DystopianSnowman

Going to be completely honest here, this does absolutely nothing for me when considering so many core gameplay issues are either broken or completely missing altogether. 
 
I realize the art team behind this and the features development team likely share very little overlap, but teasing something like this is tone-deaf all the same. I *want* to play this game, but there is hardly anything of substance to do outside of mining and building. 
 
I'm sitting here starving for engaging gameplay loops and they're saying, "Hey look at how we color coded engines! Pretty neat, huh?"

Edition 90.pdf

Edition 80.pdf
Correction 3KT or 3000T, not 3000 KT

Edition 79.pdf

I understand your point, but the reality is that MC has proven that it can retain and grow a massive, massive audience of players.
 
You're saying you spent years in MC...that's really good retention and lends evidence to the idea that building is a viable niche. 
 
Everything about MC's demographics suggests that builders can carry a game financially. I mean...MC is among the most successful games in history. Yes, people get bored eventually, but that's true of every game ever, sub or MMO or otherwise. 
 
Nearly 30 million people bought Minecraft last year alone (2020)...DU won't get 30 million sales for its entire life. 
 
I'm not understanding the idea that builders can't carry a game financially because there's ample evidence in the industry to suggest otherwise. 

Im  small ship designer, I cant get myself to do big ships because voxel tools suck, and i dont want to waste a week making every single voxel in a reactor(like i do for small ships) ..
 
And with undo, some times, not properly undoing, it all just becomes pain and frustration. 

NQ has been quite clear since the beginning of Beta that there was no promise that they would never wipe.  They have always said they might if they need to.
 
And IMO they really, really need to at some point.  Some might quit, yes, but I bet a lot who have already quit will come back as most of us quit because of the schematics and the related debacle that gave other orgs a SEVERE advantage over the rest of us.
 

Of course you are right here and I can only agree that (and I'm just sticking with the example here but it applies in general) exploration needs to bring a sense of danger and risk for the reward it can deliver in return. And a big part of that risk should be the PVP player base, that is certainly true.
 
BUT
 
For PVP to work in this context, what needs to be in place first is the exploration mechanic. If that sux and no one engages in it then there is nothing feeding into PVP. And that is why I will always agree with the idea that, while important as part of the whole, PVP needs to come into play in development once everything that feeds into it has been done to the point PVP can serve it's purpose. If development starts with PVP then what will happen is that the unbalanced interaction will chase away the food  ..
 
I understand that there is many who are hungry for combat PVP and I get that NQ has not delivered on their promise yet. But that is an overall problem and assuming for a moment that this will start to change over the next few months and we finally start seeing some structural and methodical development of game mechanics, as that process gets underway and evolves this is where NQ can start introducing PVP into the mix. Combat PVP in DU is part of the whole and IMO is the end of the loop, bringing it back to the beginning. But for that to be feasible, the loop still needs to get to the point where PVP can begin and we're a long way away from that point.
 
So yes, it will be a while if NQ does their job.. patience grasshopper.. Patience.
 

Constant communication to answer players burning questions is a monumental task that is required at any time during the release cycle, even if that answer is reiterating “We [NQ] don’t know yet”.  So keep up the great comms @NQ-Naerais !
 
On another note, if the dreaded schematics arn’t banished back to the pits of hell that spawned them, players should be able to create them... though science!

First, I appreciate the increased - and meaningful - communication. It's encouraging even to hear that you have heard us, and are thinking about a thing.
 
Personally I could take or leave the PvP - why would humanity venture out in an Arkship for thousands of years just to land and start the same petty resource squabbles? But it's a game, I get that, the emergent gameplay around PvP can drive things.
 
One of my thoughts on building a civilization is that structures on earth are typically shaped by needs and physics. Skycrapers don't go up until we have elevators. Civilizations grow along water sources. Aircraft carriers must have spaces both for the planes they carry and the crew that live on them.  Right now in DU, there's not much in the way of needs to dictate a structure. You don't need to sleep. You don't need to eat. You don't need to have storage for anything but your building materials or sellable items. One person can operate a massive battleship-sized construct, and it doesn't actually need to have any voxels, it can all just be "floating" elements.  I'm not suggesting voxel/element evaluation the way Space Engineers does it, but at the moment the only reason to build buildings is to be cool, and because we can. Cities don't need roads because we hover. Planets don't need cities, actually, because you can live and do everything from one ship.
 
