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Mordgier

Alpha Tester
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  1. Right because it was a wish list of things JC wanted in a game - without ever sitting down with real game designers to sort out the mechanics for these and then engineers to see what it would take for these to work as described - and then to do a POC and then road map it publicly. I'm willing to bet you that a lot of these roadmap items were placed there with no feedback from the dev team on feasibility. I've worked in places exactly like that - where client provided list of deliverables had items on them that any of the company engineers would have said were not feasible with our infrastructure and could not be provided with the resources we have. For example a place I used to work promised a client that we would improve our guaranteed uptime from 99.9 to 99.999 because sales folks doing the contracts "didn't think it'd be a big deal" for us to do that - and we found out that we were on the hook AFTER the client was presented the new contract....needless to say we failed to deliver. Of course IT guys got the blame for failing to meet the SLA.... The DU map is no different - it is full of things that cannot be delivered regardless of dates because nobody sat down and asked "How would this even work?" before throwing it on the map.
  2. I don't think NQ ever had the staff to actually align their vision with their resources. I think the roadmap was JC putting a list of things he wants into a game on a timeline without any clear understanding of what was actually required or if the feature was even possible without anyone asking "How would this work?" and "How many dev hours is that?" So as the vision met reality everything began to slide and slide and slide. Planetary warfare is a prime example of a JC vision roadmap item - it sounds great -but he never had ANY idea of how it would actually work. If you don't even know how it will work or if it's even possible how can you put it on a roadmap? You have way way too many unknown unknows at that point.
  3. Please have some respect for the devs. Coding DU is bad enough, being required to actually play it too feels like just kicking someone when they are already down. I know how many of us feel about NQ, but please find some mercy in you for the devs - they've suffered enough without having to play DU.
  4. Well back in the day NQ did manage to get Intel to brag about how good a multicore CPU is for DU - https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/intel-core-i9-processors-reduce-open-world-load-times.html Guillaume Gris is still at NQ so I'm not sure it's totally fair to say that they don't have the talent to pull off some fancy overhyped whitepaper for a vendor that could be used as leverage for a discount - but given that DU has squandered it's potential I doubt any vendor today would be eager to have a NQ logo on their customers page with a case study attached to it....
  5. Fair points - our cloud hosting bill is about 25M per year so given our scale we've never paid list for anything but I have no idea how low the bar goes for "You pay list and you don't" - I admit my general mindset is that "list price isn't real price" but I might be totally out of touch here... Org scale is not the only thing, sometimes "unique' use case that can serve as whitepapers/case studies for the vendor or proofs of concept that they can use to secure other clients can be used to reduce pricing at least in the short term. AWS going around pointing at NQ as a K8 cluster success story in the gaming world given Amazon's push into game hosting via GameLift might be enough for them to cut them a deal - but who knows. You're also right about the compute costs not being 'insignificant' but I just have no way to know how intensive or not their backend is because none of the data points are visible to us. All we do know for a fact is how much data DU pushes to clients by looking at our cache size. I'd love to have more insight into the DU backend - especially given that DU is a fairly unique concept - but doubt it'll ever be public data.
  6. So the cost of DU is not really CPU cycles but CloudFront - DU uses Cloudfront to push out all the voxel data. Any construct or terrain change you make is stored in cloudfront and pushed out to other clients as needed and then stored as cache by your client, at least till the cache is invalidated. Just how much data is pushed is easily tracked by checking your cache size folder. For the estimated costs it's pretty easy - https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ You can confirm this easily by the way - Keep in mind that NQ likely has a contract with AWS that is for negotiated pricing, it's pretty rare for any significant users to just pay the list price. That's why mining had to go and that's why constructs have to get destroyed if not tied to a paid account - else they are forever sent out to other clients and NQ pays for it. Tracking millions of autominers is just a bunch of rows in a table - it's not a significant cost really. As to why NQ made the AM timer 24 hours instead for 20h like the "daily" timers in many games - it's because they have a consistent history of failure to learn from the mistakes made by other games. "Daily" timers being either set to a specific reset time or less than 24h to avoid the constant 'shift right' for the players has been standard practice for some time in other games. I had previously posted a breakdown of what I estimated NQ to be paying for hosting and how many players they needed to cover their staffing costs with the profit assuming France average DEV costs + taxes - and that post got deleted and I took a 3m ban for it sooo uhh not doing that again - you're welcome to draw your own conclusions though...admittedly I did also state that you shouldn't buy into DU because of that data because well...uhh...DOA.
  7. Alpha Team Vanguard used to exist with that goal and after all the entire Alpha and Beta stages of the game were supposed to exist with that goal, and here we are.
  8. 1 and 4 are not possible. Please at least learn how DU works in the backend before making grand plans to save it. It is fundamentally tied to running on an AWS k8 cluster and cloudfront. 3 is way more complex than you think because DU as is suffers scaling issues and would need a ton of work to look decent in VR. 5 has been planned already 6 is not possible because 1 and 4 isn't possible. The End.
  9. My Day 1 gameplan is to read steam forums, and reddit and this forum and laugh and laugh and laugh. Wait you guys are actually going to play this and not just laugh at suckers who fall for this 'release'?
  10. I think you may have a very different concept of "relative stability" from others - because what I recall is people being unable to log in and unable to finish the tutorial because of the crippling lag...
  11. This is cute. Imagine thinking that a game with 100 players is viable. NQ has 68 employees according to LinkedIn. It's safe to assume that they are burning through ~5m a year - in short they need 50k paid accounts to break even.
  12. Wow it looks like all 3 remaining builders are outraged...
  13. I can't help but laugh at the MU implementation. I was begging for MUs because mining was just such a nightmare: So I hoped MU's would help remove a lot of the tedium from the game and actually make it fun to play.... Except when we got MUs it was totally not what I had hoped for....I wanted to remove tedium - not add more!
  14. Yeah - the typical DU player quit about 12 months ago after the schematics change rolled out....
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