Aleksandr

Currently, hit probabilty depends only on a cross-section of targeted ship.
In my opinion, this is pretty bad for making pvp ships look pretty, this is how my ship currently looks like:


It's done like that because it was the smallest cross-section I managed to achive with 6 M railguns + L shield + good amount of thrust.

This is a good example of a beautiful ship by Metsys:

 
But this one have x1.5 frontal cross section, and I'm not talking about other two (which can make a difference in a fleet fight)
The box design will have at least 20% less hit-probably compared to pretty-looking ship (which makes it 20% more tanky)
and 20% is in my opinion a very big difference in survivability to make a choice towards using a box.

For me, creative aspect of DU is one of the best compared to every other voxel-building games, and i want to be able to use this aspect of the game in pvp as well.
Because PvP is a competetive aspect of the game, and if we want to min/max our builds, we have to use boxes =(

Here are some of my thoughs that can help improve this situation:

Make hit probability based not on a cross-section, but based on:
a) total elements+voxel volume (that will give full freedom on ship design while keeping the smaller-better trend)
b) total ship mass (don't really know how this can make any sense, but that can be pretty balanced i think)
c) heat emission (amount of thrust / gun shots  produced)
d) any other parameter you can think of except cross-section

If I look at my factory, it seems that every production that is running and finishes during the patch period gets in an error state. Pending elements, or products that need a long runtime seem to be fine.

So just to let you know the market orders are showing the worst buy order and the most expensive sell order by default. It is reversed as to what was posted on the release notes.

As the meta changes and DU moves to more classic approach - When every person is sitting on a his own ship(as having 1 ship with many gunners is now useless, each ship now has same defense - one shield gen). I would like to propose some interface changes.
 
A well made interface is very important for fluent and enjoyable gameplay, current meta of sitting in a gunner seat and using a remote control to control your ship is far from being the best gaming experience.
 
We currently have shields and "stress". We are planned to have energy. Therefore I have a good idea of a possible interface:
 

 
The outer layer can demonstrate the shield status, the middle interface the stress of the voxels and the inner circle the HP of the core. The middle section can be used to represent the future "energy" that the ship has.
 
As we go further we may think about adding an advanced ECU that assists the pilot while piloting. You activate the advanced ECU that brings you to a third person view. While the advanced ECU is active, you can see the before-mentioned interface and control the ship by double-clicking in the direction you want the ship to fly to.
 
This way pilots can concentrate on overviewing the battle from the command perspective and decide on further course of action in a much more enjoyable manner.
 
Thoughts ?
 

Hi there)
Our favorite game recently got a competitor, and I think need to take some steps to attract an audience.
I think it would be a great idea to give everyone free access to PTS. On the one hand, it would be a great marketing move. On the other hand, you will get test participants, of which there are not so many yet.
I understand that this will create additional load on the server without making any money. Therefore, you can come up with a limitation. Let's say 4 hours of gameplay per day per account, or something like that.
What do you think?

wow, eve.. okay

Ya, it is the only way. I recently resubbed all my accounts  (CCP thanks you for the money NQ) and we had an armor timer defending our main fortizar from a bigger alliance. We bat phoned, they batphoned. 200+ man fight went down, was a blast. We as the defenders lost more ships and lost more isk, but we stopped them from finishing off the armor hp and it reset so we successfully defended and kept our main staging fortizar.  Meaningful pvp where both sides had time to prepare for war and give it their all over a meaningful objective. That's what DU is missing.  Purpose to do shit.

Then what the fuck are you even talking about.  Stay in the safe zone thats what it's for. We are talking about pvp, and owning territories, and how NQ said now space pvp territory is coming. And how eve tackles those problems. If you dont want to be apart of that stay in the fucking safe zone.  Reading comprehension isnt your strong suit I can see.

OK, I certainly don't want to knock anyone's efforts so please don't take it the wrong way, but I think one player being able to have 120 tiles is a big problem for the game.  IMO owning that many tiles should require a whole organisation of people working together and paying upkeep in some way or other.  Perhaps have tiles immune to territory warfare so long as a fee is paid every month on them and when it stops being paid people can come and contest the territory.
 
Why?  Because at the moment territory is too easy and cheap to claim and once claimed it can be held forever.  I've claimed a few tiles myself -- it works out at a little over 500,000 quanta per tile and you can keep scaling that out forever by creating more and more sub-orgs.  I'm not a particularly rich player, but using just the spare money I have in my wallet at the moment I could go out and claim 2,000 tiles right now.  Madis moon 1 has less than 1,500 tiles and moon 2 has under 2,000.  So I could go out now and claim a whole moon for myself (except the territories which are already taken ofc).  Then I could leave the game and that moon would be unusable forever.  
 
Or I could start having fun by picking out city projects like yours, claim whole rings around them and put up big walls, loads of those ugly spike things people build or whatever and there would be nothing at all you can do about it.
 
Now bear in mind that there are players who made 10s of billions out of getting schematics for 1% of the normal price.  Those people can claim a *lot* of tiles now if they want.  Whole planets in fact.  That can't be a good idea can it?
 
Like I said, I'm not suggesting that everything should be vulnerable all the time, but that there should be a mechanism where people who want your tile can contest it and where you can do something to keep it safe.  Be that actual PvP (and you have a week notice and can hire mercs and are then safe for a period after) or some sort of money based system.

My preferred way would just be to limit orgs so they have to have one subscribed player in every org.  Since one player can only be in 5 orgs, the costs of tile ownership would start to escalate quickly as more were claimed (as the devs intended).  And have rent work the same way.  To have hundreds of tiles you would need to get other players to join sub-orgs so you could scale out without it getting madly expensive.  And if those players stopped playing you'd need to recruit more, etc.  The 'pvp' approach here would then be for someone to try to recruit your players away from your org so you couldn't afford to keep the tiles any more.

I like to underscore this whenever I see it because it is true for any building game with claims that players can build cities. The ancient relic that is Terraria is more of a city builder than most because you have to house a few NPCs. 
 
Clever distribution of resources could bring groups of players together so they take different roles within the chain of production and distribution.  This will get us closer to cities though the end result will be more like interconnected factories within shared fortifications.  True cities will require some kind of NPC presence even if those are only background props that reflect the economy of the area they are connected to.   
 
More to the point of the thread.  PVP is the best way to motivate players to band together and the best way to drive an economy that gives those bands something to work toward and fight for. 
 
Should the game survive and keep going some years I would love to see different kinds of settlements emerge - High population centers - good for research and general goods production and then more frontier type settlements that could be wiped out in wars. 

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...

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

If they don't stick to their original promise here then many many players will be out.
 
Thats why there are safezones. That's why you shouldn't be in the ffa Zone if you arent prepared to lose stuff. Dont really see how this doesn't work. With the right mechanics and a good and well prepared devteam.....oh, I see the problem now 

If this game ever becomes popular and gains a solid player base, district 6 and worse is going to be every market in the game.

For those that havent read:
https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/22565-changes-to-lua-screen-units/
 
My entire range of products in-game is based on HTML screens and CSS animations. It would not be feasible to rewrite them in any amount of time that would make it worthwhile. The new LUA based drawing features are extremely limited. For example, a large part of what makes my Bacterium product look realistic is the use of CSS animation on SVGs. Most crucially, the ability to use existing skillset (HTML/CSS) and familiar tools (SVG creation outside of the game e.g. Adobe Illustrator) are what make my products possible within the already tight limitations of DU.
 
I don't want to be dramatic, because I know its important to be constructive when giving feedback but if you remove support for HTML on screens, I'm out. Hundreds of hours of work will have been wasted and the key element that attracted me to this game will have been lost.
 
HTML/CSS is an existing technology that attracts creators becuase they can use existing skillsets. Removing it is too greater loss. If anyone else feels this way, please comment below.
 
EDIT
Can I just give an example of the sort of thing I am regularly doing on screens so you can understand how unachievable it will be using the new LUA commands:
 
My Bacterium product (https://du-creators.org/makers/NoxCorp/ship/NoxCorp Bacterium) uses animated SVGs inside <DIV> containers that are then animated to move around and transformed in 3 dimensions using CSS. This can all be achieved in around 30,000 characters of HTML/SVG markup and CSS. There are no amount of "useful drawing commands" that can offer this kind of flexibility.

Yeah i get that. But this mechanics was implemented to stop players from stopping their ships via log out. So while it's technically stays in place, it's still not "stopped" and have speed.
So if you not "stop" your ship in safe zone, it's quite obvious it can travel outside of safe zone with time. It's just realization of this mechanics, that for construct to CONTINUE moving it requires someone onboard.
But how is unfreezing ship can be treated as exploit and be forbidden, if it was intended. I think that if restoring constructs speed is forbidden and counts as an exploit, then this mechanics should be removed.

yup.... ez ban bait.

Generally speaking, fix the game mechanics. Written rules are going to be broken, there will never be enough case-by-case manpower in order to judge these things. Game mechanics should dictate what is feasible and what is not. Otherwise the devs are fighting their own sanbox because of broken mechanics to the point where the sandbox is not a sandbox anymore.

The safe zone was never declared as mistake free zone (before). It was purely declared as zone with no PVP and that was it. Everyone knows knew if youre in whatever way negligent you have to bear the consequences, safe zone or pvp zone. This is still a sandbox game right?
 
 
For this situation there is also a very clear game mechanic: Its called space core docking, its common knowledge that this is was the way to protect your constructs in space in the safe zone. Its a perfect way to regulate the mechanic and theft, just like RDMS. Negligent about your RDMS? Bear the consequences. Leave your construct floating in space? Bear the consequences. - At least in the past, but now as has been clarified any kind of action that would put you in an unsafe situation (per definition bearing consequences of your actions) in the safe zone is deemed illegal.

This will allow for easy ban bait when I offer free taxi and log out 500m before the safe zone with passengers on board and they "transport" my ship by regular game mechanics outside of the safezone and they or someone else captures it. Yes safe zone is supposed to be safe (from PVP, not mistakes!) but as there is a perfect counter for any kind of theft (docking to space cores), everything else is pure negligence and wasnt be covered by the safe zone (before), because this opens every door to more issues. Especially considering other game mechanics and situations which allow transition between safe zone and PVP space will be affected by the changed situation. So since the safe zone is now completely safe from any responsibility and negligence logically (and by common sense) I wonder: Does that also mean any kind of roleplay/ingame scamming is forbidden in the safe zone? Any kind of miner slavery? Any kind of luring people into the pvp zone? RDMS theft protected? etc. etc. This opens a lot of questions for me here, since these things would make the safe zone incredibly unsafe.

Thats the difference between a privat friendship circle and a professional endeavour. Even if you have favorites you act upon it equally if youre in an professional environment. We as private customers are in a different position than the service provider and professional part in this. Certainly some rules can be extended/stretched for some constructivism and goodwill, but favoritism that directly punishes one/another side is not the way to go in any case. Being professional doesnt automatically entail being soulless and coldhearted - you can still keep a friendly communication with your customerbase, but you should certainly keep favoritism out of the business when this is very harmful for the business model and concept of the project.

IMO the bigger issue here is what sort of game do you want?  Do you want to have a game where people log on and have space adventures in a risky environment where  unexpected things happen, people do good and bad things, create interesting stories which you can tell people about, people lie, scam, steal, you need to be careful and earning trust really actually means something real.  Or do you want a game where everything is guaranteed.  Your stuff is 100% safe if someone says its safe, nobody can ever scam you, everything takes place in walled gardens you control and if someone pushes the boundaries of the game mechanics a bunch of space-lawyers pop up with 10-point questionnaires (with sub-points!) trying to work out exactly where the walls should be and anyone who gets creative runs the risk of getting banned.
 
I'm not involved with either side here, but personally when I read stories like the Elias VIlld one I think that sort of thing is fantastic and I want to play in the sort of world where stuff like that can happen.  But then again I thought it was a fantastic story when that person stole a whole market but the GMs don't seem to have agreed ...

Considering the recent event with Elias Villd and the discussion in discord, NQ could you please clarify where exploiting starts? Could you please reply in details on each of the issues listed below?
Could you please clearly clarify what is allowed from specified activity and what is not?
 
Thank you a lot!
 
 
All described issues below don't use any additional tools (like maneuver tool or any other tool) or constructs. All of them involve only player movement in atmo and/or space with only standard game physics involved.
 
 
1) Is it allowed for someone to jump on a ship (Dynamic Construct) while ship has no its pilot nearby? Is it considered exploit or not?
 
Let's assume pilot of the ship logged out while moving or not being docked to some static construct. This resulted in speed "stored" in the ship. So, when someone will jump on such ship he will restore (with curent game mechanics) the ship's speed instantly.
 
2) Is such action - restoring the ship's speed after jumping on the ship - allowed? Is it considered exploit or not?
 