I know we don't want the game to feel like going to work, but I feel like as long as there aren't more requirements put on players and structures, everything is always going to be ornamental. What's the point of putting up an tower with rooms when no one would need a room for anything?  There's no clever problem solving. No one making a cool ship design that manages to fit living space for 8 people into a small area. Routing power conduits in a certain way that saves space or weight. Things like that; boundaries that help define the engineering and visual language of the civilization.  Now maybe the game was never going to be that, but if nothing more is ever going to be required of structures, then if we have cities, they will be empty buildings that are essentially nothing more than statues.
 
Just my thoughts as I play through and visit things like the city on Teoma, which is both very cool and very ghostly.

Everyone here has paid to be in this game one way or another and they have the right to offer feedback, post suggestions and join in on ANY conversation they like.  It is simply not your place to tell them otherwise.

Agreed.
 
As a builder I am generally against a wipe. But if they have to do it, then the bare minimum would be that before the wipe NQ first fix the reasons for needing a wipe in the first place.

But for some spoiled ppl, a game that does not run above 60hz is a bad game...

Tell you what's ironic....  I just restarted NMS in VR a few days ago... haven't played for over six months... but there's a new playmode called Expeditions that has quests, goals, aims and a set of objecttives for players to reach... It's aimed at advanced players who know how to play and have been through all the tutorials and finished the main storyline and reached the centre of the galaxy.

It's a refresh, with new mechanics, new goals, better graphics and brings together over a dozen major patches and three times the number of minor interstitial bug fixes.

I admit, I had high hopes and high expectations for the game, even though I literally only heard of it three days before release, so was not on the hype train.... And I have been playing it on and off since release day.
 
But as I said, a few days ago,  I logged on and started playing as free time permitted, the day before yesterday there were a dozen other players around me and literally hundreds of player constructs within a few minutes flight time...

Being busy at the start of the fiscal year, I had to take a day off.. When I came back on, I found my fledgling base surrounded by activity... there were now a dozen bases within radar range of my own, one had a farm. another was building underwater... and when I investigated, the tech was sensible enough to know that water stays OUT of sealed constructs.... There were solar farms, batteries, energy requirements, pets, companions, PVE missions, NPCs....  The game is NOTHING like the one I remember on launch day.

For example, there are apparently over a quadrillion planets in NMS, but after 4 and a half years, they have managed to bring players together more than ever before... There wasn't even a chat window when NMS launched, but now there is a hive of activitiy in the ANOMALY which is a summonable player hub.

Those guys have turned a false start and broken dreams into reality... Sure, it's a different genre, this being ostensibly hard sci-fi and that being science fantasy...

but at the end of the day, I believe...
          ...there is still a modicum of hope for NQ.... If NMS is anything to go by.
 

The additional post "answering" concerns and questions .. really does not do that at all, it is more the usual "we hear your concerns but you just do not get it so let us explain again".. So this new tech does not replace the old, it just lives side by side with it (for now), while the whole reason for it is to fix the performance issues the "old method" causes? How does that work? This new tech does not do anything to impact transfer of data while that was used in the initial post as a (main) reason for introducing it.
 
The additional post just makes things more confusing as it now seems that you are not actually replacing anything (yet) but just doing something new in addition to this. Why am I somehow expecting another middleware name to pop up as this goes in?
 
Basically, the message is "stop complaining and just go test the new technology on the PTS once it is introduced there, it will all make sense to you then". I would make the prediction that this will be a week or two before it goes live in 0.24 "phase2" with no room, option or ability to revert if it turns out to just not work.
 
Why not release the API _now_ so we can see it and evaluate it before it goes live. 
It would be possible to still make changes, actually _listen_ to feedback and take it on board, engage your community  to make what you are trying to do make sense and be effective. Already so many good ideas and suggestion on this topic here and none of it seems to land with NQ, it's just business as usual and a prelude to another half baked broken "new feature". The existing toolset already has options to improve performance , why are you not using these? Do you even understand the tools you use or are you just adding them because there is a single function you need and do not know how to write yourself, ignoring the rest?
 
Oh, and while at it, maybe update the offline codex which is stil the pre "beta" version ??
 
