Oblivionburn
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Posts posted by Oblivionburn
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On 1/17/2023 at 6:36 AM, Jinxed said:
Just because they announce something doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. So many things have been announced that haven’t happened yet.
On 1/17/2023 at 8:35 AM, blundertwink said:there's many easier ways that NQ could improve feature depth and they've truly not shown any interest or capacity to do this in the last 8 years.
22 hours ago, blundertwink said:it's a pipe dream because NQ doesn't want to make new features.
11 hours ago, Jinxed said:but quite frankly, that level of mechanics development alone would equal almost the entirety of the complexity of the current mechanics NQ have put in place over the last SIX YEARS for the entire rest of the game.
None of this is helping anything, and yes it makes you look toxic when it's in nearly every thread on this forum... post after post about how NQ sucks and their game sucks and that it's never going to get any better. It's like you're here just to drive everyone away from the game and ensure it fails.
Your supposed criticisms are just regurgitating the one con I had already listed: "You occassionally have to consume an item and some people find that annoying", and besides your usual toxicity towards the devs and the game, this thread has been exactly what I predicted in the very first sentence: "allow me to propose an argument before spamming this with messages about how annoying food mechanics are in games". And yet you did it anyway, because you're so filled with hate towards the devs and this game that you'll jump at any opportunity to shit all over them, and then when anyone calls you out on it you try to claim you're just providing "criticism" like it isn't plain-as-day you're using it as a vehicle to continue being toxic here.
If you have any hope at all for this game's future, then you need to stop bashing it all the time and start putting out a more positive message that will encourage other players to join and continue playing... otherwise the subs/funding are inevitably going to dry up and they'll be forced to shutdown the servers. This game could have a very bright future if you actually helped it instead of hindering it. If you bring more players to the game that could mean more subs/money/funding, which would mean they could hire more devs to get things done more quickly and this whole mess could easily be turned around into something epic. Even if you believe the current engine isn't capable of anything great, they could be one talented dev away from changing that.
@Gillwin is the only one to provide any real counter-point here, so thank you Gillwin, you make an excellent point that the whole thing could be circumvented with rez nodes which would render it a mere annoyance instead of a driving factor to encourage the creation of anything. I also never eat food in games when it's merely providing buffs and isn't a requirement for continuing to play the game, since that renders it merely optional and usually pointless. -
10 minutes ago, blundertwink said:
Why do you care...?
I care because, like many, I would like to see the game succeed and grow into something great, which it's well capable of doing. From what I've read around this forum, you're just a toxic element that needs to remove itself from the equation. Seriously, you wonder why anyone from NQ doesn't participate here or communicate with you... who the hell would want to after reading your comments? Your community is toxic as [filtered], and you're part of the problem. Just removing yourself will be an improvement.
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Are none of you capable of providing a list of Cons that exceeds the Pros of adding food into the game? If the Pros vastly outweigh the Cons, then why bother even attempting an argument against it? Perhaps you need to put a little more thought into it... I'm sure there's things I didn't consider and/or already mention at the start of this.
Or are you simply here to be toxic for DU, NQ, and/or the community? The few of you that have replied to this topic so far have posts all over the forum ranting/complaining/whining about the game and/or the developers... and yet you're still here. Do you have some sort of personal vendetta or desire for the game to fail that you persist in shitting all over it with every opportunity presented to you? I'm practically brand new to this forum and it's plain as day to even me how toxic you are. You accomplish nothing beneficial for anyone, and the world would probably be better off without you and your negativity 👋🙂 It's okay, nobody will miss you.
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47 minutes ago, Cergorach said:
Yes it's an MMO, but also a game, not a life sim
lol DU is very much a sandbox/sim mmo... and it's failing to do the one thing that keeps people playing, which is providing some baseline reason to do anything at all.
47 minutes ago, Cergorach said:If we have food, the shitter we've got in DU then needs to actually work, you also want realistic plumbing in ships and bases? Because that would give you something 'to do'
Unrealistic extremes don't make for reasonable arguments. It just makes it look like you can't think of a reasonable counter-point.
