Feature Update (0.1.7)
Our hard work last week making the QC chip has finally paid off and we have some massive updates into our currency system this week, which is finally completed in its initial inception. Join us in this pretty exciting feature update covering all the features being tested for version 0.1.7-dev.
Last week we unveiled the QC chip and a primitive currency system. However, after getting some solid feedback from our community on our discord, we’ve leveled it up into something that we're quite proud of.
If you haven't checked out our last feature update where we cover the basic implementation of the QC chip, take a look here:
You should also take a moment to read the lore behind the Quantum Communication Network if that's your thing!
We now have enough of our currency system to show it to our community and we're beyond excited!
The QC Wallet
At the core of our currency system lies the QC wallet, which is no more than a space of address and password list stored in your QC chip, authorizing you to access the financial data of specific wallets.
You can create an unlimited amount of wallets and delete them; it does not matter. What is incredible is that these wallets are not stored in the database, but use a real encryption system that actually allows the system to verify that the password matches the wallet address. Which means that you could delete a wallet and forget about it, but someone adds it years in the future and recovers access to it.
But before we dive further into the system, let's take a look at an example.
The Simple Set-Up
Imagine you are a simple person who works a simple job and does not really need a complex set-up. You have a single wallet where you manage all of your money, receive all of your funds, do not need anything else.
This is how a transaction after doing some work for someone in the station might look like:
As you can see, the player has a single wallet, they can access their balance, and they receive a trade offer.
However, since all of these transactions will be recorded in a public service that can be queried (we will show how this works), the more meaningful the transactions, the more interest there might be from the player-side to mask these transactions.
Hiding Your Trail
As the player begins to get involved in the underworld of the colony, they might start to involve themselves in deals the do not want to track back to them by the authorities or by any curious freelance auditors.
As such, they create a new wallet to handle all transactions that are illegal or sensitive.
They begin to use this second wallet for more shady business and after a few weeks, this account has amassed a lot of wealth.
After letting it sit for a while, they decide its time to use these funds. So they need to transfer some funds from wallet #1 (the shady wallet) to #0 (the one they use day-to-day).
Conversely, this same syntax (transfer <amount> to <address>) can be used to transfer funds to people that are not physically in the room you're in.
We want people to have to consider how to mask their funds and this makes criminals have to think about how to money launder funds obtained from accounts that are known to be illegal.
If your transactions are all legal, maybe you want to hide your funds a little bit so that other people do not know that you are quite rich – but if you are doing illegal business, this becomes a necessity.
However, this economy is not controlled by anyone, so for it to track back to you, someone somehow has to learn that you control a specific account to figure details about you and your life.
We're pretty excited to see how this system ends being used!
Game Time
Game in Untold Dawn is 8 times faster than real life. Which means that for every second that passes in real life, 8 seconds pass in the game!
We have implemented a time command in the QC chip which lets you see the current time on the planet, although this UI is for now work in progress.
Here you can see some screenshots of how the color of it changes through time.
Groups
We have begun the hard work into making groups in game. The backend for groups involves nearly 1.000 lines of code which were all written during this week.
The idea is that groups should be flexible enough that both players and admin can create them. This functionality is extremely work in progress and the next few days are likely going to be spend further polishing it and integrating it to other systems. There is a lot of hard work that went into this that screenshots will, for now, not do enough credit to. However, let's try our best!
When you type QC, you can view a helpfile on how to manage your groups. Our character types QC and sees this:
Here you can see all the groups that you belong to and when ou joined. This screen is extremely work-in-progress, and any suggestions on how to best present this information is appreciated.
Let's say you want to create a new group. It is pretty easy (for now)!
This system might appear simple, but under the hood there is a lot of things that are going on.
The system:
- Creates the group with the given name and description.
- Automatically creates an Owner role.
- Gives the Owner role SuperAdmin permission.
- Creates a membership between the creating user and the Owner role.
There's various things we need to do now with this system, including deleting group, managing roles and their permissions and adding new users. We also need to add a way to pay people through this system and have the system have a post. But this is the progress we've done so far on this side of things!
What's next?
This was a pretty important week for Untold Dawn with a lot of exciting progress.
This coming week will likely be spent working on further group functionality and linking it to currency for payment and costs.
If you have any suggestions on features you'd like to see in the long term or short term, do not hesitate to drop us a message in our forums!
If you enjoy our vision and progress and would like to help us field the costs of our growing list of services, please consider becoming our Patreon. It helps us infinitely to be able to develop this project without worrying about server costs!
