jintzy

Ah I miss the potential of the Stomping Land. Where you could capture someone in a cage and force feed them to harvest their precious feces to use in a garden to grow veggies to force feed your prisoner to harvest their feces.

Awesome! Thank you for explaining this so clearly.  I'm very happy that's how they are doing it instead of the way I had imagined.

Your body vanishes. Your construct (ship, house, Statue of Liberty with a Lightsaber instead of a torch) still remains in-game. If you log inside a Saezone, they can't trap you, unless you are inside ther construct's voxel grid.

If you log out while flying your ship, you will relog inside your ship, even if it moves. If it's robbed or GTA'd, I don't really know the answer to that.

So yeah, you may need to park you ship inside a space-station if it's too heavy to land o na planet (physics is a bitch on lift-off, so is fuel consumption). 

Or even better, people may actually run "space parking lots".

As for planets, that's why cities will emerge. So people can log out insdie their houses, where nobody can barricade them isndie via "voxel boxes" or something like that.

Also, in the wilds away from a safezone, if you relog and find someone has traped you in a voxel box, you can actually break thevoxels with your wepaons.. The game is not just Construct VS Construct, it's about Avatar VS Avatar combat as well. You can break free of your "prinon".


Cheers.

"It's just not big enough." exactly my problem with most MMORPGs in the last 12 years. No crafted economy. Tacked on PVP. Instances everywhere.

I played Ark for a good long while when it was new, it came to the point that i had multiple of each dinosaur and a building so complex you'd get lost in it for days. I'd been to every corner of the map on the back of a 'dactyl and further.
 
My impressions of Ark after completing all this was, "Its different". Crafting system wasn't really new, Building system was more of less 'Rust', Combat was poor. It just had dinosaurs that you could tame and ride.
 
Looking back at my gameplay of Ark it was the novelty of the dinosaurs that kept me playing, once you had a couple of them, if you didn't play PvP Aggressive, there was nothing left for you to do and it became boring very quick.
 
DU on the other hand has a superior building system through voxels and it's potentially infinite planets alongside it being a single shard MMO with Lua coding. It is as far from Ark in potential enjoyability as it can get, ark was all 'novelty' where DU is pure 'gameplay' yes it's similar to other games with voxels but those other games were not Infinite persistent MMO based and in space.
 
If Ark was MMO and on a spherical planet not just a single map i would have enjoyed it better but they are not able to do it or it's to late for Ark.
 
I have no fear that DU will best Ark 100x over and i have zero fear that it will just become a sci-fi ark.
 
Spaceships, players and infinite planets, what can go wrong
 
nora,

Is it year 0AA yet? System clocks are showing 12477, which was the date we scheduled to arrive at an undisclosed location when we started our trip. I have not yet fully regained my consciousness, having been crammed in this darned cryo sleep pod for a millennia so this is difficult to think very much at the moment.
 
The last time I remember, we were told that we would be heading toward the Scutum-Centaurus arm of the galaxy but most of my memory is hazy.  Where are the windows?  I can see on the monitor that we are approaching a strikingly earth-like planet but I have not been able to glee any of this beauty with my own eyes.
 
I suppose this is the best time to attempt contact with any other surviving arkships and try to pinpoint their galactic location(s) for mapping later on when we arrive on the surface.
 
Looking around, I can see there are a few eyeballs and wide-eyed explorers anxious to find out more - staring at the ship system monitors, soaking in every photon and every source of information while we are locked inside this life-preserving vessel.
 
-----
 
Okay -- seriously --- HELLO there!
 
I've been waiting for EVER for this game!!! I signed up when I first heard about it, but then I shoved the links into a corner and forgot about them until recently. Now that we are inching closer and closer to having access to an online alpha experience, I figure now is a good time to start getting involved with the DU community.  I CAN'T WAIT!!!!!  The last Dev Update was satisfying, although I want more.  lol
 

Welcomes   Join us on Discord: http://discord.me/dualuniverse

Welcome jintzy, we're all excited for DU

Official DU 'throw money at the screen' thread
https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/423-when-can-i-throw-money-at-you-please/

Thanks a lot for the compliments and your encouraging words, Saffi! 
 
