Scavenger

Hello Noveans,

With the latest release (0.23), we are introducing some pretty radical changes to the industry gameplay. We would like to take the time here to explain the rationale behind those decisions. 
 
First, let us start by reminding everyone that we are still in Beta, which is a place where core balancing is supposed to happen in order to prepare a game that will stand the test of time at release. We understand that some changes will impact the current game style of many players, but keep in mind that everything is done for a good reason, which we will try to explain below.

Industry Recipes as Items

The central idea behind the industrial gameplay is that an Industry Unit (Assembly, Chemical Reactor or others) is a sort of mini factory. It should come with an initial and substantial cost you have to invest before starting to commit yourself to mass producing the goods that this unit allows to produce. 

Mass production is a key element here. If you need just one or two items it should not make sense to build a factory to produce such small quantities. You should instead go on the markets and buy it from a specialized producer. This is the basis on which we can hope to see a healthy economy strive in the game.

It follows then that the initial cost to build a factory must be much higher than the cost of production of one unit, and by a very large margin. This has not been the case so far. The price of an industry unit was often on par (or even far below) the unit cost of products it could output. 

As a result, buying on markets made little sense. Markets overall were not being used as much as they were intended to, and players built omni-factories to produce anything they needed even if they only needed it in small quantities. This would be a great design for a single player game or a hosted-server game but not for a civilization-building game with a single-shard approach where player specialization is central and paramount.

This is what the “Schematics as Items'' modification is intended to fix. (We renamed “recipes” to “schematics” because even if we are a French company, we don’t want to bring cooking too much into the factory!) We don’t intend to touch the price of existing Industry Units, but instead we have added a schematic item that you must load individually into a single Industry Unit (there is now a small schematic bank container integrated).

Having the schematic item in the Industry Unit schematic bank is needed to run a particular schematic, so you will need several instances of the same schematic item if you want to produce the same item on several Industry Units at the same time. Those schematic items are sold by bots on markets, and they are much more expensive than the Industry Unit they run on. Each factory needs a schematic associated with it. This is why you need to buy several of them if you want to run production on several lines simultaneously.
 
Adding a line of production for a new item will come with a steep initial cost investment. This makes total sense if you plan to mass produce the item, but is suboptimal if you just need a small quantity of this item. You would be better off going to the market to buy at minimal cost from specialized producers competing against each other. If you're only planning to produce a couple of decorative plants to customize your underground lair, it’s probably going to be more cost-effective for you to buy them from a market than buying a schematic for it or else the cost of this couple of plants would be excessive.

What does this mean for industrial players? If you already have a giga factory, you will still have it, but it will now need a significant starting investment to buy the schematics needed for production and a commitment to mass produce and sell in order to make economic sense. You could specialize it to improve its returns or you could even consider reselling part of it on the markets to revert to another strategy. You could perhaps take it as a new challenge, a reboot of the game goal where the balancing between initial setup cost and cost of a single item will be central to your success.

Something else to note is the fact that the introduction of items for schematics means that we may later be able to introduce a Research gameplay feature where players can improve schematics to get an edge not only in productivity but also in the quality of the product they create. This could additionally open the possibility of selling schematics, an option we may consider for the future (though it will not be anytime soon).

New Talents

Before the 0.23 update, there was no barrier to use any advanced Industry Unit or advanced weapon. If you had it, you knew how to use it. This was both counter-intuitive in general (before you buy new gear, it’s normal that you learn how to use them) and went against the idea of character progression as intended in the game. 
We have now introduced new talents to unlock access to basic industry (very easy) and also the more advanced versions or the larger versions, which are more advanced talents. This will contribute to player specialization, which is a central idea in the design of Dual Universe.

That’s it for now. Thank you again for your support and your constant help along the path. See you soon in Dual Universe!

JOIN THE DISCUSSION!
 

First off, there is a lot of "Me" in your post. While DU is perfectly playable as a solo player, without the support of an org and other people in it to join forces with when needed your options will be limited, yes. DU is not a game that is geared towards a Solo person achieving everything by themselves.
 
You find that mega node? Drop a Territory Unit, it's yours and no one can touch it. 7 days after you put the TU down, it can be taken off the tile again and reused elsewhere. In EVE, you go on holidays and someone else drops a citadel near that belt and kills you as soon as you get back to it as they have claimed it for themselves. That belt may also move or next respawn it's contents may not be as rich as previously.
 
Progression continues as you are offline, your talents keep training and Industry keeps producing, no need for you to be there. And here again, when playing with friends you can divide time up between the group and when you get back on, all the stuff you need wil be there, ready to go.
 
