Alright guys, I have access to the City now, but due to the update, Bot events and Hat events both got CRC'd, and so the food system in restaurants is stalled, and all chairs are messed up.
But in other news, the news. I am in the process of creating the general newspaper system where you can change your job, check stocks, read random news articles, check your horoscope, and check on sports. Currently, only the general news part is in progress. I'll get into detail later in the post.
I have also started on a new house design that will kick the other one's ass. Since I'm rolling with premade houses on each lot, I can expand the brick count per house. As such, I decided to make double-walled houses, that being an exterior color and an interior color, so as to make the house seem more lively. This will, unfortunately, increase brick count to about 2.8k bricks per house, according to my extremely quick estimation powers, but I feel that will be fine. I may or may not name each individual house part so as to easily recolor interiors and exteriors, such as the color for bricks or for wallpaper. I most likely will not, but it was just a quick idea. For many of you, school has started already, I start school on Tuesday, and this is my Junior year so I expect to play very little anything for a while. Therefor, I'm aiming to get a huge chunk of the city finished off.
Another feature I have thought about is mail. Yes, I know there is a mail mod, here you type in the person's name, then the message, then the person receives the message. But, if I remember right, this only works if that particular player is on the server. Also, would it be very realistic for someone to send mail without a house? I think not. Therefor, I am thinking up a brilliant way to send actual mail from the post office to a house. I'll go deeper in thought on this later.
A few more features I thought up is fluctuating gas prices (similar to how the future stock system will work), the lottery, resource-based economy, as was discussed earlier, better farming than was already thought up, and more.
Eventers, let's talk. Here are some basic concepts that I have made for various additions.
Newspaper:
As I said earlier, I am making a newspaper with events. Nothing graphically special (only text, no newspaper-styled GUI thingy...Yet...
Now, time for eventy stuff.
I'll give a brief word explanation then a simple example in event form.
First off, the mods I am using for this are: Daycycle events by Lugnut, Command events by mold, prompt events by truce, and VCE by Destiny, Chrono, Clockturn, and Truce. Once Lugnut gets Daycycle events working, hopefully soon, then true testing of the newspaper can begin. First off, when the Daycycle is midnight, ie daycycleOnmidnight, a minigame variable is randomized. For example's purposes, lets say one day, .16485 is randomly generated, this variable is "News". This is on a hidden brick in the hidden brick area where I keep hidden bricks that edit environmental factors, turn on lights, and generally run the game. On the news box brick, there you pickup your newspaper, when you click it, the newspaper comes up with "News, Sports, Jobs...". At this point, you say what category you want, using command events, so /c News. When this command is called, it checks between what two point the variable "News" has been set to. Our number was .16485, so it is in the 0<=x<.2 range. This then triggers a specific function, yes function (finally I have a use for this), which then displays a few lines that act like a news article. There will be 5 news articles that can be randomized, this the range being 0<=x<.2 . That is basically it for how I will do newspapers for this, restaurants, housing, etc...
I'm too lazy to do any event writing tonight.
Fluctuating gas price:
As like the real world, gas prices are not fixed at a certain amount, they go up and down. To replicate this, I will use a similar tactic as the discussed stock system. It's quite simple, really. A hidden brick randomly generates two numbers. The first is stored to "VChance", the second is "Change". First, if "VChance" is 0<=x<.5, then "Value" is set to 0. "Value" is for setting a positive or negative trend. If "VChance" is 50<=x<=1, then "Value" is set to 1. Next, the brick uses if variables to modify the variable "Price" (gas price) by checking "Value", 0 for subtract, 1 for add, then adds/subtracts "Change" from "Price". Easy, done.
I'll add some more in a little bit.
Poll