To be honest I may seem quite active on the forum for the time being but this is mainly because the number of participants is still quite small. As the community will grow, my participation will seem less visible, spread among all the topics posted on the forum (while my activity will remain the same). 
 
And yes, we have a dream to make Dual Universe unique:
As gamers we feel like something is currently missing in the MMO Field.
That's why the team is making a game we can't play anywhere else... and a game we definitely want to play! 
 
We are also aware that incredibly successful Kickstarter might overwhelm some people and make them do some mistakes about how to manage the money they get from backers. We have seen some sad examples, and we know that because of these examples, backers are becoming more careful, sometimes even suspicious (and it's perfectly understandable, especially when they participated in a successful kickstarter that went wrong). Traps coming with euphoria due to success have been noted. So we're preparing ourselves to many scenarios, even the least expected that comes to our mind, in order to stay cool-headed as much as possible regardless what the future has in store for us. And no planned scenario includes swimming in pools of Mt. Dew, that's a promise!  

I understand that people can build in the ask ship's safety zone and that the ark ship will protect those structures from being damaged by anyone unless the builder/owner grants them the right to do so. In that case, what's to stop me building a big wall or dome around the ark ship (if I've got sufficient resources) and charging exorbitant fees or requiring nasty contacts to be signed to go through the gate?
Also, if you build your own ark ship like safety area how would anyone damage something in that area? Isn't the whole point that is an area of invulnerability? How then could you ever lose it as long as you can keep the generators running?

(Posted Saturday 13th of September 2014 on the DevBlog)
 

 
 
While we will encourage and foster PvP activities in the Dual Universe, we also want to find a way to let less action-driven players, or simply beginners, to enjoy other types of gameplay. Some of those would incidentally be essential to the mechanisms of a player-driven economy. To give you a few examples, we could mention architectural/artistic and building activities, politics, science, exploration & research, or financial organizations. None of these can easily develop in a war zone. At the same time, we want rare resources to be hard to secure, exploring the unknown to be challenging, and territory control to be central for Alliances and Empires. How can we reconcile these two extremes?

Often times in the design of the game, I like to look at the real world for inspiration. In most industrialized countries, we are enjoying a relatively stable peaceful environment, but it was not always the case. Originally, people used to gather in small towns characterized by high protecting walls, internal police and usually a garrison of military forces ready to defend the city. The goal was to define a collective force of defense, and a "secure" perimeter, presumably easier to defend and therefore more peaceful than an isolated house in the forest where bandits could attack at any time. Today's industrialized world has developed similar protections at the scale of a country: frontiers, military forces and collectively financed weapons to discourage any aggression. Modern countries typically also add economical interdependencies with other countries, creating a commercial network that encourages cooperation rather than aggression.

This is the kind of emergent security we would like to witness in the game. However, building cities and then nations will undoubtedly take a lot of time. Maybe several years of game time. If we don't bootstrap the process, the game will be a sort of Mad Max world for so long that we might never get there.

The backstory is going to help here: you are a colonist who just arrived on a new planet, in a gigantic arkship that transported you and hundreds of thousands of other colonists through the universe for millennia. The arkship was designed in Kyrium, a super-resistant, graviton-absorbent semi-transparent material able to manage any type of brutal deceleration for the ship or its passengers. It is programmed to literally and frontally crash in the planet's ground, becoming an impressive 10km tall high tower lurking over the landscape. Digging deep for geothermic energy harvesting, and standing high in the skies, the arkship is meant to become the universal beacon for your new civilization. As the ship designers expected, your nascent world would need supervision and defense regulation, at least around the arkship, to be able to bootstrap rapidly a self-secured civilization: as a consequence, there is no aggression possible in a perimeter of 20km around the arkship, no PvP.

The ship’s autonomous AI will constantly monitor every action performed in its action radius and neutralize any attempt of aggression or unauthorized destruction. Beyond that zone, it’s PvP free-for-all. You only go there if you’re well prepared. We might introduce intermediary zones before the full PvP area, where certain levels of protection remain, but this is not yet decided.

