MAD-Kuzia

Hello.
 
I made a OCR parser bot for Dual Universe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUtrZ5NDXus
The program automatically grabs all the orders data from the DU markets.
OCR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition
 
I don't have the reverse-engineering knowledge to use memory access or packets intercepting, so I had to settle with OCR.
Because it's OCR, I would need to purchase a new computer able to run DU in order to automate the data collection.
 
If data collection was running 24/7,  there could be a website with the market information and history.
I've made this website for a game I work on: https://stonks.gg/product/BOOSTER_COOKIE
 
For now I plan on waiting for an official API from DU before setting up a website.
Just wanted to share the creation, I had fun making it and maybe someone out there is interested.

Don't waste your time and effort arguing with that guy lol
 
Folks like that can't understand that different people like different thing, that's not ok to them, you have to be like them or you should not exist. That's their mindset.

Why should I slave for an org? And actually, no, I was never setup for Warp Drives or AGG's. I set my sights on building small and efficient ships.
 
Good for you and good for him. That has ZERO to do with me. The sooner you figure out that not everyone is you, the less disappointed you will be when we don't care what you do.
 
No, it's a "I have a life outside of the game, screw being a slave, and don't have years to pour into a game just to be able to do what I want" kind of thing.

I really dislike what 0.23 did to new players most of all.
 
Nobody will really tell you straight up when you join the game that it will take 10,000 hours of straight up mining to finally be in a position of self sufficiency to actuall even start to experience this game 6-12 months into their start to have a fleet of ships for different purposes, an industry, min/max spec talents with other players, a base or two and being able to finally stand up before you consider the losses from pvp, inefficient machines, dings and smashes to destructible parts, ultra saturated markets, and generally being largely able to not do what you want in game or to have a full functional experience on top of it.
 
If you are a new player you have a mountainous grind to the top of everest when you consider a new player cant reliably do anything in game and forget choosing something fun you want to do, you are expected to mine probably 100 hours to just get a ship going that is even worth going mining for in the first place along with the crashes / destructive elements and general lack of talents. They cant go industry which is now under lock and key and beyond the hands of a new player who might be able to buy some of the basics but will be required to either jump to a higher tier but cant mine the stuff so its pretty pointless. Or that their nano crafter is so inefficient that they might as well be deleting the ore since its at like a 40% loss to everything off the bat just to throw the rest away in repairs. And they also cant go piloting first unless they dont want to be able to mine to get the ore to get the ship to get the ore to crash the ship to fix the ship to mine more ore. Its a hell of a daunting thing to ask people in a game with no respawnable resources and expecting people to mine for like 5-10hrs a day to do just basic things. And the devs keep piling on the hits as time goes on directly intentionally or unintentionally at new players who are stuck in the crossfire each time they punish from the bottom up rather than actually creating a balance by punishing at the top and not necessarily at the top down.
 
For instance rather then knee capping 75% of the people from using their industry when schematics went in they could have let everyone still be able to be sufficient enough to still use the basic recipie but if you wanted something more then you could opt in for the advanced, rare, extended rediculous version and buy a schematic. That would have been fair to the people who invest who knows how much before JC decides to put a lock on it for no real reason and then throwing a wrench in the market so that he can throw a bone to the mega orgs who bought up all the schematics, had all the power, credits, and ability to shrug it off with minimal losses while everyone else got shut down.
 
When they could have not just put some arbitrary content gate and money sink after mega orgs have been pilaging this game in EZ mode upto this point and have massive quantities of parts, ore, territories they got at 100k and cleaned up which now also costs everyone else like 2mil now. They could have just made it so the more land you claim the more expensive it gets to allow mega orgs to expend but at an escalting rate so new players or anyone else could own land but no it neither stops mega orgs who have lots of credits to continue buying up all the juice nodes but it does further prevent anyone else from ever catching up with the mass imbalance they have been allowed to reap and use to their fullest extent up to this point in mining, pvp, and the markets.
 
They could have just thought about this issue for like 5 additional seconds and though hey we have no idea why our market system is broken and terrible and rather than throwing wrenches into things and breaking the game more in favor of JCs precious mega orgs and destroying the rest of the game for anyone else maybe we should prevent people from being able to put so much stuff up on the market. Or that if you only cater to the mega orgs then they will no doubt hyper saturate the market in which case the only way the maket goes from here on out is down into the ground. If your precious buy sell bots didnt manipulate the market in the way it does it would be like 1H for everything right now.
 