Let's assume after restoring the speed ship is moving towards nearest planet. So, if someone will continue to stay on the ship the ship will eventually fall into the planet and explode.
 
3.1) Is such action - staying on the ship while it is falling on the planet - allowed? Is it considered exploit or not?
 
Let's assume after restoring the speed ship is moving in some random direction that finally ends in PvP zone. So, if someone will continue to stay on the ship the ship will eventually be moved BY ITSELF into PvP zone.
 
3.2) Is such action - staying on the ship while it is travelling without the pilot towards PvP zone - allowed? Is it considered exploit or not?
 
 
In all above issues ship is moving by itself, only general game physics is involved. Not a single tool/exploiting technic is used.
 
 
Could you please clarify about spying issues. No any exploit is involved, only standard game physics:
 
4) Is it allowed to jump to the ship and go to log off? So it will be possible to be a spy on the ship. Is having spy on the enemy ship allowed or not? Is it considered exploit or not?
 
4.1) If after log in into the game the spy finds itself on the ship in space and that ship is moving by itself into PvP zone without pilot - is it allowed to be on such ship? Is it allowed to wait in such case while the ship will reach PvP zone?
 
4.2) The same as above, but ship is falling on the planet. Is it allowed or not to continue to stay on the ship?
 
 
What about if spy will bring with him some additional weight in inventory that will pull down the flying ship or will not allow the ship to lift off?
 
 
 
5) Is it allowed to jump to the someone's ship with some weight in the inventory? Is it exploit or not?
 
5.1) The same as 5) but do log out after jumping on the ship. So, ship could have additional weight. Is this allowed or not? Is it considered exploit or not?
 
 
6) During normal fly in atmo: can pilot of one ship disturb the flight of another ship? I mean can one ship be controlled in such a way that it will end in collision with another ship? Is it considered exploit or not? I am speaking about flying in atmo/safe zone here.
 
 
7) There is some bug in game while parenting bigger dynamic core to the smaller one. The resulted couple could gain some free speed in some situations. Is it allowed to use this parenting issue for cheaper transportation of your own constructs?
 
7.1) If someone jumps on such couple of dynamic constructs in space (the case when such couple of constructs doesn't below to the jumper), and it will result in this couple moving towards PvP zone - is it allowed action or not? Can player continue to sit on the construction or should it jump out from it immediately? Is it considered exploit or not? 
 
 
Some normal PvP related issues:
 
 
While normal PvP session with guns and pew pew - if pilot of one ship will log out his ship will lose it's speed resulting in brake from 30k kmh (or any other value) to 0 kmh instantly. When pilot will log in, the ship will restore its speed - 5%. Is it allowed to use such mechanic to interfere PvP atacker pursuit of the target? Is it considered exploit or not?
 
8.1) Is it considered exploit or not to stop killed ship (the one which has gray marker) with maneuver tool even if the attacked ship has "stored" speed?
 
9) Finally, could you please clarify what is "Parenting Ships" from your article here: https://support.dualthegame.com/hc/en-us/articles/360016890940-Clarification-Regarding-Bug-Exploits-and-Griefing 
By parenting, is it considered parenting between constructs only OR between construct and player (Can player be parented to construct?) is also considered parenting? Is construct transferring to PvP zone with one of the methods described above considered "Parenting" and is also forbidden? Is it, finally, exploit or not?
 
Last issues I would like to clarify:
 
10) What is official position about burying other people dynamic constructs on unclaimed tiles?  Is it acceptable action or is it also exploit?
 
10.1) And if the tile is claimed by me, can I bury (cover with earth) alien ship? Is it acceptable action or exploit?
 
10.2) Let's assume I found some ship staying on unclaimed territory. If I will claim the territory and bury the ship immediately after claiming the tile - is it acceptable action or is it exploit?
 
I will be very thankful for clearly answers on all of these 1) - 9) issues, just to clarify the rules of the game and of what is allowed and what is not.

[removed image to free up space]

Yeah, that's a big nope.. Nobody with the skill set to make a one of a kind "Augmented Reality GUI" whatever would make that script using the built in LUA editor only, never ever having versions of the script exist outside the game and/or in multiple cores. Making a complex script using the built in LUA editor in DU, is like painting a house with a toothbrush. Technically possible, but wrong tool for the job.

It's about time we activated the 20km safezone.