IvanGrozniy

Well.. as a start, don't build an MMO on cloudfront. Someone here said they shouldn't have worked on PvP. Well.... The first thing NQ (JC) said when after they finished their prototype is that they will be working on atmo pvp. They didn't of course. The whole idea of the game, making cities, making a civilization, emergent sandbox blah blah blah... Why does a city get built? 1) protection against outside dangers 2) quick access to resources / commodities 3) trading is easier and safer 4) social rules 5) a city is a bastion and safe haven that controls the surrounding lands I can go on... The point is there are social / political / evolutionary pressures that cause people to get together to create trading hubs, towns, cities. The city exists because it has to, it has a vital organizational purpose, it doesn't just appear because someone wants to make a pretty building. DU pvp is basically optional, there is no danger from anything. There's no pressure of any kind. People don't have social interactions that are complex enough to force them to start thinking about cities — because cities don't matter. Plenty of people have built fancy hubs. Some people have used them because they were fancy or somewhat convenient. But at the end of the day they are all empty voxel art, they do not matter, they do not affect anything. Every person in the game can build their own castle / city without consequence. The game is devoid of any necessary preconditions that makes social organization emergent enough so as to make cities necessary. There's no pvp danger to hide from, there's nothing in pve to defend against. Resources are plenty, no one needs to rent a house at some voxel city, they can always build their own. In short focus on pve elements, voxelmancy, making sure everyone gets what they want immediately... It devalues the sandbox and devalues what is made in the sandbox. Because it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Ow... And don't build an mmo on cloudfront.

Exotic screw specialist...

Except for added crazy amount of tedium and nonsensical mechanics for "gameplay" reasons. If you had a hard limit on factories per account it would amount to the same thing you were alluding to: people would create manufacturing lines dedicated to only specific parts or very small production chains, actually forcing them to interact with other people and buy/share their production lines. The benefit there is any new person can come into the game without having to be burdened with the schematic system and its high costs for building anything worthwhile. Instead the player would have to make connections with people in order to buy the parts needed due to their dedicated production chains. In some respects limiting production units per account is also a nonsensical mechanic for "gameplay" reasons, but arguably a more elegant and much simpler solution than a system that does not value your time at all.

If all you want is specialization from players, the actual simple solution to the problem is limiting the amount of factory units a player can own. You can also limit the amount of factory units an org can own. And there you have it, the net effect is that organizations are now forced to specialize as well. I realize this is heavy handed and ultimately you'll need to undo so many things you've already done, but that seems simple enough. One may say that this gives power to people who have a bunch of alts. Well... we're already there, have been since before beta started. The whole talent system encourages that so there's more to be concerned about here. Simple solution but effective, and there's so little to do in order to implement it (other than... undoing what has already been done of course). Proposed numbers: Each account has a max limit of 20 or 25 factory units. This is not a lot of factory units. It will force specialization just like you want it to without cumbersome and awfully tedious mechanics. If an account is in an org, that account adds 8-10 factory units to the org limit. An account can create factory units under the org or under their own account and share their units with the org. The idea here is to have a push and pull between accounts contributing to the org pool but not excessively, they still will likely sacrifice their own account unit limit for the org. This will prevent orgs being bloated with big factory unit pools and it will also force orgs to specialize. All in all, schematics don't make sense, They break immersion quite heavily (why would you buy them when it would be more practical to clone them... why is there only one schem for one production unit, etc...). They add immense tedium. They just don't make much sense on so many levels. You'd be better off with just limiting factory units per account.

This game was supposed to be about building civilization... not an update to Landmark.

Remove emission from rocks. Remove that nebula. Leave space alone. Give @Eternal his landscaping business back. I worry about his commute.

Nice post overall, some of us were talking about removing planet voxels / digging altogether 6 months / a year ago. Believe it or not we have lost a lot of really impressive devs from this community due to .... stuff... some of them are way more qualified than NQ. DB iops are super expensive for what NQ was trying to go for. Additionally they scaled way too early (who needed that many planets at start of beta?). They are dealing with scaling / cost problems while trying to develop new features, which throws the development cycle into a loop of late-come optimization on a lot of the backend code. The main kicker is... atmo pvp combat was removed from the roadmap.. it simply does not exist. Will it ever be added again? Who knows. I think not. Mind you, this game was supposed to have avatar vs avatar pvp first, JC (the starter of this project) said exactly this in one of his development videos. The focus shifted completely somewhere else (Landmark playerbase, building building building). AVA is now only a pipe dream, and sad to say, atmo pvp as well.

So... where are the lua changes?

Player number dwindle, pie get smaller, infighting begins.

According to DU lore, Noveans don't breed

Well... I actually agree with this... Not streamable. Not ergonomic. Most importantly, not fun.

I love this man, please keep going you!!! Also how was your commute?

It could be that they are not using gpu acceleration, but we also know that they are not using databinding, which means the whole DOM tree gets refreshed and stored in memory on every frame.... smh....

