| From: | Gurth <gurth@******.NL> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Re: VR 2.0 |
| Date: | Fri, 29 May 1998 11:43:14 +0100 |
> One aspect of the book bothers me, however: the methods by which deckers
> obtain their programs. Either they buy them, or they write them. Writing
> them takes excessive amounts of time: the example given of a decker with a
> computer skill of 8 (damn good) taking a base time of 128 days to write an
> Attack-8S program. Buying them is extremely expensive: Hacker House sells
> computer programs for three million nuyen. That Attack-8S could be sold
> for 128,000 nuyen. That's a pretty amazing living, 1000 nuyen a day.
Same as for magicians making foci, really. What I'm wondering
about is why these things are so damn expensive anyway; sure,
corps (or deckers) invest lots of time and resources in writing
them, but once it exists, you can copy it any time you like --
Street Index being around 0.00001 or something :)
> Given good programming techniques, it seems reasonable to me that one
> should be able to 'upgrade' existing programs that you own.
Agreed.
> I've been working on a rules system to allow this, but I'm wondering what
> people on the list feel should be important considerations. For example,
> when should upgrading a program be a losing proposition as opposed to
> rewriting from scratch? Which options should be the most difficult to add?
> For example, transforming a one-shot program into a full utility should be
> very difficult; the one-shot option has a tremendous amount of
> optimization and little tricks which allow it to fit in the smaller memory
> space. Additionally, if it were not difficult, software houses couldn't
> offer one-shot test programs. Upgrading a program to have an Area option
> should be much more difficult than upgrading the Area to a higher rating.
Upgrading is already covered in VR 2.0, on page 107. Basically
you work out the difference between what it is and what you want
it to be, and base the time required on that. The TN is that for the
full program, so it is just as difficult to upgrade a Cloak-2 to a
Cloak-6/Optimization as it is to write Cloak-6/Optimization from
scratch.
If you want more detail, you could add some stuff around these
rules. However, deciding on when it's better to start from scratch
then to upgrade is probably very difficult to put into rules, unless
you want to add rules for upgrades taking up extra memory,
bandwidth, or whatever (because there'll be some redundant bits
you can't easily remove, or forget to, for example).
--
Gurth@******.nl - http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/index.html - UIN5044116
Your actions speak so loud I can't hear a word you're saying.
-> NERPS Project Leader * ShadowRN GridSec * Unofficial Shadowrun Guru <-
-> The Plastic Warriors Page: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gurth/plastic.html <-
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