philux

I concur with OP. Hopefully, Novaquark can come up with a hybrid system that allows for actual projectile physics in less crowded instances for a more realistic experience.
Relying only on tab locking reduces dog fighting and ground infantry combat to aiming and dice rolling, which is IMHO a contradiction to the otherwise modern approach of the game.

I think some people are missing the point; which is that the lack of space combat at release will turn some people away by default. It won't matter if players won't be able to build ships capable of CvC for months after release, the fact that it's an option will be a draw for some people. If you take that possibility away then those people will never give the game a second look. They'll see "no combat" - and even if the next word is "yet" or "soon" it wont matter, because they are drawn to combat games. 
 
In a post No Man's Sky world people are afraid to be optimistic, and they're predisposed to not trusting any game that looks anything like NMS. From the surface, DU looks a lot like NMS. So the phrase "soon" will be met with instant distrust. I hope the Devs at NQ understand this and have some plan to deal with that inevitable reaction. I've already seen at least one rant video on youtube about how this game is just another money trap like NMS was, and that's only going to get worse as time goes on.

For example in the most recent AMA video he answers questions about the damage model and how its related to voxels. Specifically about how damage actually breaks voxels and makes realistic type damage to blocks and systems. He doesn't mention there that this is something they aren't planning on doing before launch. We've seen ships with gun, and statements like those about how damage affects voxels. Unless you really read into it, you'd think CvC would be in this game. Hence it is misleading and should be addressed. 

What kind of space game doesn't have space ship combat?
 
Yes, I know the answer to that question, but the vast majority of people don't. They will see a game with pacifist space ships and say "what the heck, this game sucks, why can't I put guns on my spaceship?" And, from a limited perspective, they will have a point. Launching the game without combat will be just as bad as launching the game in Alpha state. It will feel unfinished because it will be unfinished. I don't want to play a space ship game with spaceships that can't blow each other up, especially given the overwhelming number of competitors that will have this feature. I cannot express with words how much launching without ship combat will hurt the future of this game.
 
I mention NMS because it will be the first game to come to people's minds when they hear about DU. As soon as they hear the phrase "limitless universe" they'll say "oh no, I fell for this once and I am NOT going to go there again!" Du will have to overcome the massive distrust and negativity that is the specter of No Man's Sky, and "not talking about it" will not make that problem go away.
 
You can stick your head in the sand all you want, but these are real issues for a lot of people, and we need to talk about them right now, not after launch when it's already too late. Hopefully we reach the stretch goal and this whole thing becomes irrelevant, but as of right now the Kickstarter has earned less than $5,000 in the last 24 hours, so something is clearly wrong.

Let me start by saying that I'm very excited about this game, I've backed it from day 1 of the Kickstarter, and I've been promoting it to everyone who will listen ever since. I very much want this project to succeed.
 
That being said, the idea that PvP might not be included in the launch of the game is a very serious negative for me and any other player whose main gameplay in MMOs is PvP. I have no doubt that such an absence of combat will turn off a lot of people just on principal. Building games are all well and good, but DU isn't setting out to be a prettier Minecraft, or a PvE-only Space Engineers. If DU wants to be, as the Devs say, "the next best Sci-Fi MMORPG" then it cannot launch without a combat system.
 
For example: I can run around for hours in The Witcher 3 just playing Gwent and exploring because those are all fun and enjoyable experiences; but if the game didn't have combat in it I never would have bought it in the first place, because combat is an essential part of every RPG. The fate of Dual Universe will largely hinge on the review scores it receives at launch, and if there is no combat then you can bet that every single one of those reviews will reflect strongly on that absence. You do not get a second chance at a first impression, and DU's first impression can't be as another half-baked, all-promise-no-delivery No Mans Sky clone.
 
It's not good enough for combat to show up "eventually", it has to be there at launch, and it has to be at least decent. Just thinking of the 100 or so people in my EVE corp, it wont matter how good the game is; if there's no combat they won't even give it a second look.
 
I want this game to succeed too much to ignore what I consider to be a failure-inducing design decision.
 
Thoughts?

I'll continue to say, I think they should have followed the Eve Online model.
 
- PLEX does not have to be converted into an ingame item immediately
- You do not have to be in the same station as your PLEX to redeem it
- You do not have to bring it into the game to redeem it
- If you convert it to an ingame item, you can trade it to other players
- If it is an ingame item it can be stolen while moving it through space
 
 
Why do people move PLEX through space if they can just redeem them from wherever they are? 
 
That is a question nobody will ever really have a concise answer to, but it's something that happens and many people suffer the consequences for taking that risk. 

Because that is the risk vs reward that works as a balance to keep them from becoming a pay2win item.
 
The reward for bringing them into the game is potentially making money or trading them for resources or items, the counter to that should be that DAC's should be lootable. Otherwise there is no risk for bringing them into the game and moving them around. 
 
Without looting it establishes a secondary form of currency that is immune to looting, and creates a store of value that is impossible to attack. Player run banks are effectively going to be warehouses for DAC's now, since it's the only store of value they can keep that is immune. 
 
They become risk-free ways of moving large amounts of money through the game. 

i would say otherwise, first, you would have ways to counteract it with skills and ship modules, second, it allows for a more fine tuning of the balance of agility builds, thing is agility builds with the current theoretical system are OP, and will be nerfed in other ways that will make them less fun like limiting speed with skill, or else. anyways the modification will result in a linear downscale. G forces would allow for a logarithmic reality based (not stats) progression you can mitigate in various ways. The problem is not if you will die, it is how will you integrate your modules that prevent this.
 
You assume just G force is the end of the story but no. everything is connected. if you remove such a deep feature (deep because it changes the most basic mechanics and affects vastly every player) you also remove the interaction it has with all other aspects of the game, like ship deign that would need more thinking, industry to create the most efficient anti-G-Force module, battles that could be changed by propulsing ships too fast with tractor beams and killing its crew, destruction of probes too close to black holes, death upon impact on physical objects, ship ramming.
 
and i think there are more.
 
thing is it is a complexification agent, in the early game you buy a anti-G-Force module and that's it. later you will have to deal with it way more profoundly, in nearly every aspect of DU.
 
Thing is control over it has to be provided, but you have to provide enough for it, and if you don't you get punished, but you can use it against your ennemies.
 
This could even generate a new kind of weapon: a graviton well, that accelerates a ship into a singularity and then stops it dead in the center thus creating immense G-forces, the weapon would have a depth and radius relative to the energy used, so for instance a death star sized ship could easily gulp an entire fleet, but most fighters in it will survive because of their improved G-Force resistance.
 
That is the extent it can affect the game. It's not just a matter, dam i got squished, it's a matter of how can i use it to help me and destroy the ennemies.
 
and even more could be extrapolated if thought enough about it.

Well, yeah, that's the jist of it really People can't expect to venture into areas that have NO security forces by any factions and expect it to be a good idea.

You can't. Welcome to a sandbox game.

If you want to mine in the equivalent of Detroit at night and in space, you are out of luck.

If you want to mine in a region that your faction doesn't police, you are out of luck.

If you want to mine in a faction's main moon of exporting minerals and you are not a member of that faction, you ASKED for it, you are stealing from them and they should drop every rocket they can on your ship.

You and your friends should realise this is not Second Life in Space. You go for mining, better set up duties for each other

One guy runs the mining ship, four others are bodyguards on their ships. That's how it's done in sandbox games. Also, if you are not PvPers or, more likely, Second Life players, you may want to mine in asteroid rings in systems your faction polices frequently and they can guard you in a moment's notice if someojne goes to troll you.

You can't have a sandbox MMORPG and then ask for no interaction. 

If there are no griefers, then mercenaries paid to protect you have no jobs.

if they are anyway near to make a 2000 player battle, they surely can have an array of GPUs: 13 * 2000 = 26000 = ~20 nvidia Titan X
which has a total of 20 * 3584 cuda cores which can calculate the physics of a whopping 71680 bullets physics simultaneously:
2000 instructions per shot physics tick (very generous estimation)
so it can calculate 1417000(base clock so probably even higher) / 2000 * 71680 = 50785280 theoretical bullet physics per second.
which would be half for a 1000 player battle.
(memory is negligible as only the relevant physics voxels will be loaded in vram, which would hardly approach 12 gigs)
 
You, my sir, have ludicrous claims.
Have a nice being destroyed (no offense, just for the drama ).
 
EDIT:
 
I have mistaken (yes self destruction), one gpu cycle does not coincide with one instruction, and thus will more likely be in the realm of 10 million theoretical bullet physics per second because of the 6 instruction stack size for 20 titan X, please note tho this only describes latency, and such a scenario can only happen if the program is really badly made and compiled. and will such be still around 50M

There is a misunderstanding here, on that kind of mmo you cannot let people calculate their physics, only their graphics. Latency is irrelevant since you send input to the server and get the changes of everybody back. The only latency you get is when you shoot and move, and that can be mitigated with a small load timer on the gun and movement prediction and interpolation.

i would quite disagree, G forces have a big impact on space travel. without G-Forces we could use a big cannon to shoot people to mars and done, but that is ludicrous. without G-forces the difficulty curve for agility builds is quite linear towards thrusters tech level and fuel efficiency, but with G force you would have to add exponential inertial dampener transforming that curve in a more logarithmic one, as you need more mass to go faster thus going slower a bit than you would without.

You're mixing up several things here: the g-force effecting a body is the acceleration of it in terms of multitudes of the earth's gravity. Despite its name, g-force must not necessarily be caused by gravitational fields but also exists without any gravity, i.e., in space with zero gravity when a force is applied to a body.

even in large battle it would be possible to maintain if the calculations are parallelized. I already did something similar in my physics sandbox, i multiplied performance by 100, literally (there were caveats, but they were due to hardware limitations (physics precision)).
A good opencl handler could handle about 10000 - 100000 physical moving shots on an average gpu (770m) easily. (has to have physics ordered in an octtree)
 
well, if it was only relying on me you coud plug a gpu on a potato and dual universe would work efficiently lol.

I concur with OP. Hopefully, Novaquark can come up with a hybrid system that allows for actual projectile physics in less crowded instances for a more realistic experience.
Relying only on tab locking reduces dog fighting and ground infantry combat to aiming and dice rolling, which is IMHO a contradiction to the otherwise modern approach of the game.

i would like to have Aerodynamics in the game i mean there should be difference between flying in space and a atmosphere of a planet.
for taking of there can be some sort of lifting trusters or an anti-g system probably a conbination of both.
So those wings would make sense and for bigger ships you could do that anti-g system but they should be build in space only whit shuttles to land on the surfice.
probably an gravitation model for the planets would be nice so you cant just position a spacestation at 0 velocity above a planet. they would require an orbit.

My problem with targetin is that you cant target different parts on a spaceship so you cant do things like destroying the reactor to prevent escape.
 
Plus i think targeting should be done like flight control. you should be able to change the script.

Bad combat can ruin non-combat focused games.

Hello Dualiers,
 
The plan right now is (according to what i have seen and heard) to have a stats based locking targeting system. it is extremely cheap. too cheap. the problem with it is that the battle becomes more of a dice roll, as can be seen in eve online. You target point blank on a battleship (miss) wtf... these kinds of things are frustrating.
 
there are tons of ways to contour the problem with kinetic weapons and their delay, the easiest way to reduce performance drain is to handle them like a shell + their movement, it calculates then an intersection on that 4D-ish object (it is in practice flattened into 3D) every frame, not more expensive than having a player. then you can put a limit in the form of reloading time, real battleship shells take 10-20 seconds to reload in best of cases.
 
besides that, lasers are practically free, but do less damage, and have tendency to overheat so you have to stop them quite often if not reducing their lifespan considerably, and use a lot of energy.
 
you get the idea of the gameplay implications.
 
this system would allow to handle all weaponry shots in one container, thus reducing development costs and code base pollution risks.
 
this is mostly important if we want to make weapons interact between planets and space, as punching a hole in a vessel in space would be ludicrous from the planets surface. and what about 1000mm planet-space cannons, do these not ark? 
 
in addition to that this system would allow for massive increase in need of good targeting scripts or canoneers (there would be visual aid for players (can be cheaply calculated with raymarching, but  it is relative t the memory architecture you chose for the physics mesh, if there is a phase where it is static in the loop, it may be worth it to do it asynchronously in a separate thread if it is the case)
 
eve online opted for that system because it uses 1 second ticks, i don't think you work like that, and if it is the case there is no advantage to it except a relatively small amount of computations, as you would have to determine the voxel to break anyway...
 
and what about people who want a fast fighter with Gatlings? locking would be so unsatisfying, especially if you target a starbase...
 
but anyway, this is my opinion and my vision of locking may be wrong.
 
hope you find this idea interresting .
 
just remember, my point is control vs simplicity (pro control).

Should I decide to play the game (still on the fence), I will probably also be in a ship most of the time. That's why I hope for satisfying Newtonian flight mechanics and a better alternative to dull, EVE-like tab targeting in the finished game.

And some people become uncritical fanboys too fast, wasting the opportunity to give the devs valuable feedback about weak elements of their concept early in development, and to propose better alternatives to consider as long as things need not yet be carved in stone.

DU definitely comes across as space sim-ish at first sight. For potential customers lurked into the forum by this, reading about tab targeting, tech trees and skill bars is a painfull process.

Indeed! The concept of "spell-casting and rolling the dice" by clicking on enemy ships has been done for over 10 years in EVE. Simply reusing those archaic mechanics takes away much of the novelty and appeal of the otherwise fantastic concept of DU.

I hope in-game physics adhere at least to the basics of Newton's laws. Additionally, I hope flight  will be main-thruster centric with only believably strong but not(!) overpowered maneuvering thrusters. Thirdly, I hope the effects of g-forces on the pilot (vertigo, red & black out, etc.) will be modeled correctly and thus dictated "smoother" flight patterns in combat; instead of erratic twitch shooting, circle-strafing, zigzaging, etc.