"... HTML/CSS/Javascript is a group that forms a UI technology. For reasons beyond the scope of this topic we do not allow the use of Javascript inside the screen units. When you remove Javascript, the group effectively becomes a not so efficient vector image drawing technology which we have very little control over in terms of rendering. " - NQ Meanwhile Coherent ui: Coherent GT incorporates the proprietary Renoir graphics library and performs all rendering on the GPU. Renoir backends are provided for all major graphics APIs and multi-threaded rendering engines. Users can also customize the low-level rendering code and even write their own backend that uses the application engine. - https://coherent-labs.com/Documentation/cpp-gt/db/d12/rendering_guide.html

This... although there are ways to offload the whole thing to the gpu, not really sure how they do it under the hood but you can do some powerful magic on a gpu... but there are plenty of reports of people maxing out their gpus with no one around and no constructs... and in space. Sounds like a lot more problems happening than just voxels getting in the way of better performance. The other issue is the shear amount of data being requested to load all those voxels in. SB also has these problems so they deal with it by staggering viewing distance. it's not working great at the moment but they're working on it. Lol, I'd be happy to do away with voxel systems entirely and just "build" with prefab components that are designed for sci-fi immersion instead of trying to accouunt for every single voxel.... say, you need a corridor in your ship, well, there can be prefab designs you can place that look really good... but that requires lots of artwork on NQ's part...speaking of which... they did have a fancy corridor thing in early alpha videos but it just disappeared...

In both my examples of games you can achieve 500v500 I think... and Infinity Battlescape can do 1000v1000 I believe.. it's been a while so I may be wrong on exact numbers. Nonetheless both of the games I talked about achieve "massive" battles with projectile based, fps combat. I do think NQ is in for a ride with their voxel system though, the lack of optimization is staggering in pvp with all the crazy voxel update requests and such. It's a huge problem. Like @XKentX said, even lock and fire 5v5 right now is impossible in DU, and what's worse is when it starts lagging it also affects players from across the system with pending ops... I mean.. there's loads and loads of problems, you can crash the server by warping 20 or so docked constructs at the same time... or was it 16?.... been a while . I believe @XKentX is right in saying that NQ devs will need to rewrite the whole system in order to even support good sized pvp battles with lock and fire... NQ does advertise massive pvp battles, which is false... not only because we don't have enough players to actually "enjoy" this pvp lock and fire system, but also because well... servers can't even handle a 5v5. We can also talk about lock and fire and how to improve this system instead on focusing on something NQ will be very unlikely to even consider, as seen here: They will VERY LIKELY stick to lock and fire due to server constraints (talent constraints imho ). They will very likely stick to long distance combat, otherwise they will have to solve the slow server ticks at distances where you can see the opposing construct. It's just hard to even talk about lock and fire in a positive way when there are so many massive problems with it right now.

It's a game where people do stuff, just keep this in mind.

I know what you mean and I don't ignore it, I simply don't want to add caveat after caveat, too much rambling on) Yes that is the mmo standard. Time is the ultimate pace halting mechanic in mmos. I did say that the "it's about the car, not the player" approach favors players who have been playing longer. For sure that is NQ's reason for not having fps combat. That doesn't mean it is not doable. Starbase will have fps combat mechanics for both ships and robots despite the mmo nature of their game. I know of at least 1 indie space combat project that has some amazing netcoding that allows me to fight someone from across the world in ship fps combat with almost no disagreeable latency for projectiles (some fancy prediction is used there and it works without a hitch). NQ is a new company, they have never made a game, let alone an mmo, which, in terms of netcode, is an entirely different beast. This is why we have been having some insane netcode issues in DU, for example massive amounts of data being downloaded during pvp where the mesh requests have absolutely insane rates. FPS combat can be done in an mmo with some tradeoffs, and in the hands of talent it can be done very very well. NQ does not have that kind of talent, even the current lock and fire system is very much scotchtaped together, it simply does not scale. You can check out an open alpha (free) called Hunternet for multiplayer space fps combat. You can also check out Infinity Battlescape for relatively ok netcode and massive space battles (they do have a bunch of bots but they have them replaced by players when they join servers). To be honest I would not trust NQ to make a good fps combat experience in space. It takes someone who actually understands how these things work in game context. and as far as I'm aware, they don't have such a person. Even Star Wars Squadrons failed in that regard.