47 minutes ago, Cergorach said:If you want to look for a DU equivalent for food, then look no further then ORE. We can 'grow'/collect it in multiple ways, we 'consume' it, we can buy/trade it. Some tiles are richer then others... And while some people do (Asteroid) mining as a group activity, most certainly do not!
Ore is an option, not a necessity. It's a pretty basic difference.
54 minutes ago, Cergorach said:Adding food to DU doesn't suddenly make it a more social game.
It does in fact make it a more social game if inevitably someone will end up on a tile that can't grow food and thus has to trade for it... not becuase it's something they simply want to have, but because they literally have to have it in order to continue playing.
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5 minutes ago, Cergorach said:
Adding more 'make do' stuff without any purpose is just not going to make DU any more fun
There being no purpose to any of it is exactly the problem I'm pointing out. The game needs something that is actually needed and serves a purpose.
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2 hours ago, blundertwink said:
That's...an interesting theory of game design.
The challenge with motivating gameplay "by virtue of necessity" is that in general, players dislike being "forced".
Consider a classic game like Mario, because it's often used as an example of quality game design.
You can complete the level as quickly as you want or barely finish within the time limit...you can care about points or power-ups or ignore them. The only thing you're "forced" to do is complete the level without dying.
This is what creates engagement -- if you were forced to stop and eat every now and then, it might "give you something to do", but in the same way as busy work. It isn't something you want to do, it's something you have to do.
Having gameplay or activities doesn't automatically mean those activities are engaging, which is the core goal of good design...not fidelity to real life.
There's an infinite number of ways to create feature depth and engagement without having to force people to eat or starve.
It's easy to brainstorm about all the little things they could add "if only food were a thing", but this would be a huge undertaking for a studio with very limited resources that has shown very little willingness to introduce new features in general...
You can list some of the same integration points with something like energy production -- how it could encourage x/y/z dependencies between players and create new markets or promote "civilization" if done in x/y/z way....but no matter how you boil it down, it's a pipe dream because NQ doesn't want to make new features.
I think you might be fixating on the perspective of an isolated/single-player experience instead of considering the bigger picture of how large groups of people interact with systems. While you, as a single individual, may view it simply as the annoyance of having to consume an item once a day, the grander scale of the matter is the forming of cities, essential trade routes, business empires, and large scale efforts of growing/processing/shipping a needed product to remote areas as not everyone can, or will, crowd around epicenters of the supply. It's the desired state of the game we all wish to see, and it's not going to get there with the current systems/design because none of what you can currently do is actually needed for anything. Building a vehicle or a decorative build can be fun at first, but there's no built-in purpose for any of it long-term... there's nothing to sustain in the game other than the avoidment of boredom and that's not enough to retain players and continually encourage engagement with the existing systems in the game.
Mario is not a sufficient comparison... this is an mmo, not a single-player game. -
8 hours ago, blundertwink said:
The OP is suggesting this because the game has such a profound lack of feature / content depth. That's the underlying issue, that "there's nothing to do".
One PvE mission won't change that.
Would "food" solve this...? I don't know, maybe, but there's many easier ways that NQ could improve feature depth and they've truly not shown any interest or capacity to do this in the last 8 years.
The last couple years of updates have entirely been focused on revisiting things they've already done, with one exception for "space territory war" in the form of alien cores.
Even their "roadmap" is just revisiting things they've already done -- one new mission type, new planets when in the beginning they talked about countless solar systems, joystick input support...?
DU needs food? Unsure that's true...but DU does need content depth so it feels like there's "something to do" and that just isn't going to happen anytime soon.
This isn't just about feature depth or things to do, but about motivating gameplay by virtue of necessity. A survival element of gameplay demands/requires things be done to deal with the need to survive, else perish. The threat of death, or at least the annoyance of non-permanent death, can be a big motivator to get people moving, trading, and taking action to avoid it. Plus it presents more obstacles to overcome, which is really what most gameplay is about in video games... accomplishing things and overcoming challenges. The fact that it would also encourage most of the stuff to get built that we all actually want to see in the game is just icing on the cake.