NQ, you have a chance here to actually do things differently and actually involve your community instead of force feeding what you are convinced is great only to find that it actually is not once it gets into the game by which time it's too late. It's amazing how NQ really has not learned a single thing from their mistakes with previous changes of this nature and scope.
 
Oh and yes, these are _not_ changes you make during a beta stage of a game pretty much 6 months before you feature freeze for release. This is defacto and textbook Alpha stage game development stuff, you do not implement a feature to "collect your feedback on this concept" 9 months before "release". I'm so trying to keep an open mind here but NQ just does not seem to be able to get past their programmer mindset and see that they are not making sense at all.
 
If you want to put this in PTS to test it and see what impact it may have sure, that would make sense and that is what PTS should be for. Provide value for us to install PTS and deliver feedback there, organize mass tests where you TP everyone to one market on PTS and ask them to load provided scripts to measure performance. But as mentioned before, this just has "we found this cool new middleware and it may help us so let's invest in it and get it in game asap". The given that it seems you do not even understand what this may do yet yourself indicates to me it's an experiment, not something you know will work for whatever purpose.
 
 

I would like to put my thoughts on the CEO change out there as I actually feel a lot of this aligns with what I have been saying would be good for the game for a long time.
 
Right now, DU was forced into an early public release for what many expect will be funding needs. And it did not work out. The short-term thinking and rushed implementation of features has only done one thing, cause more delays and waste dev time because a lot needs to be redone.
 
NQ, by means of JC, kept a brave face, and kept saying that all would be well, that there were no signs that they would not be able to meet the end of 2021 target for a full release. The list of features to be done as well as the immense mountain of technical debt, bugs to be squashed, optimization and polish to be done simply make a release in the true sense of the word at best unlikely for the end of 2021.
 
Now, the vision of JC for the game is great but poses a lot of challenges that are extremely hard if not impossible to overcome. The idea of implementing several vastly different playstyles and preferences in one world by itself is tough, the technical challenges remain huge. JC the visionary could and did dream of his game and how it would all come together while JC the CEO of NQ needed to temper expectations and bring that vision down to a manageable and viable level. And that IMO is where things went wrong.
 
 
When I backed the game, shortly after Kickstart ended, I was certain (and had no issue with) that NQ would not be able to hit the December 2018 release as it was clearly unrealistic for a game this scale. When Alpha opening to backers was delayed by several months and we then found ourselves in pre-alpha and under NDA instead at the end of September 2017, it should have been clear it was never going to be possible to get a release done in about 12 months. Yet, it took NQ nearly a year to announce an updated roadmap which pushed release to the second half of 2020. That new release date was clearly still overly optimistic at best seeing the state of the game at the time.
 
Then a new studio opened in Canada, we can only guess as to why but a combination of using a better tax environment for software development, more access to talent and yes, they speak French there. We do not know the ins and outs of how the management structure worked/works but it seems that much of the decisions were made in Paris still. When the first studio lead left the same year JC moved to Canada.
 
With some fanfare a new backing round by investors was announced by JC in June 2019 and when looking at the normal timeline for Venture Capital investment this was a pretty standard Round A option that was taken after the initial seed. Crowd funding never played much of a role in all this with the eventual 2.5M or so being spent before it was received basically.
 
Around November 2019 and honestly very little actual progress later, still under NDA a new roadmap was released pushing the release out for another year to end of 2021. That roadmap still read more as a wish list of features and still seemed very optimistic to me as NQ still had to implement all main features outside of mining and building.
 
Then, 30th of April 2020, JC announced that the game would come out of NDA and go to public beta with subscriptions instead of the planned closed development up to release for backers only. That was the moment where some of us backers started to see signals that NQ was not doing great and needed to start generating revenue which was never the intention. Meanwhile NQ had been operating on a total budget of around 25Million since end of 2014 so it was only reasonable to assume they were running on debt which in itself is fine as long as you can pay interest and keep paying your bills.
 
In December the 0.23 patch dropped which caused much discontent and an exodus of players with changes which were really not bad in themselves, but the implementation was terrible and very superficial. NQ, again by means of JC, blamed the need for the changes on the small groups and solo players who did not use the markets and did everything themselves so that needed to change. Add several badly handled exploit fallouts to the mix and the fragile player base shrunk at an alarming rate. To me, this was a massive signal that JC the visionary was not able to separate from JC the project manager or JC the company president/CEO.
 
JC also said on several occasions that he saw no reason to assume that it would not possible to meet the release date on the roadmap of end 2021, anyone understanding the amount of work left to do and especially the list of feature JC brought in as “coming in the next year” towards the end of 2021shoudl have been a clear sign of the many red flags regarding hitting a 2021 release.
 
Then, as the next major update came around it was underwhelming at best and NQ had to spin missing their milestone by announcing that 0.24 would arrive in “phases”.
And so, here we are start of April and we know that JC has resigned as CEO with anew CEO being appointed in the person of Nicolas Granatino who also is the CEO of the main investor in NQ. And from here all we can do is speculate on what is next.
 
 
 
My hope is this:
Under new management the potential and promise of DU is acknowledged while at the same time the need for more time is established. A big factor in the assets of the game is the server tech which can be developed and licensed to third parties with potentially considerable revenue. For that reason, Novaquark will be receiving a fresh investment injection with a business savvy and financially qualified CEO at the helm. 
 
To achieve this, the company will need to go through a restructure and cut a lot of mid level ballast. I would really hope that NQ will have the balls to relabel the development to where it is, alpha, and postpone the scheduled release with a TBD new date.
 
Then spend time to fix what they have, work through the technical debt, stabilize the backend and improve their community facing communication to a point where we do not need details but do find NQ to actually listen and be responsive and not “be heard” and then hear nothing back. So many great suggestions and ideas have been lost because NQ has shown a chronic lack of engagement and interaction at even the most basic levels.
 
I have always said and still feel that DU has such massive potential and promise as well as will be able to appeal to many different play styles and ideas but NQ as it was, has never really shown the ability to make that happen. I hope that this change is not the end of the company (despite the "letter", I would not disregard that option yet) but a new start in making that potential come alive and a reality.
 
 
I really feel NQ (and with it DU) has a chance here to recover and grow. From where we now are and for it to work, NQ needs to do their part in showing progress and improvement in many ways while we, as the community, need to start with giving them the space to do that and then get past what was and work with what is to come..
 
 
Let's have a good discussion here and not dwell on the past, we're all here because we have a passion for DU and the only way DU will stay alive is for "new NQ" to be able to make it happen. 

Just wish you would all go to those other games forums, rather than trying to destroy a game you no longer play, all very vindictive.  I cant remember EVER hanging around in the forum of a game I had left to put it down, for me it displays the worst of human nature.

Dear Noveans,
 
We would like to address the recent speculations that have arisen in our community, and openly disclose some changes that are happening at Novaquark.
 
First and foremost, Novaquark continues to be supported by its long term investors to allow it to launch Dual Universe in line with its original vision. It also puts us in a position to attract experienced talent to complement the team that’s already in place so that we can continue to improve the game.
 
Next week, we will share with you what we think our priorities should be for Dual Universe and how we hope to approach the development of the game with improved processes going forward.
 
An important change to note is that Jean-Christophe, the founder of Novaquark, has transitioned from the day-to-day management of the team to better focus on his position as a board member. Over the years since the creation of Novaquark, JC designed and set the standards for the structural and conceptual foundation of the game, and he feels now that a solid base is there for him to move forward as a strategic advisor. The recent changes in the administrative presidency of the company only reflect the transition of JC to his new role. We’re excited to have the team he has built deliver on his vision for the game.
 
Rest assured that Novaquark’s future is in good hands, and there is a strong partnership between our long-term investors and our team. We believe that the future is bright for the game and for the company, and we cannot wait to tell you where we want to take Dual Universe.
 
With our warmest regards,
The Novaquark team

Each of us has a different reason for playing video games.
I can tell you why I played with it: to vent my creative vein, my need to build and see my aesthetic sense and inventiveness realized, my hobbyist design skills and amazed by the artistic solutions found by others.
Yes, I am from that part of the players who played DU for his creative ability. PVP and commerce have never attracted me.
I liked to build.
And I still do, in other games and even out of games.
I don't know what "all adults" are doing to play a video game. Everyone has their own reason.
There is no more valid or less valid reason. There is only how you perceive it, for yourself.
 
