. 10 - 90 points will have a tax bracket of 30% 100 - 900 points will have a tax bracket of 15% 1000 - 9000 points will have a tax bracket of 7.5% I like a bit of help from the community since I am kind of new at this thing. I know it is not perfect it could use a bit of perfecting.

I do like names to be unique but something like Petri12348854875777477574 is weird. Perhaps it be best to remove numbers otherwise people get lazy. The problem with non unique names is if you are searching for something like Dragon then you might get the first dragon that is found and this can be a problem if your petsite uses names as its difference. Dragon and DRAGON is the same name and this can cause problems. The only way around this would be to use ids but to search for an id gets kind of boring really fast.

The problem with chatboxes is it is dependent on how active your members are. Not everyone is on at the same time all the time. Some are in different countries, changing to Discord doesn't change the problem that the chatbox couldn't solve. I personally don't have a discord and I don't I will get one as I am not active enough to use one. A big issue is if a chatbox or discord is not kept in check the forum will decay and no one will be on here anymore. The cherno forum is a good example of this: https://www.thecherno.com/forums/ This is what happens when a chat system takes over. I don't want this to happen to the gaming list, I already lost the cherno forum and virtualpetlist for the time being. I don't want the gaminglist to fall as well. Its the one place where I can learn things and meet some new people that I can't meet anywhere else. Please don't let this happen.

I see I could use some help balancing my sources and things I don't really have any sinks. I only have sources and source/sinks no full blown sinks.

Speaking of Graphics Magick I used that same code with uploading my files to my website in ruby on rails.

Hey Chazerz welcome back. How are you doing my friend?

The reason it is in hex is because I am using a hex editor to edit certain values to fix up a video game bug. Actually no it is a video game created by the game company Cryo Studios. In the game there is a sietch that you can't get to normally because of a bug in the game making it impossible to fly to unless it is edited in a hex code editor. The sietch in question is Cielma Tuek something. The save file ends in .sav file. I believe the code was originally written in C++, Assembler, C++ or Basic. Here is a bit more information to help you out with it: https://sites.google.com/site/duneeditor/savegame-editing http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Dune_(video_game)

Thanks Digital. By the way do you happen to have any ideas?