IvanGrozniy

Lol Snipey... 
 
It's like you woke up, put on a left sock, got an alarm that the Staff of Wisdom struck again, and just ranted some crazy nonsense no doubt connected to your dreams of Blazemonger terrorizing you witb chopsticks and voxel checkerboard... and then you went to have a smoke on the balcony and realized you were butt naked.

You wanna know what lighting elements are for? To bring illumination on areas that are dark! In other words, to make the surrounding more visible in terms of details! Darkness is the absence of light! 
 
What is the point of the lighting elements? If the night is brighter than the moon, you don't need these elements! You don't! They have no purpose, they are just decorations like many things, I am telling you as a mechanical person!

DU not only tech demo in many aspects, but as it was confirmend with latest blogs (AKA "we still not sure what we are doing"), JC also lied about actual state of game for years.
 
"No red flags about 21 release", do me a favour!
 
 
 
 

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....

It is a bit of an apples to oranges to bananas comparison..
In most browser CSS/SVG transform is GPU accelerated, so that would definitively be A LOT faster. But at the same time I have a feeling that the CSS/SVG implementation in DU is not using the GPU, so then it becomes a question on how optimized the software fallback is.
 
And of course while importing your own 3d engine is seriously cool, it also leaves less script space for other stuff.
If NQ really wanted people to make cool screen projects they should add support for webassembly and webgl, instead of re-making functionality themselfs. But that is not their way.

You can mine the environment.
 
 
In return, the environment can bore you.
 
Interactivity confirmed.

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...
 

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...
 

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 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.

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.

So true. All these little mechanics are missing in DU but made eve so SO much better at Exploration. We were 15 ppl in a c5 and always scannen the whole chain, we got around the whole verse in less than 15 jumps. And it was very exciting because you always had a risk involved of getting caught. But these ppl don't get that, and never will, because they want their playstyle to be 100% safe and they want to do everything with no risk. "But those griefers never build anything and and risk does not involve pvp" - pretty wacky statement for a single shard MMO 

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.

100% agree. One of the dangers with 'early' beta release and crowd funding in general is exposing early and potentially short-lived mechanics that players decide they like but that cannot be implemented at scale. Danger of the funding mechanism and not managing the expectations.
 
The other big issue is making players think that their individual feedback is going to shape the game. It is the collective feedback that is important and the 'noisemakers' tend not to think about that. To be fair companies tend to do a bad job of publishing the collective feedback to keep such expectations under control, but also to be fair the vast, vast, vast majority of players have absolutely no idea of what is involved in building a game like this. Not even a clue. This was clear reading about the screen change discussions.
 
Now, this has nothing overly much to do with the PvP discussion - other than tangentially - but is important all the same!

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.

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.

In just one post we learn that
toxicity is a binary designation you are the arbiter of truth and reality old farts are toxic you represent newbies (presumably by election) ......  
Jokes aside, okaaaay? If you notice, I generally don't talk about players when I'm criticizing DU, I talk about the game. It is game design that facilitates, encourages, and provides incentives for certain actions, even if the said game design is unintended or not apparently purposeful. Blaming people for playing a certain way in a sandbox is counter to the sandbox. Calling players toxic doesn't help, it's quite embarrassing actually, it usually means that when someone throws an "fu" at you, you are too weak to throw "fu" x 10 back at them (expression shamelessly stolen from a Siberian intellectual). Not all newbs are the same, they are here for different reasons. Most people here are very helpful to them if they need help figuring things out. Sly remarks about "admitting x" and "you know it but don't want to admit it" silliness doesn't help either. Those things are generally summarized in a term "not an argument". If you have one, provide it so we can discuss the argument. Discussing players is a slow burn to garbage drama.

This video...
 
They. Talk. Literaly. About. Another. Game.
 

Yes seems like "dev-time" isn't so precious after all when its for the french.

