[MUD-Dev2] [TECH] Implementing currency without implementing currency

[William Leader]

Nick Koranda wrote:
> William Leader wrote:
>>    So assuming that I have a mechanism for NPC's to know what they 
>> will and won't accept as currency. The only remaining question is how 
>> to count it. The code does not currently support stackable objects. 
>> If a character has two of something, then there are two instances of 
>> the object not a big deal since they are just another record in the 
>> database. So right now If I wanted a character to have say, 100 gold 
>> pieces than that becomes 100 records in the database. It also becomes 
>> 100 items in the players inventory to manage. Thats not so good. 
>> Currency in this form demands stackable objects. I just don't see 
>> away around it. In the past I have avoided stackable items for no 
>> other good reason than that I have heard they are the source of most 
>> duping bugs. Is there any truth to this or am I just being paranoid?
>>
>
> I would imagine you could have multiple currency values such as 
> nickels, dimes, quarters so that 5 nickels would be equivalent to 1 
> quarter and so on.  The code could handle auto converting to the least 
> amount of coinage.  So you would not have to carry around 100 gold 
> pieces (or 100 objects) but say 5 platinum (5 objects).  If the 
> exchange wasn't exact then you would have 4 plat is 17 gold, but still 
> less then the 100 objects.  It would get around from having stackable 
> objects.

This kind of implies having notes/coins of different denominations. 
Which I hadn't considered in the initial post. Basically each object 
would have to have a currency type flag, so Dollars, Pounds, Peso, etc. 
It would also have to have a value flag. a 1 pound coin could have a 
value of one, a 20 pound note, 20, a 50 Pence piece, .5...I think this 
gets rather complicated, and doesn't seem to add much to the game. I 
think it just adds a lot of aggravation to the players, and makes the 
code more complicated. If I did end up implementing stackable objects, 
then it wouldn't be so bad if there was just a single denomination. Hmm....