 
Frankly, it's all a matter of perspective. You seem to be looking at all this through a lens which from the get go is colored by your opinion of other games and you also seem to be looking through it from a single player experience. All of that is fine, if another game suits you better then go for it but that doe snot make your argument valid beyond the fact you prefer mechanics in other games. There is a lot that needs to get better in DU but you need to keep in mind that a lot of the game mechanics are yet to get in and existing mechanics will go through iterations over the next year or two. It's really not fair to compare to games that have been around for decades.
 
You hope the game turns in to something you like while it sounds to me you have expectations for the game which were not based on what is in, has been announced or is being worked on but what you like in other games. so without this meant to be negative in any way.. go play those other games you do like.. no shame in that and perfectly fine if DU is not for you.
 
 

First of all: awesome! I really like the idea of stored momentum and wished for it quite some time. But I see huge issues with it that at first feel worse than not fixing it right away. Sorry, I didn't read all of the non-NQ replies here, but I want to add to the list of concerns and apologize if they've already been mentioned.
 
Most of the time I got my AGG ship parked at 1050m above my base at Sanctuary (using the fact that logging out will freeze it in place because the AGG wouldn't keep it there when I'm gone as I understand it). I use an elevator platform (sometimes called magic carpet) to reach it and go down again. The AGG ship can maneuver in atmosphere but not lift without AGG support. Will my design be invalidated by this change? @NQ-Naunet could you please put child gloves on for us AGG captains and explain exactly how we need to prepare and what to expect?
  If I get disconnected while piloting, along with restoring my momentum, logging in should also restore me in the pilot seat. Otherwise I might crash for not reaching the seat fast enough.
  The position from where the player entered a seat should always be persistent. Currently you can get trapped in your own construct when you log out while seated, because it resets the position from where you entered the seat originally and the "default position after login" can place you inside the ship's structure, effectively trapping you. If your ship is stationary and frozen that's ok and you can enter build mode to free yourself - but if momentum is restored you might end up trapped, racing against time to get out of the structure before you hit something. You could argue bad ship design, but I feel that would be unfair, as placing a seat in a spot with a low ceiling for example or between flat elements would be a perfectly fine design in reality, but gets you trapped in DU.
  Remember to restore thrust settings and engine states as well. If you are floating on vertical engines (like elevator platform / magic carpet or heavy hauler with slow starting XL space engines) and need to set thrust and spin up these engines first, it could be enough to get you into a non-recoverable position.
  Make 100% sure that all game assets have been loaded before you restore momentum. Right after login I remember to experience heavy lag before the game runs fluently after everything loaded. Stuff like that made me fall through the ground and get a "Back to the surface..." screen - or fall through not loaded elements and end up in space (a friend entered another player's construct throug the not yet loaded door and got trapped for thinking there was none). Latter being ok if my ship is stationary - but imagine falling out of your ship when logging in, while the momentum is being restored and your ship shoots away. Ouch. You should freeze players in place until the surface they were standing on has been fully loaded or securely known to have be removed.
  When I first tried the radar in orbit to lock onto a ship out of curiosity DU dived into some kind of memory leak and made the game unplayable. Other times I was on a perfect approach vector, but the loading of planetary assets (or something else) killed my framerate. In both situations I had to use the emergency exit brake to avoid fatality. Same happened on markets where we already made a habit of landing 1km away and walking the distance to avoid crashing due to market lag.
  There seems to be a loop that constantly reinitializes all elements on a construct. This loop has a flaw and sometimes skips an element or takes minutes to find and enable it (at launch or mid flight). Just yesterday I was unable to turn right with my elevator platform and kept spinning left until 1-ish minute later DU realized that I had adjustors to turn right too. In the past this often led to situations where the emergency exit brake was the only thing that could rescue me.  
Given some time I think I could come up with more situation where a logout is the only thing able to rescue me from bad situations that I didn't cause myself. I'm all in on the idea that it should be in the player's control to live or die by being careful and planning ahead - but right now I feel like freezing my ship using logout to brake does more good than it does bad.
 
Further I'd like to know if freezing a ship will be completely gone and if not I'd like to know if an approaching player or running around on your ship will initialize physics, or if that only happens when you enter the pilot seat?
 