So yes, I very much think DU needs food. I think it's the one thing missing (besides more players) that would bring the original vision of "civilization" to fruition. -
I don't see how PvE is relevant to the topic of Food or its vast potential to motivate/stimulate more "play" in the "game".
Pessimistic skepticism doesn't particularly seem relevant either, unless you really have nothing else to bring to this discussion? Why even bother replying to it then?
Counter points/arguments or other ideas to expand on the concept would be more productive.
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I know this idea has been thrown around a bit and there's older topics discussing the matter, but allow me to propose an argument before spamming this with messages about how annoying food mechanics are in games...
The core of this argument is simple: there's no reason to build anything except vehicles and factories, because they're the only things that serve a purpose in the game... none of which is even a real necessity that anyone has to do, it's simply done because there's nothing else to do (for the majority). Sure, we could build houses and cities and all this stuff we usually call "civilization", but we don't and we won't... because all that "civilization" stuff in real life mostly revolves around storing food, purchasing food, and places to consume food at. In history, the invention of agriculture is what really kick-started the rise of civilization as we know it since it created the need for things like trade, markets, and currency by virtue of having a growing supply that's in high demand (because you die if you don't have it).
Pros of introducing food into the game:
- More ways to play the game and things to do (e.g. agriculture, businesses serving food, businesses storing food, processing food, shipping food, etc)- Reasons for factories that don't revolve around vehicles (e.g. processing raw food into products and a legit need for building supplies for storing food)
- Guaranteed essential supply chains when everybody needs food and not everywhere is capable of growing it
- A reason to build houses, cantinas, taverns, warehouses, grocery stores, and ultimately cities since survival elements like food create a demand for that stuff when people want to be close to where the needed supply is
- More social content and places to gather/hang at (e.g. I'm sure some of us would love to build some Mos Eisley-esque cantinas on not-so-habitable-planets for shady deals to go down at)
- Long voyages needing to be planned with food stocks in mind and supplying multi-crew vessels with enough food for everyone (yes this is a Pro because it adds to the complexity of travel which makes things more interesting... thus more "gameplay")
- Spaceships and buildings actually having a reason to have things like a mess halls, kitchens, dining rooms, bathrooms (makes more sense to roleplay bathrooms when there's consumeables), must-have storage that's not just for hauling shipments, or even something as simple as a table and chairs for people to congregate around for meals (more roleplaying stuff)
- Wars fought over soil rich planets/territories, because food has real value as a nessecity and thus is always high in demand... if you control the food supply, you control the people
- Pirates can disrupt food supply chains and cause a very noticeable effect on whoever the supply was intended for, which gives a reason for groups to form to protect the transporting of food and thus more gameplay
- "Food" doesn't even have to be limited to just things you eat and can easily be expanded to all sorts of consumeables once the basic "Consume Item" foundation code is there, which opens up all sorts of avenues for more content, gameplay, and roleplaying (e.g. beverages, healing items, poisons, etc, etc)
- Tons of things I'm sure I haven't even thought of yet that arise simply from a resource being a necessity and not merely in demand because players are bored
Cons of having food in the game:
- You occassionally have to consume an item and some people find that annoying
In Summary, DU is boring and lifeless compared to what it could be simply by adding food.
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So, Territory Warfare and the Energy/Electricity features in the following update or something? Those are still on the roadmap, right? Little disturbed none of the big ticket items are being included in a list of "Coming Soon".
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It would be nice to see the applied talent bonuses in the UI for nano/industry crafting that effect the time remaining or how long it'll take to craft something.
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The rest of the world doesn't need to share the burden of your personal problems or health issues, nor should this game world be held back by them. The world will, and should, continue spinning without you.
