Physical money vs virtual money

Reasoning

In my opinion, illegal activities should be high reward but also high risk, with constant changes in power and hard to maintain. Easy to get into but hard to keep in place. In real life this comes with death and prison, but in the game, these systems do not work as a deterrent as much as they do IRL.
Legal activities, on the other hand, are not as rewarding, but a great place if you are looking for stability and long term success.

Solution

If we make what you earn with illegal activities as easy to lose as it is to gain, while legal activities hard to gain but also hard to lose, it would solve that issue. You could choose the path of easy money but no future or you could choose the path of hard earned money and keep it protected.

Proposal

Have 2 types of money:

Virtual money

It is kept in your bank, where nobody can touch it. You can use it to pay for things anywhere, just like physical money. You receive paychecks in you bank account and receive money for sold legal items directly to your bank account.

Physical money

It can be used anywhere just like virtual money, but you cannot deposit it. You receive this money for all illegal activities, including drug trafficking, illegal fishing, stolen cargo. If you die, you lose the items you are carrying, including physical money.

Final thoughts

At the end of the day, it will be up to the server owner to decide. I think we should have the system in place to allow the server owner to choose:

• Which activities give physical money
• Which activities give virtual money (directly into the bank account)
• Whether you can turn physical money into virtual money or not

from everonlife.

I think if we have this distinction of virtual and physical money, while making vendors accept both, it would not be hard to make them a server setting. One server might choose to only deal with virtual money. Another can choose to make all activities pay with physical money and you have to deposit. Another can choose to make so that legal activities pay with virtual money while illegal activities pay with physical money and you cant deposit it.

Why not have "dirty" physical money that has to be cleaned before it can be deposited, I think that provides the most flexibility as you could limit the dirty money to specific "seedy" vendors, and clean physical money can be used everywhere and deposited. Also, the existence of a money laundering place allows for interesting post situation (i.e bank heist) roleplay, as the police would have places to stake out, this fulfills the increase in risk in your original proposal.

from everonlife.

It would be nice to keep as many things as physical items as possible in my opinion. Having 15.000 1$ bills in your inventory might not be the smartest idea though. So I recommend slightly modifying the inventory code and showing a replicated "quantity" property on a stack of money items you only have once in your inventory. If you drop all your money you don't have anything in your inventory. If you drop only part of it, you have one item in your inventory and one newly created on the ground as a "container" for it.

Sure a purely virtual money system could be made that just shows the amount you have in your inventory, but I personally think that is lame if all the other items are likely to be real "objects" you can manipulate in your inventory and store in containers.

One prerequisite for easy handling of money is transferring all or part of it. Since Arma Reforger has no stack management (everything is always stacked. So no splitting them or anything) and no "move whole stack" function both need to be added manually. I have already looked into this and will push a proof of concept for it as soon as possible.

Any interaction with money or other items needs to be initiated by the client but validated and performed by the server to avoid any kind of "two people pick up the stack of money at the same time" situation.

For a low poly model I have found these so far, that look interesting:
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/money-set-afcb0e5720ad40a98797507861aa371f
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/money-stacks-low-poly-a9ce7f1cd9614376b39a96a1698d9109
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/1e4q6cia46sg-money-5727450a953b4cecb18579f05534c72d
All are CC-BY and as small as I think they are going to get.

from everonlife.

@LuxPoseidon I'll let you know. Will probably take 2-3 days.

from everonlife.

Seeing what I can do with this, implementing it into my HUD UI. My implementation will be digital with no physical bills atm.

https://github.com/LuxPoseidon/EveronLife

from everonlife.

Seeing what I can do with this, implementing it into my HUD UI. My implementation will be digital with no physical bills atm.

LuxPoseidon/EveronLife

A physical item with quantity approach is worked on by me and @Jacob_Mango. But your code could be used for #34, couldn't it?

from everonlife.

Seeing what I can do with this, implementing it into my HUD UI. My implementation will be digital with no physical bills atm.
LuxPoseidon/EveronLife

A physical item with quantity approach is worked on by me and @Jacob_Mango. But your code could be used for #34, couldn't it?

Absolutely, that’s what I picked up first, I am starting to implement the money portion just for testing the UI really, when you guys have a version where I can call into your code for values let me know and I’ll be happy to integrate it.

from everonlife.

@Arkensor let me know if you want me to have a go at compressing/implementing the models and textures.

If it will all be stack-based, a good place to start might just be having a single money item, that is a $1 note that can be stacked in unlimited amounts. I found this one, with virtually no polys and we could compress the texture down I think we could get it in for like 50kb or something
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/one-dollar-bill-5867dd6d021846beba9cf589422f7ca1

from everonlife.

Physical money

It can be used anywhere just like virtual money, but you cannot deposit it. You receive this money for all illegal activities, including drug trafficking, illegal fishing, stolen cargo. If you die, you lose the items you are carrying, including physical money.

Great ideas.

I think physical money should be able to be deposited, if seperate I feel it won't be as valuable. There is no need to seperate the two in my opinion, but I like old school takistan life revolution. I agree with being paid for any item in physical form, jobs pay via bank account.

from everonlife.

Yea don't think of them as separate things, just allow physical item when its on a player as an option to server owners.

from everonlife.

I think if we have this distinction of virtual and physical money, while making vendors accept both, it would not be hard to make them a server setting.
One server might choose to only deal with virtual money.
Another can choose to make all activities pay with physical money and you have to deposit.
Another can choose to make so that legal activities pay with virtual money while illegal activities pay with physical money and you cant deposit it.

from everonlife.

I think every activity should give physical money. You can deposit / withdraw or pay a trader directly from your bank (virtual).

Why not have "dirty" physical money that has to be cleaned before it can be deposited,

I also really like this idea. Keeps all the money physical but makes illegal activities harder. So you cant just rob a bank and put all the money directly in your bank account while you are there.

from everonlife.

@thebonbon traditionally in the past life mods you could not deposit money ~X minutes after robbing gas station or bank.

from everonlife.

@thebonbon traditionally in the past life mods you could not deposit money ~X minutes after robbing gas station or bank.

The A3 framework I used to play on had a dirty money system like I proposed, I think that's better than a straight timer, you could always sit in a random building and wait it out, whereas a dirty money system means you're likely to butt heads with cops . Nothing inherently wrong with a straight timer, I just think it's not as "immersive"

from everonlife.