As for the rest, I am sorry to be "brutal" but no one who is going to close a game will ever tell you "in 6 months we are planning to close everything, in the meantime we will squeeze you as much as we can".
It's commercial madness.
You won't know.
If they tell you that everything will be fine, that they won't whipe, and that everything will go smoothly, it could be true, or a huge bullshit. It is up to you to decide whether to continue or not.
But what you are asking is ... naive.
Extremely naive.

I've been thinking about the past few days and even the last few months, even back to .23. Some in the DU community including myself can be pretty harsh towards NQ. This last few days has been no exception. Sometimes it's all written off as trolling but that's not the whole story. The trolls are a small number of people. I think this is a huge learning experience for all of us. 

On the NQ side, know that you want us to build a civilization and that requires lots and lots of time. Lots of us have been grinding away at this for many many hours. If something changes and puts that all into jeopardy, we want to know. It's not like call of duty where the damage will change slightly. Changes here mean dozens, maybe hundreds of hours of work lost. In the extreme case of the game shutting down, people want to know they aren't pumping hours into nothing essentially.

On the community side, we have probably learned a lot about ourselves and how we fit into games like this. How sometimes we stop enjoying the game and worry too much about things we can't control.

I think that for a game to be the real life Ready Player One, the developer has to be serious about nurturing it's community and the community needs to be reasonable with their expectations from the developer. I've learned quite a bit here and It's been a fun ride.

I am sure as you say it is much different than DU, but what I was saying is I don't really care about any of those things in a Space Game. For me a "space game" could be summarized from the Star Trek Intro "Space ... the final frontier ...", "boldly go where no one has gone before ...", "seek out new life and new civilizations ..."  

I see the game as having just as good a chance to survive as with JC at the helm. It was long overdue.
 
Everything we've seen and heard suggested he wasn't just a bad leader because he lacked experience in the game industry...but because he wasn't open-minded and didn't want anyone else's ideas. That's reflected in how NQ interacted with the community and (from all the evidence we have) based on how he treated his own employees. It was always his project, his vision, his castle, his "ready player one" roleplaying game.
 
When the community complained, he told them why they were wrong. I expect he did something similar with his own employees, hence the very high employee turnover and slow, slow progress. 
 
If investors want to salvage this game, they can't just "sell off" tech because there's nothing to sell.
 
Everything they've made is very buggy and vendor-locked on AWS or Unigen2 (which no one in the industry uses) -- never worth it to buy buggy code that hasn't been proven to scale! It's far, far cheaper to develop it yourself long-term...any studio with the cash to buy tech like this would have wisdom enough to avoid it. "Wanna buy tech for this game that's been mired in bugs and hasn't shown it can scale even with low population?" No, hard pass, maybe worth $50,000 but not anything substantial enough for investors. 
 
i expect the investors will make up their mind shortly -- but my guess?
 
They wouldn't start taking things over unless they had some runway left to try to salvage the project. Otherwise they'd have laid everyone off and shut it all down already, because every day it is online is money spent. I'm not holding my breath, but getting JC out of there might be the change NQ needs. 

Start your own topics, let the dead rest in peace 

Continuing on beyond the original 2D Voxel Planner, I'm releasing today a new in-game building tool: Reactor/2D+ Voxel Planner. It extends the original 2D Voxel Planner's limited layer support with a Layer definition screen while adding a tool to design the 3 dimensional shape of a single voxel.
To support these features, a new XS Dynamic core construct has been built with a unique Voxel stack (derived from the NRD Voxel Cube which also inspired some aspects of the interface). The construct also has new Reactor frame
The blueprints (at nominal cost) for the construct and the original 2D Voxel planner are available at the Objective Driveyards headquarters at the open space location which will hold their future sales office. There is plenty of parking! In game location: ::pos{0,2,23.2925,73.1635,9.1008}
Also available is a limited number of blueprint+elements+voxels from a dispensor. These will cost 100 000 quanta and are limited to 1 per player.
More information can be found on this short  Video tour.

No one wants to play a game where you don't know where it's safe to leave your stuff, and where it's not.
 
That's not risk.  It's just bad design.
 
A player left their ship somewhere that they were told it would be completely safe, and another player exploited a bug, in a new system designed to stop people from maneuvering their ships into space, and moved the ship, without the owner's permission, which is not supposed to be possible, at all.
 
The thief knew that there is not supposed to be any way to move another players ship outside the safe zone without their permission.  
 
Should be a simple decision for NQ