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On 12/31/2019 at 5:36 PM, plmkoi said:
No, it would never be good on paper as you want inflation so people keeps spending money, as DeviseDevine said it leads to hoarding. The point of currency is that it is a fiat a medium for the exchange of goods/services and if it rarer then the gold or copper, then what is the point of having the currency. In my opinion, I think what everyone misunderstands, is that theme park mmo's it really is irrelevant if you have run away inflation. Every real economy has inflation, but they keep it capped at a certain % and I am sure someone who is much better at economics can explain that as I am no market guru. I am just now finally mastering market pvp, which sadly this game is already snuffing out.
Inflation is an influx of money into circulation, which isn't something you want in a stable economy. When those that sell goods recognize there is an increase in spending power, they raise prices since they know people can afford to pay it. What once costed 10 quanta suddenly costs 15 quanta, and then 40 quanta, and then 100... not because of anything natural like demand increasing for something that's in short supply, but simply because there is more money. This is money losing its value. When a money supply can increase indefinitely, such as when there is no material constraint or limited supply to maintain its scarcity (and thus its value), those that can amass it quickly will cause hyperinflation, which is when the value is dropping so quickly that prices skyrocket beyond what anyone can afford aside from those that were causing the inflation to begin with. This is what causes the poor/rich gap, and should be something we, as players of this game and participants of its economy, should want to avoid.
If the developers are going to control how much money is in circulation by turning on/off faucets in order to maintain a level of the money's scarcity/value, it sounds like a decent idea and would basically be a variable cap... not a fixed amount, but a maintained percent or ratio of something. With ore being the foundation of the economy, it would make sense to use that with some ratio like 1 Ore = 0.002% of money in circulation, or whatever ends up feeling like a good "Goldilocks" zone for the economy to be in. This sort of thing would take some time and experimenting to figure out.
Ideally you want the highest percent possible of the money supply to be in circulation, and not just sitting in a vault or in someone's wallet. As people have pointed out, hoarding is something that happens, but I think occasionally turning some faucets on would adequately combat that. However, what if one of those hoarders suddenly dumps all their money by buying up huge amounts of a particular resource, like Iron or something, in order to build some sweet Death Star? Then we run into a dramatic iron shortage and a bunch of jobs get created in order to increase the iron supply, since good markets always seek equilibrium. That's how businesses form and interesting stories happen. It's the drama of "events" like this that will keep the world feeling interesting and alive, driven not by some theme-park plot that everyone goes through, but player agency. It would be cool, but it would also cause inflation as that money makes its way back into circulation and causes prices to artificially go up. There would have to also be a sink that can occasionally be turned on, like a tax on trading or something, in order to pull that money back out and thus maintain the variable cap on the supply.
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Nevermind, apparently the Lua only runs client-side when you're logged in and near the control element it's attached to, like one-time scripts that only do their thing when an event triggers the script. Oh well. Hopefully we'll get word about there being any way to read/write data with Lua in one of the dev blogs, but it's starting to seem unlikely.
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9 hours ago, spaceforger said:
i am 100% sure because devs said that running millions of scripts server side is too costly
Ah, I must've missed that. Thanks for the clarification!
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4 hours ago, spaceforger said:
LUA scripts run client side, so my guess is that variable lifespan is as long as client running script is connected to the game and in close proximity to control element.
Does it? They've talked about industry machines using Lua that continue to run even when you're not logged in and nobody's around, which makes me think it's being handled server-side. It would make sense for it to be a client-side thing, but for stuff to continue to happen in the world for objects that are utilizing Lua scripts... I dunno, man. It's all very interesting to me.
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There's a lot of games that use embedded Lua to do stuff in-game, despite the game being written in like C/C++ or something. Easy example: ComputerCraft mod for Minecraft. Minecraft was written in Java, but the mod allows in-game Lua execution... and I'm guessing some framework behind the scenes to translate particular Lua methods to Java for the events to occur in the game. However, in the example of that mod for Minecraft, the Lua variables only get allocated memory during execution of the Lua... as soon as execution is complete, the variables are empty and that memory is flushed. It basically functions as a one-time run script, as opposed to a native part of the game's engine that would be held in RAM so long as the game is running.
Lua's been discussed in multiple Dev Blogs (else we wouldn't know about it), so should be fair game to discuss.
