Hi guys !
First of all, thank you all for the warm welcome to the VPT. We've been working for a while now, trying to make it as ergonomic and intuitive as possible, we hope it will live up to your expectations when you test it yourself with Panacea.
I take the liberty of intervening on this non-Lua devblog for questions related to it, and thus to answer your question @EasternGamer
Having the ability to export/import with Lua or without, a bunch of voxels was considered but we were faced with a lot of quick and hard to prevent automation possibilities, copyrights ...etc. The game could have quickly become an import show of all kinds of 3d models.
So we decided not to implement it.
I would have liked to have an export/import function for this. You could make a program help with making more mathematically perfect points and paste in the code for that vertex... or maybe just having the ability to type the exact value you want could be a huge help. I don't believe you can do that, right?
Hey there, here's my humble opinion on the upcoming Demeter patch.
I'm a fan of constructive feedback, and I don't say the following lightly. While I really respect each and every staff member of NQ, and their efforts of bearing the brunt on a daily base, and while there are also things I am really looking forward with the upcoming patch (and while some in here will even disagree with my personal opinion) ... I am not in principle against changes (on the contrary). But I am, like many others, very concerned for the future of DU - and that even before the official release. To say this as respectful as possible in regards to all your hard work at NQ: the upcoming changes are a sign of destruction, and DU may disappear into oblivion in early 2022.
(1) The terrain reset is necessary, yes. And I assume the majority of the player base is absolutely okay with that, considering the issues we've experienced since Beta start. Nobody cares, if they have to dig out their stuff again - it might be a great opportunity to redo some stuff around bases, that people were not really happy about in the first place. Same with those changes on how brakes work. Personally, I like the way they work on PTS now.
(2) The voxel changes are fine too. Technology is changing and evolving, so does the voxel tech. What I'm concerned of are the complexity limitations. While technical issues need to be prevented in the first place, I fear many detailed designs will no longer feasible in near future. DU will no longer be the game where everything is possible, and the own creativity is the limit - instead it will be the game where everything is possible within those complexity limitations. Please, don't cut the rope too short there.
(3) And now, let me point out my concerns for mining changes, scan results, and territory taxation: This could kill many huge community projects within the first one or two months. And while projects like the Alioth Spaceport by Infinity Corporation, Shamsie's Bazaar, and Obsidian Racing may be safe for now, many others will just disappear. Smaller groups or ambitious solo content creators won't be able to grind for millions and millions of quanta without spending the time of a full-time job each day, seven days a week, just to earn enough money from missions to pay their taxes on tiles they need for their project.
And if that's not enough, you would split the community even more by keeping existing scan results valuable. Both new and casual players won't be able to acquire enough resources by mining, and huge organisations with fully scanned planetary bodies are going to take each and every valuable tile for mining without any efforts and/or competition (within days, or even hours), because they already have containers full of planet-wide scan results.
I like the idea of having two different kinds of territory units, some people have already mentioned in other threads (e.g. in Hagbard's feedback thread): those, we already got - to just build and terraform. And mining territory units, with tax rates of those you plan to implement in Demeter. Plus, I'd prefer a full reset of all scan results - and I may not be alone with that wish.
Conclusion
The way you are going to implement all those changes + territory taxation, many players will leave before Christmas (déjá vu), and many projects (race tracks, community projects, and other ambitious projects) will just disappear before the game has even been released. The players' base will shrink, and even PvP will suffer from those changes. To be precise, you break the neck of many content creators, that create amazing stuff for you and for all (existing + future) players. And when that happens, Dual Universe as we know and love it - a game that I, like many others, have waited for a long time, that I've followed since the first Facebook ad that NQ-Nomad has dropped, and that many of us value for the freedom of creativity and the great community within - will vanish.
Please, NQ, I ask you from the bottom of my heart, and even as an early backer of Dual Universe: overthink those changes you are planning to implement with the upcoming Demeter patch. I don't want our all concerns become a nightmare before Christmas (no pun intended!). We don't want a "Eve Online" 2.0 economic simulation - we want to play Dual Universe, a "continuous single-shard sandbox MMORPG taking place in a vast fully editable Sci-Fi universe".
Do not let those changes be Hades, do not let DU become Persephone ...
As a coder I am biased, but instead of “IF IT’S BROKE, FIX IT” I'd rather hear “IF IT’S MISSING, LET THE PLAYERS ADD IT”.
I get that most players in the long-run may be more interested in using stuff than building it. I also get that you may worry that opening up more flexibility is a Pandora's box that could lead to game-balance problems later. However, to quote that well-known fan of open-world sandbox space simulations, Voltaire: "Perfect is the enemy of good".
This is still a beta. You have a finite number of designers and coders at NQ, and a lot to do. You have another army of both out here in the game: stop trying to do everything yourselves! If you give us more API hooks and better tools, we will prototype things for you, and we will fill in a lot of the gaps for now, whilst you focus on the infrastructure.
With a modest number of additional hooks I'd say that we could have a community-run mission system and player markets already; they wouldn't be perfect, but they'd exist! If the community adds something and NQ later replaces it with something built-in, few people will complain as long as it is an improvement... and if it's not an improvement then arguably you should be spending your time on something else instead.
My friend, you seem bitter. And for as long as you have been here, it is understandable. However, now that there is a new CEO, give this new CEO a chance is all we are saying.
What we are building here is ground breaking, it has a lot of potential for both NQ to make profit as well as player to experience an unprecedented MMO content, But with out honest feedback synergy is wasted.
A very positive push to right direction this is, thank you and keep it up we are here to help.