When in addition to just letting people keep their T1 industry and upgrade when they wanted and left it alone so anyone could at least maintain their fleets. The real issue is the way the markets are run. All the people who played during pre-0.23 EZ mode have such a collective hoard of items/mats/etc that the market at this point will never fully recover and when the mining bots go in we will have such an influx of mats into the system that will no doubt make some kind of chainmail interlocking grief loops to account for. When from the start they only needed to limit how much you can reliably put up into the market in one weeks time. Supply and demand is a real thing and in DU we cant get the machines running fast enough to keep up with how much crap is put up into the market.
 
There honestly needs to be a liscense system that prevenst people per week from shoveling unlimited quantities of items endlessly into the market. Either the taxes need to be adjusted by the volume or storage space you use in that market. Or there needs to be an additional fee or tax for the priveledge to use the market in the first place to huck those massive quantities into per each individual market. Each week if you intend to sell more than a certain amount of free trade volume limit per day if you want to sell more then that there should be a talent to raise the minimum, but if you want to sell more then that then you need to buy a liscense that renews per week and not per day like the personal free volume. Each wee you need to bet how much you think you can reliably sell. If you dont use all the volume you waste money, dont have enough space you lose money, and it should be about strategically selling items per week when other peoples limits run out or to find the actual sweet spot that you can afford to reliably scale to pay for the scaling liscense volume that has options of 1 week - 1 month to further entice people to lock rates and build up stock rather then the markets we have now.
 
Those two solutions would have been much better then the way schematics are being handled as a content gate & money sink so you can mine more for no reason. Eventually if they box everything out of a new players hands this game is dead before launch.

After completing several ship builds over the past few months and really digging into the voxel editor, I've found that the biggest limiting factor to my creativity has been the checklist of elements that are required for any ship to function.

The Problem:
I'll use engines as an example.
All basic atmospheric engine L's are the exact same size. They all output the same thrust. Same fuel consumption, etc. There is a distinct number of them that I will need on my ship if I want to lift a Container L. But what if I want my ship designed with only one massively powerful engine instead of twelve relatively smaller engines? With the current system of elements that isn't possible.

Elements as they currently exist occupy the role of function while honeycombs occupy the role of aesthetics/armor. For a pure pve ship, using anything but elements is an active detriment to it's functional performance. For a pvp ship, the meta dictates the optimal style/aesthetic (currently a flying cube). This creates a situation where you aren't really designing a ship so much as designing a socket for each necessary component. Effectively a box with a seat in it strapped to some engines. Actual ship design would necessitate many internal components, not just all-in-one elements to be bolted to the hull.

Currently ship design (for any type of hauler) requires the entire back end of the vessel to be a wall of engines to maximize thrust.

The Solution:
I am suggesting a merging of elements and voxels so that you are able to define the size and shape of your elements. Engines would exist in the form of a voxel, and function as such.

The same can be done for containers, fuel tanks, doors, windows, ailerons, brakes, etc.

How would voxel based elements work?
Another game with this build system is Avorion, which fits into the space simulation builder genre (you can look up speed builds on YouTube to get a good idea for how the builder works). You can define an area to function as your engines. With this system you could have the exact same engine footprint. The same weight, thrust, fuel consumption, etc. However, you are now free to style the back end of the ship around one engine instead of many because it's shape and orientation are different. Using my masterful skills of paint I've illustrated a comparison of how things are now versus what I'm suggesting.

These two ships would have identical weight, thrust, fuel consumption etc. because they have the same volume of engines, just spread differently.
Voxel based elements would be manufactured just like elements are currently, but instead of outputting a singular object, it would output a volume of voxels, much like the honeycomb refinery does. One voxel of engine would have a set amount of thrust. A voxel of container, a set capacity etc. The larger the element, the more capacity/thrust/fuel/weight...

What exactly is gained from this?
Most of the benefit of this is aesthetic, but there is some importance to that. Have you guys seen the Facebook ads and YouTube trailers for DU? Most of them are featuring interesting looking ships to showcase what can be done in the game. The reality is that the markets are littered with ships that are nothing more than engines strapped to a container with a stack of wings. There is a distinct "sameness" to most of the ships I see and it's because I'm staring at the exact same engines and wings and hovers on every one of them. I believe this damages the atmosphere of the game, especially for new players looking to see all sorts of cool ships, or build them, and then end up having to meet the same "checklist" of parts and being restricted.

Additionally though, you would be able to make better use of space within a ship. Containers could be long and thin for a specific type of ship or more square to fit where they need to. Most of an engine could be internal so it is longer instead of wider. Larger drive cores could offer reduced cooldowns.

I'd like to hear some of your feedback. Bad idea, good? Waste of time? Let me know!