Regarding the maneuver tool: 50m is not enough and I feel this should scale with core size. If your ship is 128m, moving it by 50m doesn't suffice, while at the same time it's enough for an XS sized ship. Imagine your L sized ship laying on its back and you can't get it high enough to spin around? Errr... nope. Ok, takes only 3 Minutes to reset, but still rather uncomfortable to stand around watching the clock tick. Maneuver distance should always at least be a tad more than the edge length of your ship's building zone - best make it the distance between the upper left front and lower right back corner (I'm sure there's a term for the diagonal line in 3D space in English, but I don't know it). The constraints about standing on a planet or static construct should be enough to prevent platform-climbing and I don't see any benefit in limiting L cores (or XL later?) to 50m. Also, what happens when I stand on my carrier and maneuver a small ship around on it? Will it initialize physics after maneuvering and fall down on the carrier, meaning no more "docked at the side using clamp-ish force fields to walk over"? Maybe implement docking clamps first before removing the option to use the maneuver tool to simulate the effect.. but I'm not sure if that was even implied. Some clarification would be welcome, but either way it's not that crucial as the removal of the emergency brake  

Good day, Noveans!
 
Much of the allure of Dual Universe is the ability to be the captain of your own destiny as you pilot the ship of your dreams. Piloting your ship requires skill and a strategic use of the tools available.
 
The Maneuver Tool is an important part of that toolbox. In its current state, however, it wasn’t working quite the way we planned. As we approach the launch of the 0.23 update, we wanted to talk about changes we’ll be making to the Maneuver Tool as well as changes to issues around what happens when you’re disconnected from the game (intentionally or not) when actively flying your ship.
 
The Maneuver Tool is for maneuvers

The Maneuver Tool was originally introduced to offer a simple way to get your ship out of a small hole or to flip it over when it landed upside down. It also provided a handy way to lift your ship off the ground a bit so you could work on it from below.
 
But as is often the case when designing video games, the cunning imaginations of players found unexpected ways to use the tools that were not intended by the designers, some of which are detrimental to gameplay and could cause issues in the not-so-distant future. Let’s take a closer look at some of the issues caused by the “creative” use of the Maneuver Tool and the upcoming changes we’ll be implementing in the imminent 0.23 update to correct them.
 
Cooperative play is all about collaboration and players helping other players. That’s great, and we don’t want to discourage players from doing that, but how it’s done is important. The Maneuver Tool was not intended as a way to move a ship “by hand” over kilometers or to create a ladder of two ships used as intermediary steps to reach space. These uses went clearly beyond the original intent of the tool.
 
To address this, we’re introducing some limitations in line with the purpose of the tool: 
 
A ship will not be able to move more than 50m in total between accumulated uses of the tool. The distance between the start and end points is added at each run of the tool. The moved distance is reset after three minutes to ensure that players aren’t stuck forever. It is, of course, a per-construct limitation.  Unless the player was in contact with a planet ground or a static/space construct, a ship will no longer freeze in the air during the use of the Maneuver Tool. This will make it possible to lift it up to work under it, but no higher than that.
No more instant stopping of ships upon disconnection

Everyone has “the need for speed”, the desire to get from Point A to Point B in the shortest time possible. So you pull that throttle back, amp up the power and blast off. The danger is that if you don’t carefully monitor your speed, you’ll smash full-force into a planet, your ship will blow up, and you’ll find yourself either returned to your bind point or resurrection node. Ouch!
 
A common workaround for this has been to disconnect from the game just before impact. Upon reconnection, your speed would be reset to zero, and thus you could approach with a safe speed. Although it’s convenient, that’s not how it’s supposed to work.

With the upcoming change, upon reconnecting, as soon as you get in range of the construct, the speed and rotation will be restored to whatever they were when travel was interrupted. The benefits to this change are twofold. First, it will close the aforementioned loophole. Second, it will prevent you from expending twice the amount of fuel to reaccelerate a ship at maximum speed if you had been disconnected for whatever reason.
 
Further, if you disconnect while another player is in range, the server already assigns the task of handling the physical properties of your ship to that nearby player. This means that your ship will continue to move in this situation. On a large ship with many people on board, disconnecting will no longer have the effect of freezing your ship because there will always be other players nearby to continue the simulation of your ship’s movement.
 
We will also add the option to have the Emergency Control Unit (ECU) activated in that case, so that an emergency “braking” can take place if the ship capacity allows it.
 
Keep Doing What You’re Doing
 
We tip our hats to the ingenuity of our Beta testing community. The way you use the tools and mechanics we toss into the sandbox gives us lots of food for thought, showing us the changes we need to make to make the game we all want to play. We encourage you to maneuver your way to the discussion thread to tell us what you think about the adjustments we’re bringing to DU! ❤️ 

I just spent almost a week on an insane and pointless yet beautiful building and terraforming project. I did not mine a single node. Could not care less if someone else was stealing all the resources. I have my territory, my ore will be there when I need it.
 