I see what you mean. That depends of course...
 
if we're talking pvp meta ships, no, this statement is not true. Those things are really expensive to build. And they are expensive to repair. I'm not sure people comprehend how much mining and man hours it takes to build one of the golden ships from Boo's Gold Armada. I'm not sure people understand how much it takes to repair them after a "battle". No one wants to lose one of those, so pvp battles tend to be more about whoever gets pushed out into the safezone first, battle of attrition. Additionally, if we talk about piracy as an easy win card, it's not like piracy is profitable, it mostly does not exist and the "piracy" you can do is very aids if you ask me, you'll spend more on fuel and waste more time and quanta pirating than if you were digging holes in the ground and selling to bots. I don't think it makes much sense to divide people into pvpers and builders... pvpers are also builders, whereas you're probably talking about a subset of players that are purely builders I'm assuming. PvP builders are just more specifically focused on indy buildings, ship building for pvp, and station building rather than purely builders who want to avoid pvp. Have you looked at the Foundry for example? That is a station built by a pvp group. There are also others, some really fancy. Talents don't matter too much in meta pvp, again it's mostly about ship stamina rather than who can shoot further. Repair talents help though, repair engineers are really important in fights. Smart pvp ship builders make ships that last longer and take more shots.... but they also mine a lot in order to repair.  
 
I see. And I agree. If that's where the conversation headed before I mentioned this was a civilization building game then no comment. If it was the case though... then... I think games should (and they do) take inspiration from real life but they should not mimic real life. And I'm mainly talking about the fact that in real life things are cohesive, there are causes and effects, stuff just doesn't appear out of thin air. In a game, this happens all the time, but it only makes sense if it is cohesive within the world it is trying to build. The cohesion is where I make the parallel between real life and games. I do not like that some games mimic real life where it becomes a second job. In terms of DU and civilization mechanics, this is why I already mentioned elsewhere on this forum that before you set out to make such a game with such "grandiose visions", maybe you should start with first principles and ask what civilization is, what are its characteristics, what are its causes. Once you have the key ingredients, then you think about choosing a few important ones that you can actually gamify and make a cohesive yet fun system out of. And I'm simply saying this never happened. It doesn't feel like it did anyway, since the game exhibits absolutely no civilization building mechanics or progressions. NQ should probably rethink that "vision"  

Ahem... and there we have it... blame the players, not the game! Best strategy ever.

A lot of people have built a lot of cities, the problem is.... they are useless. And they are namely useless because they are not necessary. As long as DU remains a game where a stronghold / city is not necessary, it is not a civilization building game.
 
Civilization doesn't just come out of nowhere, there are some very important selective pressures that generate civilization: geography, weather, environment, neighboring tribes... war, scarcity, uneven resource distribution, etc etc... None of this is in the game. Placing higher tier ores on different planets is a bit of a lazy way of doing things, but so far that's the only attempt at a civilization driving factor, even that is done poorly. There is no danger at all, apart from game bugs or someone too asleep at the pilot seat to realize they're about to smack into a planet.
Cities don't just appear, there is a process by which they did appear out of necessity and natural growth. Just because someone placed a few constructs on the ground with fancy voxels and lua doesn't make it into a city. Empty museum, sure, not a city though. Moscow was not built as Moscow... it was an intersection of war and trade paths that necessitated a trade hub and then grew into a stronghold and then into a sprawling city, again, by natural necessity. The result of years and years of strife and trade was a bustling city with input and output, supply lines and social hierarchies and distribution etc etc.. Driving factors. Selective pressures... they don't exist in DU. It's mostly rp and rich players making "plans" and building empty voxel museums.

You would think that if the visionary scientist would have set out to build a civilization building game maybe he'd start off with first principles and ask questions like: what is civilization? what factors cause it? What are its characteristics? And when these questions are answered, maybe the important / realistic causes / characteristics can be picked out and gamified into a coherent system. Something screams at me that this process never happened. It was.... oui... cities.. civilization.... lessss goooo sacrebleu! More than 20 million dollars later we have what we have.
 
Fundamentally DU is a tech demo purported as a game because it's treated like a game (payed subs). There are expectations of a game that is treated as a game, especially when people are paying for it.... meanwhile still a tech demo. As far as I see it, the premise of this 50 concurrent player quota single shard mmo mining simulator is that its vision will be accomplished when there is a player generated city bustling with players, with supply lines constantly feeding it, and top tier production exported as product for the general population to use, organizational and governmental structures, etc. If DU can actually achieve that, it would be a good score. Perhaps it can't and the devs will hire level designers to "build" cities for the remaining playerbase. But at that point you can't call this game a "player-generated" content game... you'd have to clean out and erase a lot of marketing and the whole premise of the kickstarter.

All this to say, pvp is necessary as a driving force for civilization generation  Along with geographical differences that matter... along with weather... along with horny T-Rexes roaming the jungles of Alioth and eating innocent virgins...