The arkship is self-powered and impossible to destroy (no one knows how Kyrium is made or harvested, but it's clearly not something that plays in the same league as any other materials you will encounter or craft in the game). So, this safe area is impossible to deactivate. However, it is not impossible to build another one somewhere else in the unsafe zone or on some other planet, power it and defend it. The AI-shield technology that the arkship uses is documented in the blueprints available for download, and with the right skills it can be rebuilt. However, the energy cost of such a gigantic device, as well as the military protection that will be necessary to protect it against frontal attacks or sabotage, does not make it something you can just build in your garden with some friends. It will typically be requested to support some strategic mining operation or some political plan that makes it worth the effort. This is the kind of construct that will require a very large number of players and resources to create, and will be made available in the game much later. But it will be in principle possible to settle a new safe zone anywhere on any planet (except in another safe zone), if enough players are willing to contribute to its building and maintenance.

Strategically, a secondary arkship-like defense tower and safe zone will obviously be a target of choice, either for military purposes or simply by griefers eager to set the world on fire. The first type of attack could in principle be settled without much damage for the inhabitants of the zone, if they consent to transfer territory control to the attacker when he has proven to be stronger than the existing defenses. In the second case, ultimate destruction could be the goal of the hostile forces. Players will always be encouraged to take electronic snapshots of their constructions, if not blueprints when appropriate (the difference is that a snapshot cannot be traded, it's a personal asset), together with insurances, in order to be able to rebuild if necessary. However, rebuilding after destruction is costly, as neither the materials nor the time required by the auto-rebuilder can be avoided. It would be better to lose a bit of time and money, rather than losing your magnificent neo-renaissance imperial castle on top of the mountain.

Ultimately, for a group of players outside of the range of the arkship protection zone, the best way to insure their safety is to invest in powerful defensive weapons, secure energy sources or backups, and cultivate a network of diplomatic links to be able to call for reinforcements when hell will knock at the door. I wonder who will be the first to settle on another planet and how long it will take!

JC Baillie,
Project Lead
 

Well... Basically, you won't have much incentive to build a big wall/dome around the Arkship.
Because we are talking about kilometers here, and you won't be able to keep integrity of such thing on this scale: 
 
- If you just build a wall/dome around the Arkship, on the planet, then the wall doesn't belong to you as a construct. It's just materials deployed around the Arkship Safe Area that can be collected again by any other player.
- Assuming you did succeed to create such dome (which would requires  many building zones to circle around the Arkship Safe Area), players will be able to attack the walls and it will be problematic to guard the walls on several kilometers.
- Players will be able to dig under your walls.
- Advanced players will be able to use teleport technologies.
- The players trapped behind these walls or this dome will be most likely new players, with no money to tax.
- Powerful player alliances might not agree with someone who wants to "emprison" new players.
 
So for these many reasons, it seems a bit ridiculous to even try this action, with no chance of success/profit when it involves some much resources.
Some players will probably try, before realizing it's not worth the effort.
 
Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.

What is confirmed :The alpha is meant to fix bugs and test things, it's not early access and some features necessary to make the sandbox work will be missing. There'll be a wipe at the end of alpha and at the end of beta.
My guess: they'll make us play the base game with all the features they have ready, like building and mining, since they decided to delay it to september specifically to give us a better experience, so they'll likely use it not only to test but to promote the game (so probably no NDA, i mean JC has never been scared of showing the state of the game). As far as we know (from the first devidiary i think) they already have a testing server with bots running fulltime (not sure if it's still the case), so since alpha players are not that many, I wouldn't be surprised if they'll keep the servers running most of the time. Another reason for that to happen is to test stuff you'd need more time to develop (big ships, rare bugs, ...) and to understand better how the player behaviour will shape the sandbox in the long term

Hmm, you can't see who voted for which age, I don't think there is any privacy issue.

Praise the Sun, building ships looks like an actual science <3

Ermagerd, plot twist

to add to my point, if youre in a chill organization, and the people who are backers in it like you, they can gift you some DAC's too, so be sure to make friends along the way