This is a game for creativity, surely. If you want some kind of empire building space combat game there are many better ones to choose from

I think a lot of people are looking for Dual Universe to be a lot of different things, and i hope it can be all those things eventually.  But it's not all of them yet.
 
Personally what i was looking for was a building game, Minecraft with better graphics.  Right now Dual Universe is exactly that, and better then i ever could ever have imagined.
 
Look at how popular Minecraft is, it's a crazy successful game.
 
Having watched this project go from a few pieces of concept art, and a discussion forum, to what it is now.  From where i'm sitting things are looking pretty damn good.  I really hope to see the game become everything that they envisioned it to be.  And it's possible that NQ was a bit too ambitious.  But i don't see any evidence that the game isn't on track to be something amazing.  
 
As far as i can see, NQ is making the game as fast as they can, it sucks if the game sounded interesting to you, but nothing in it interests you right now.  But what was NQ supposed to do differently?  
 
Should they have built the game from start to finish in secret, without telling anyone about it, just so people wouldn't have to live with the disappointment of knowing about it, but not being able to play all of it yet?
 
They could have settled for just making Minecraft with better graphics.  Or they could have made Eve with better graphics.  Either of those would have been a hell of a lot easier.
 
But neither of those would have been half as good as what we have right now, to me at least.  /shrug
 
 

Dear Alpha testers,
 
The Beta launch is coming in just a few weeks and as you might expect it, so is the pre-Beta wipe! You will have 2 last test sessions before the wipe, during which we ask you to save all the Constructs you want to keep under the form of a Blueprint. 
 
We know that this official announcement comes on short notice, but as you can imagine, the whole team is on a tight schedule to deliver the Beta at the end of the month and we’re trying to inform you as much in advance as possible with the time constraints.
 
The last test sessions before the wipe will occur will be:  
 
From Thursday, August 6th at 14:00 UTC
To Monday, August 10th at 14:00 UTC
  From Thursday, August 13th at 14:00 UTC
To Monday, August 17th at 14:00 UTC  
Remember, everything will be wiped following this session, except the normal blueprints located in your Player Inventory (Nanopack), so be sure to keep those previously on your character, and not anywhere else (like in a container).
 
Last but not least, we also want to apologize for the inconvenience regarding the very short notice about the extended PvP zone and the issues that may have resulted from the situation. However, if you’re in a situation where some of your Constructs have been damaged before you can make an up-to-date blueprint of the said Constructs, please contact our Customer Support as soon as possible so you can get help from our team before the next test session. If you’re in such a situation, please read carefully the process described in the previous announcement published here.
 
Best Regards,
The Novaquark team.
 
 

Besides Space Whales, one of the few things I've been wanting lately is new functional elements / cosmetic elements. "No more!" I beg!
 
I propose having an endgame talent once you master an entire talent category (though I know you're redoing how they work, unsure how it will look so this may be dumb) such as Dredger or Avatar that takes a week or so to talent into, and allows you to get a new cosmetic or functional element that only you can craft / place. Perhaps it's a better / bigger / prettier type of engine! Maybe it's a launcher pad or a mini resurrection node. Could be a new type of voxel! The ideas are endless, but I think having them as a reward for talenting into things could be really smart / rewarding.

Was thinking about how mining in its current state could get some more depth.
 
What about a "Timing-Minigame" which needs you to release the mouse button (or click a second time) when the mining sphere reached its max size (Maybe a tiny threshold).
Once you timed good you get a buff which lasts like 3 seconds and will give your next mining sphere in its first second of growing a tiny boost like 10%. A tiny start boost of growth could already feel satisfying and make you feel you are in the flow
 
That minigame could be indicated by i circular loading bar which makes a satisfing "blink" in its neutral white color when you timed good. But it should not appear red if you dont since the player shouldnt be punished if he doesnt care about it.

Was thinking about how mining in its current state could get some more depth.
 
What about a "Timing-Minigame" which needs you to release the mouse button (or click a second time) when the mining sphere reached its max size (Maybe a tiny threshold).
Once you timed good you get a buff which lasts like 3 seconds and will give your next mining sphere in its first second of growing a tiny boost like 10%. A tiny start boost of growth could already feel satisfying and make you feel you are in the flow
 
That minigame could be indicated by i circular loading bar which makes a satisfing "blink" in its neutral white color when you timed good. But it should not appear red if you dont since the player shouldnt be punished if he doesnt care about it.