It's a double edged sword though. Because tbe problem you'll have with focusing on "the car rather than the driver" is balance. Once you get into the business of balancing you have to commit to balancing everywhere... basically being an overbearing mother that constantly gets into the way of kids playing in a sandbox. And doing that is frustrating for both players and developers. More so for developers because now they have to balance everything. The devs basically create a sandbox mmo and then nurf the sandbox into the ground by fighting the emergent mechanics of a sandbox to absurdium. In a more "its about the driver, not the car" kind of game, you do get a merit based system. But yes not everyone will just practice practice practice to get better. But some will. Nothing wrong with that. It's "fair" depending on your definition of fair. Everyone can increase their pvp skills if they choose to practice them. But yes you'll get super good players that would beat anyone in a 1v1, 1v2 or 1v3... but it's "fair" because they put in a lot of time into practice. Again... depends on how you define and look at these things. Matching up elo ratings in an mmo is practically impossible, this is the nature of an mmo. "Its about the car, not the driver" typically favors the players who have been longer in the game because they accrued more gear / talent points, etc... if something feels unfair people typically blame the game balance and game mechanics (if they were logical about it lol). "It's about the driver, not the car" favors naturally talented players more and their ability to learn and improve. In this scenario people typically blame each other or devs for allowing "exploits" because some players can't comprehend how much more skillfull their opponent is. Also the reason why I divide these poles so strongly is because we hardly ever see a good blend of both simply because of complexity and sunk costs. It's easier to focus on just one type of system otherwise if you do both, you're working on systems that cancel each other out and that become useless. For example, you can have gforces in the game but also a talent system that helps you deal with it. Older players will max that talent and render gforce mechanics essentially useless because they are canceled out by talents. And this can happen for multiple systems across the board such that an older player has way too many mitigating talents/skills that prevent them from experiencing the limitations of the game in the same way that a fresh player would experience it... and there again we come to questions of fairness . But essentially the question would be: why design the game such that most skills barriers and limitations are negated by rpg mechanics simply because of a player having an older account? You'll get 30-40-50% of the mechanics of the game nurfed or not be used at all due to them being canceled out. So why even try to sink time and money into such a system... It's frankly useless to talk about fairness in an mmo. It's more useful to create game design where a player can improve as a player over time. I think that should be more emphasized.

The way that most space dogfighting game make combat fun is one or more of these things, but usually a combination of: low max speed cap (say 1000km/h for DU) This is necessary to force combat into close quarters as well as held deal with netcode issues better if it's aim / projectile based fps combat warp drives with variable speeds that can warp wherever you point your ship. weapon projectile distance caps to again force close quarter combat g-forces and loss of consciousness due to g-forces moving blood... this adds limits to maneuverability and forces the pilot to consider how to maneuver the ship properly in order not to pass out while fighting. ship design is 6dof focused, meaning that maneuverability of a ship on all axis is very important in order to dodge projectiles and outmanevuer opponents projectile speed is capped, bullets are projectile based rather than instant hit (hit scan). Speed of projectile is capped so that if a pilot is good enough they can outmaneuver bullets or at least avoid majority of damage. Combat is not about trying to build tanks to soak up bullets, it also allows for outmaneuvering them The combination of all these things leads to very fun and challenging combat. Part of the reasons for this that combat relies on pure player skill and not on talents or rpg skills. It means that if you suck then it's mostly your fault. Which leads me to another list of what these mechanics lead to: 1) very high skill ceiling. This is a double edged sword because this combat system relies on pure player skill, which requires proper player training, while some people actually prefer rpg skill mechanics that increase their effectiveness in battle. Very high skill ceiling introduces merit based combat, in other words, the best fighter wins, not the best voxelmaster or ship builder, nor even the best ship design. Very high skill ceiling usually means "its about the driver, not the car", while rpg mechanics and talents systems focus more on the car than the driver. People will complain about high pvp skill ceiling because actual player skill will become barrier to entry into pvp rather than talents / quanta / rpg skills. these mechanics require 6dof (6 degrees of freedom flight model). DU actually has it, except it is useless in a fight because you can't "dodge" and combat is so long distance that there is no practical purpose to strafing / rolling, etc. 6dof combat can be very very difficult to grasp due to maneuver complexity and very insane freedom of movement in close quarters. In DU context this model is improbable to achieve as the whole codebase is pretty bugged and it looks like DU is just a minimum viable product in terms of pvp. Starbase is doing it with their hybrid p2p system though, so it can be done. Furthermore I personally know developers who have achieved very effective ways of mitigating issues due to high ping across continents (I've played such a game against a person across the world and the projectile prediction was surprisingly on point, everything was smooth). It's definitely possible but it will require NQ to rewrite... everything. this whole thing is a pipe dream for DU tbh, devs have said they are sticking to lock and fire. Idk if they even know of ways to mitigate high latency seamlessly... I just think the current DU pvp model is a very unappealing mess.

I'm playing it on an ultrawide screen, experience is fine. I did see NQ reduced font sizes for hud widgets in the newest patch and it's tiny.

Back when Eve was being developed gaming was very different in terms of players and especially gaming industry. People were happy to play any shitty mmo. Now? ... there are many analogs of voxel builders being developed today, there are huge mmos being developed and or are already in ea or beta, it's a different world. You need to do much, much more than a mining and voxel building simulator in order to attract enough concurrent players to recuperate costs. And by more I don't necessary mean more mechanics, I mean quality.

How about make every aphelia market market 15 and introduce player markets before any other mechanic...

If that is what the correct assumption should be then why make a kickstarter promise? Company promises x if they get y dollars -- everyone should assume x will not happen regardless of y -- company proceeds to make z, w, and g None of this makes any sense.