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Yeah, but it would stay in RAM so long as the server remained running, wouldn't it? I would imagine it'd be the same as any other program that allocates memory to a particular variable and holds that memory slot so long as the program is running, else there would be a memory violation exception... but I've never dealt with server/client architecture, so I'm not entirely certain if that would be true for this mmo or if there would be garbage collection methods in place for Lua variables?
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Shouldn't this fall outside the scope of NDA, since it's a general question of how Lua functions within the framework of a persistent mmo?
Or can Lua be limited/controlled by a game's engine, and thus it being a proprietary thing specific to Dual Universe's engine that would mean it falls under NDA?
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An idea just occurred to me, which I also made a post about in general discussion: with this being a persistent universe, variables in Lua should never lose their value once assigned, so would be possible to create a database of sorts by adding/removing values in arrays. The logical next question would then be: is there a way to send a value from one script to another? Or is using "require" to utilize a script within another script allowed? Could maybe have one script act as a central database with functions to add/remove values, and then just "require" it in other scripts to utilize it.
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Is there a lifespan to how long a variable in Lua will retain its value in memory, or with this being a 'persistent universe' do variables never lose their value once assigned?
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My apologies if this is already a thing, but I would like to propose there being a finite limit to the amount of currency in circulation and not an unlimited amount that can be created from player sold items/vehicles/etc.
The reason: what breaks most mmo economies is the ability for players to amass wealth without limit, which ultimately causes the currency to be essentially worthless. You can look on the market of nearly any current mmo and see items priced in the millions+ because the majority of players have more currency than they could ever possibly spend. Most mmo's have attempted to compensate for this inevitability by having 'money sinks' or regularly introducing new currencies to keep the market from flooding and prices skyrocketing to absurd levels. However, money sinks and new currencies always fail since they underestimate the speed at which players can amass currency (especially when working together in large numbers). I would like to see a mmo do the right thing and learn from the mistakes of the thousands of mmo's that have failed at this in the past, and the solution is simple: cap the currency.
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I would also like to know if it's possible (or will be) to read/write data, since actually useful programs require being able to do that.
How would you have fixed DU ?
in General Discussions
Posted
There's a name for that "pressure" that causes civilization to emerge: survival.
I think a lot of us originally wanted to see this game evolve into an amazing Sci-Fi Life Sim/Sandbox, something to finally eclipse the memories of Star Wars Galaxies with a higher bar, and I personally was rather disappointed and bored after I did the whole 'industry' and 'ship building' thing then found there was no reason to keep playing after I had an industry to make all the parts I wanted and a ship that could take me wherever. I could literally just stand there for an eternity and it would make no difference since there were no pressures/incentives in the game to encourage any further movement. Like what's the point of going anywhere when you know there's not going to be anything of real interest there since nothing else is part of the woefully dismal gameplay loop? Nothing to see, nothing to do... might as well log off, so I did and never came back. I swing by here every once in a while to see if anything has changed, since like most I felt (and still feel) the game has such great potential... even if just for the few thousand players the tech can handle... but I've just watched things become even more boring, less interactive, with fewer incentives to keep players engaged, and thus less interesting. It's not a trajectory towards anything good that I've witnessed unfolding here.
I think having a survial mechanic like food would've made a massive difference and provide all those "pressures" and incentives mentioned in the quote above, which I made a post about at one point, but yeah... we all know everyone likes to hate on that idea. Survival is just considered 'tedious' nowadays like a necessary evil we have to put up with so we can enjoy the rest of life. I think not enough consideration and respect is given to the implications and potential gameplay loops that simple 'tedious' activity brings to the table when it's a non-optional necessity like it is in real life... when it becomes a civilization-emerging pressure to secure, protect, and trade the most important resource in the universe that everyone needs to continue playing the game. The food must flow. All the cool things we want to see in the game only make sense once that foundation exists to build on.
Here's a link to my original post on it in case anyone's curious... it's not pretty since I had failed to handle the backlash as well as I had hoped, but that's on me... my apologies to those I had lashed out at in it, hope all are safe and doing well: