Bazzy_505

I don't believe engines need universal bump to pre-nerf times.  But having said there should really be more meaningful difference between different favors of the same size engines. As it works right now, there's no reason to bother with anything but military variant of any engine.  More varied fuel-to-thrust-to-weight-to-fuel consuption would go to differentiate between the engine grades of the same size. 
 
As for the engine wall problem, no matter what the effective thrust is, people will always fit as many engines as they can to haul as much as they can.  The only true solution if to finally implement powergrid on cores and have each engine type and variant specific powergrid requirement to link.  A size of core or a reactor size connected to core would determine max available grid to link all active elements.  Shipbuilding would than become more of balancing game between different operational requirements and would have been good foundation for further game systems to implemented related to guns, defensive systems  etc.
 
Wings, stabilizers and ailerons i feel are more of an immediate issue. Current models for wings are pure garbage. what's more  you can't even properly add adjustors to its surfaces without insane amount of fiddling and attachment point issues are not even worth talking about.  Rest of the airfoils also have a fair more quirks than they should have. Weight of ailerons vs their lift and size make the large sizes quite impractical to use.   Also some interoperability and consistency between wings /stabilizers  and ailerons wouldn't hurt either.  
 
 

No one is saying that game developers in general or NQ specifically here would not want to see Linux based players but the facts you keep trying to sweep under the rug and pretend to not see are that there is not enough  potential customers to make it commercially viable to support them.
 
This is not a Linux vs Windows debate, it is a numbers game and Linux userbase simply does not have the numbers to justify spending money and resources on in a commercial sense when talking game development.
 
I am also not saying you should do anything, _YOU_  make a choice to run a Linux distribution which has a seriously low market share on desktop (for RH, probably in the neighbourhood of 0.5%) and with it _YOU_ place yourself in a position where you are not a viable target to support as the cost to do so would never be made back. That is just the economic reality. Stating NQ is too lazy to support Linux and in the same breath stating you do what you do a few post back just tells me you really do not have a good grasp of that reality.
 
 
 
Then why is the creator of Linux making that exact argument when answering what needs to be achieved for Linux distros to become more mainstream? Are you saying you know something he does not? And are you saying that "binaries can be compiled" (?) or are you saying game developers should just give you the source code of their game so you can compile it yourself?
 
 
 
You do know you are quoting numbers from a website (mmopolulation.com) which is easily shown to fabricate and inflate their numbers and be grossly inaccurate right? Last time WoW subscriber numbers were published was back in 2015 and the number was around 5.5 Million. EVE has about 350K active unique accounts as this is frequently shared by CCP in public. DU had about 50K active accounts last time these numbers were public, around this time last year .. Oh and according to your unreliable source, SC has 13.24M players, while CIG has their account number on the front page of the website and it shows 3.1M accounts
 
No one here is arguing that DU is a massive popular game or that it is mainstream. In fact, any sensible person here will know and understand DU is a super niche game which has limited appeal. This is fine because even with that limited appeal, the game could still draw in more than enough of a player base to be a viable and profitable commercial endeavour. In order for that to become a reality though, NQ must shoot for the largest possible potential audience so they can attract enough players to generate enough revenue to stay alive and grow. This unfortunately (for you) does not include Linux users, as supporting Linux would come at a net loss and the potential userbase is not big enough to absorb that loss. Hence no Linux support.. Again.. it's just a numbers game.
 
 
 
You seem to be missing the point here.. entirely. I did not back DU because I thought it would be a massively successful game with millions of players. I backed the game because of the potential and original vision for the game, knowing full well that over time that vision would need to be adjusted and based on that vision the game would never be a mainstream title and come close to the numbers they hoped or accounted for. If a game in the vein of DU would kickstart today, I'd probably back it again for the same reason.
 
 
In general, you attribute others with doing something which effectively is instigated and driven by yourself. You pretty much are talking to a mirror with earplugs in and a blindfold on, not wanting to hear anything you do not agree with and blind to the facts.
 

Impling that  macOS X is related to linux is quite amusing.  It's like saying AIX is related to RHEL.
MacOS X kernel is based on MachOS (a fork of BSD UNIX)  kernel and pretty much most of intial userspace programs were liberally borrowed from netBSD.
 
I cannot help but to react to some things that have been said about Valve.  It is true to Valve has commited to a number of things in recent years, they've pretty much abandoned most of them: steam controller is dead, steam machines are dead, steamLink and steamOS is pretty much in maintenace mode. Index was one few bright exceptions but i wouldn't hold my breath on Vave sticking to it in long term. Now gaben is hinting steamOS based console,  which will either never see the light of the day or end up like another steam machines failure. They track record is spotty at best of times.
 
As for joaocordeiro's posts in this thread go, i can't really tell if he's shamelessly trolling or really believes what what he's saying.  I tend to believe it to be the former as the latter would imply a complete lack of understanding of the subject matter.  And while i may not have agreed with many things he has posted in the past, it always thought he's generally a fairly sharp lad and this just doesn't fit the bill.   

A good example of the problem. Look at the number of likes, reactions and retweets.  Kinda cheap posting.
I do get JC loves to retweet pretty builds, and that's all right.  But that hardly something akin to community
engagement. Who is the a target audience for a tweet like this? Most of us who build, trade and script have
been hanging around ducreators from the beginning in one form or another.  For anyone else it's just yeah
a ship.  It looks great when you evaluate it with the knowledge it's done in voxels, but if you take that context
out of the equation the image is a dime a dozen. It the kind of tweet that get buried within minutes.
 
 
 

Anyone else with similar,  "What the actual fruity, lemon scented fu..." DU thoughts that hit you late at night?

A good example of the problem. Look at the number of likes, reactions and retweets.  Kinda cheap posting.
I do get JC loves to retweet pretty builds, and that's all right.  But that hardly something akin to community
engagement. Who is the a target audience for a tweet like this? Most of us who build, trade and script have
been hanging around ducreators from the beginning in one form or another.  For anyone else it's just yeah
a ship.  It looks great when you evaluate it with the knowledge it's done in voxels, but if you take that context
out of the equation the image is a dime a dozen. It the kind of tweet that get buried within minutes.
 
 
 

A good example of the problem. Look at the number of likes, reactions and retweets.  Kinda cheap posting.
I do get JC loves to retweet pretty builds, and that's all right.  But that hardly something akin to community
engagement. Who is the a target audience for a tweet like this? Most of us who build, trade and script have
been hanging around ducreators from the beginning in one form or another.  For anyone else it's just yeah
a ship.  It looks great when you evaluate it with the knowledge it's done in voxels, but if you take that context
out of the equation the image is a dime a dozen. It the kind of tweet that get buried within minutes.
 
 
 

In my experience,  the best practice, at least for the time being, is to build your ship like a russian cold war era, no bells, no wistles, no heating, no cushions, mugholders, fancy radars and chairs. 
 
Once you have the hull, engines, airfoils, tanks ,adjustors and brakes laid out, test it and adjust the hell out of it untill the flight characteristics are rock solid. Make a conscious decision early between naturaly stable ( but less maneuvrable) or naturally unstable ( more maneuvrables) design.
 
Once your design behaves consistently with your design goals, than start adding all the windows, switches, force field ramps.. etc  And even re-fly the ship often after adding any major element so you can backtrack effect of each change on design. 
 
And last but not least, at all stages of tuning your design, always test with various sized dummy loads of cargo ( containers fill uniformely, rather they always fill as first linked first, last linked last) . This is particularly important when tanks and cargo containers are not placed along the center of  lift/gravity.   When using multipe fuel tanks, watch the changes in weight distribution as tanks are emptied. Not a huge concern on XS cores, but get more profound as the sizes increase.
 
 
And remember, first few ships you design will very likely get off the ground, they might even manage get out of atmosphere, but that doesn't mean they're not crap,
and that's okay, nobody get its right the first few times    
 
 

No one here has ever called himself an expert. I don't do this professionally, but have been in the modding scene since UT99 (Unreal Tournament) with the Unreal Engine 1.5 at the time and then a few years later with the Unreal Engine 3 as a level designer. I made a few mods for games like Ark, Skyrim, Space Engineers (wrote own programmable blocks in c#) and then ran a modded Minecraft server for a very long time, where I wrote the plugins myself. I was even more shocked when I saw that NQ tolerates calculated mining on PTS, because the ore seed is the same with the live server, which you don't want as an admin. 
 
But speaking of making an own game, funny, that you mention that: I am indeed making a game for a few weeks now on a irregular time.
It is currently a prototype that I am working on. The game is a roguelike in a randomly generated universe.
 
What I have so far:
- randomly generated and scalable universe in size
(More specifically what I can decide and place how I want it:
-> game area,
-> planet count as well as variations of biomes,
-> asteroid count,
-> space station count as well as variations of space station types (space city, laboratory, military base, pirate hideout)
-> npc ship count as well as variations of ship types (hauler, pirate, celebrity, space police, military, bounty hounter, diplomat)
-> obstacles like interstellar clouds (placeholder sprite with IC))
- Time calculation (Every movement costs you time, which I can bind individually as a method to actions and at the end I can calculate it back and store it in a separate date system)
- Dice system à la d20 (As with the time calculation, each action is stored with an argument to call the method)

I have added a screenshot of what the whole thing looks like at the moment. Maybe I'll open an offtopic thread to document the progress, we'll see.
 
But to make the leap to DU: XS Space tanks. Since we have atmospheric tanks that are xs, it's not like those stats or attributes don't exist. That doesn't take years. Scale space tank down, take same values as xs size from atmospheric tank . Afaik there are no difference in the values looking at space tank and the equivalent atmospheric model.
 
 
So instead of trying to deflect from the issue here, which is backed up with valid arguments from people who are familiar with the fundamentals of the process of modelling and programming, you shouldn't try to defame them. I want to encourage you to help make DU better. But with your statement, you only continue to fuel the problem that ails DU .
 

It will surely help somewhat, but what would have helped more is if their engine were more content agnostic and could situationally also stream simple baked vetex arrays instead of large of chunks of voxel grid data.  But at the end of the day, these are all just technicalities.
 
The true deep issue of both DU and Starbase is that neither one is much of a game.
 
Both are are quite good at catering to the Ladmark crowd, but like in Landmark, once you have built all you wanted to build, there's little reason to hang around.  Sure you can trade or run an industry, but that too tied to premise that there is somone on the other end who has yet to build all they wanted to build. PVP is more of placeholder at the moment. PVE doesn't exist. There's no lore to give any context or structure to anything we're doing.  Exploration could have been great way to extend gameplay, but procedural generation  is rudimentary at best, no real flora or fauna, generic repetetive terrain no real points of interest other than markets. 
 
Pre blueprint fiasco, DU at least had the magic first 20-30 hours, in which you learned how build your first ship, crashed it, than built it better up to the exhilarating moment when you reached the orbit of a planet for the first time. Where DU really fails is at what happens right after that.
 
To put fine point at it, if DU were a decent game, most of us would not have minded to buy into the most expensive gaming rigs just for the chance to play it. 
 

While Starbase does a few things really well, they have their own technical can of worms they have yet to address. I do wish Starbase a long and happy life, they are very likely to bleed users faster than they gain new ones. In fact quite a few starbase playes were eyeing DU as possible alternative before NQ shot themselves in both of their feet with all that 0.24+ ish nonsense.
 
Most likely mid term effect of both SB and DU will be that no producer will want to touch a voxel based online project for quite a few years to come. Not that there was great interest from publishers to begin with. Esp not after the spectacular failure of Landmark/EQN.  
 
You are completely spot on about the insane size of strings passsed between client and server for DU.  Now that said 100KB/S is not a realistic figure for any voxel implementation, even in the most rudimentary implementation at least 12bytes for positional data in voxel grid and at minimum at 12bytes for surface normals, material type/color. And we're still talking about plain box voxel, now you need to implement some sort of transform, let's say we'll go with a variation index on of predermined transforms 1byte ( which is not that great but gives us a workable 256 possible predermined transform variations), you'll end up with 25bytes per voxel.  
 
  Let's say for surface 256x256 voxels (like a base of M  construct) 1 voxel deep you'll end up with  roughly 1.5mb to stream. Now even on ground you realistically need at least 2x as much even  with modestly sized viewport, that brings you little over 3mb, excluding your ship, other flying garbage around you and all those fancy space elevators and prtocol overhead ( let's say UDP with MTU at 1500,  max packet size 1518bytes -ethernet frame- IP header -UDP header gives you 1472 available for actual data (46bytes overhead)
 
Not defending NQ, just want to give you an idea of the size of dataset voxel engines work with.  
 
 

While Starbase does a few things really well, they have their own technical can of worms they have yet to address. I do wish Starbase a long and happy life, they are very likely to bleed users faster than they gain new ones. In fact quite a few starbase playes were eyeing DU as possible alternative before NQ shot themselves in both of their feet with all that 0.24+ ish nonsense.
 
Most likely mid term effect of both SB and DU will be that no producer will want to touch a voxel based online project for quite a few years to come. Not that there was great interest from publishers to begin with. Esp not after the spectacular failure of Landmark/EQN.  
 
You are completely spot on about the insane size of strings passsed between client and server for DU.  Now that said 100KB/S is not a realistic figure for any voxel implementation, even in the most rudimentary implementation at least 12bytes for positional data in voxel grid and at minimum at 12bytes for surface normals, material type/color. And we're still talking about plain box voxel, now you need to implement some sort of transform, let's say we'll go with a variation index on of predermined transforms 1byte ( which is not that great but gives us a workable 256 possible predermined transform variations), you'll end up with 25bytes per voxel.  
 
  Let's say for surface 256x256 voxels (like a base of M  construct) 1 voxel deep you'll end up with  roughly 1.5mb to stream. Now even on ground you realistically need at least 2x as much even  with modestly sized viewport, that brings you little over 3mb, excluding your ship, other flying garbage around you and all those fancy space elevators and prtocol overhead ( let's say UDP with MTU at 1500,  max packet size 1518bytes -ethernet frame- IP header -UDP header gives you 1472 available for actual data (46bytes overhead)
 
Not defending NQ, just want to give you an idea of the size of dataset voxel engines work with.  
 
 

I believe each and every customer has every right to express their concerns and grievances for the product they have paid for and in no mean resembles project advertised in kickstarter much less anything akin to what you see in videos and early pre-alpha previews.  Additionally majority of the issues with NQ's product were well known and documented all the way back 
in early alpha, and very little was done in terms of remedies to these issues. What's even more interesting to consider is the fact the NDA we had to agree to was never lifted, not even after beta launch. I've been in quite a few alpha programs, both paid and free  and i have never ever encountered such draconian terms.
 
Now before you resort to pejorative expressions like "whining" let's put a few numbers into perspective and compare them with other past projects of the kind. 
 
First of all NQ is not indie developer by any meaning of the word.  The moment you have venture capital involved, you're not independent anymore. It's not necesarily a bad thing, quite the opposite.  But even if you were to broaden the definition to anything self published on a dime 20mil+KS money+Alpha backer money gives you a number which is very much outside of realm of what is generally considered indie community backed project.
 
Now let consider past project that bears the closest semblance to DU and even JC's original pitch can be summarize as "that game" but bigger and in voxels.
 
CCP developed Eve Online in 2.5 years  with a team of 35 developers on a buget of 2.6 mil euro in a small country of Iceland the pool of available developers of which is a fraction of what you'll find in Île-de-France alone and where everything is pretty much 2x as expensive as anywhere else in Europe.
 
With those 35 people  and 2.6 mil in the pocket  CCP developed their own 3D engine from scratch, developed the full server stack from scratch, built all 3D assets in house and has it run on their own metal server housed in datacenter in UK. 
 
NQ with 35 people (if the number is to be believed) and 20.6 mil in the pocket , merely licensed Uniengine2, licensed core of the server tech,  purchased most 3D assets, and leased server capacity in AWS.   
 
Now granted, CCP initial development window was in the period between 2000-2003 so it would be just fair to adjust the budget for inflation which puts it just to little above 4mil in 2020 money.
 
I rest my case
 
As i've mentioned in my previous posts, i have no regrets about forking out for being alpha backer, i did get my money's worth out it. It is but a pity that it did not go much beyond that.
I still hang around DU for tiny slim off-chance NQ gets its house back on track,
But I will not be throwing any more money at DU unless NQ can, through their actions prove, that they can get out of that development ruth they've been stuck in for past 2 years and i would caution against newcommers commiting to paid beta access until they do. There simply isn't enough value on the table for the time being.    
 
 

Actually your own advise is good OP.

But misdirected.

Take a step back from your addictive nature of collecting resources and building that cool thing, or amassing useless amounts of virtual money. Stop playing for a few months and see the situation with clear eyes. Nothing is happening. No new content. No developer communication. No CEO who's vision was the driving force of the project. The only thing that continues is allowing people to pay a monthly fee. Oh, and the insultingly hollow and 'diplomatic' responses that occasionally filter back through the forums. We are being managed like cattle. Absolute refusal to give us any real information or answer any real concerns truthfully. While at the same time being as careful as possible so as not to scare away the remaining cash cows who donate money every month.

I agree with you that if we don't want to play we should leave and not post negative comments. That's is why I hardly visit here anymore.

But trust me, I was seeing things exactly like you are now. It's foolish, a fantasy. What is worse is that I argued this exact same point against decent people in the community for a couple of months. Those same people were probably equally seeing things like you do at one point. 

NQ's biggest crime in all of this is having people who will defend them and back them up all day only to let those same people down and crush their enthusiasm one by one until we all end up in this same cynical position. I get it now. It took me a while.

Some of us doing the backseat driving has also been doing professional software development for 25+ years. And the way NQ is approaching this project and the community is fundamentally flawed on so many levels it makes my head hurt. Basically NQ has been trying to do waterfall (both for dev and for community communication) on a highly experimental MMO game, and that is doomed to fail.

I believe each and every customer has every right to express their concerns and grievances for the product they have paid for and in no mean resembles project advertised in kickstarter much less anything akin to what you see in videos and early pre-alpha previews.  Additionally majority of the issues with NQ's product were well known and documented all the way back 
in early alpha, and very little was done in terms of remedies to these issues. What's even more interesting to consider is the fact the NDA we had to agree to was never lifted, not even after beta launch. I've been in quite a few alpha programs, both paid and free  and i have never ever encountered such draconian terms.
 
Now before you resort to pejorative expressions like "whining" let's put a few numbers into perspective and compare them with other past projects of the kind. 
 
First of all NQ is not indie developer by any meaning of the word.  The moment you have venture capital involved, you're not independent anymore. It's not necesarily a bad thing, quite the opposite.  But even if you were to broaden the definition to anything self published on a dime 20mil+KS money+Alpha backer money gives you a number which is very much outside of realm of what is generally considered indie community backed project.
 
Now let consider past project that bears the closest semblance to DU and even JC's original pitch can be summarize as "that game" but bigger and in voxels.
 
CCP developed Eve Online in 2.5 years  with a team of 35 developers on a buget of 2.6 mil euro in a small country of Iceland the pool of available developers of which is a fraction of what you'll find in Île-de-France alone and where everything is pretty much 2x as expensive as anywhere else in Europe.
 
With those 35 people  and 2.6 mil in the pocket  CCP developed their own 3D engine from scratch, developed the full server stack from scratch, built all 3D assets in house and has it run on their own metal server housed in datacenter in UK. 
 
NQ with 35 people (if the number is to be believed) and 20.6 mil in the pocket , merely licensed Uniengine2, licensed core of the server tech,  purchased most 3D assets, and leased server capacity in AWS.   
 
Now granted, CCP initial development window was in the period between 2000-2003 so it would be just fair to adjust the budget for inflation which puts it just to little above 4mil in 2020 money.
 
I rest my case
 
As i've mentioned in my previous posts, i have no regrets about forking out for being alpha backer, i did get my money's worth out it. It is but a pity that it did not go much beyond that.
I still hang around DU for tiny slim off-chance NQ gets its house back on track,
But I will not be throwing any more money at DU unless NQ can, through their actions prove, that they can get out of that development ruth they've been stuck in for past 2 years and i would caution against newcommers commiting to paid beta access until they do. There simply isn't enough value on the table for the time being.    
 
 

I believe each and every customer has every right to express their concerns and grievances for the product they have paid for and in no mean resembles project advertised in kickstarter much less anything akin to what you see in videos and early pre-alpha previews.  Additionally majority of the issues with NQ's product were well known and documented all the way back 
in early alpha, and very little was done in terms of remedies to these issues. What's even more interesting to consider is the fact the NDA we had to agree to was never lifted, not even after beta launch. I've been in quite a few alpha programs, both paid and free  and i have never ever encountered such draconian terms.
 
Now before you resort to pejorative expressions like "whining" let's put a few numbers into perspective and compare them with other past projects of the kind. 
 
First of all NQ is not indie developer by any meaning of the word.  The moment you have venture capital involved, you're not independent anymore. It's not necesarily a bad thing, quite the opposite.  But even if you were to broaden the definition to anything self published on a dime 20mil+KS money+Alpha backer money gives you a number which is very much outside of realm of what is generally considered indie community backed project.
 
Now let consider past project that bears the closest semblance to DU and even JC's original pitch can be summarize as "that game" but bigger and in voxels.
 
CCP developed Eve Online in 2.5 years  with a team of 35 developers on a buget of 2.6 mil euro in a small country of Iceland the pool of available developers of which is a fraction of what you'll find in Île-de-France alone and where everything is pretty much 2x as expensive as anywhere else in Europe.
 
With those 35 people  and 2.6 mil in the pocket  CCP developed their own 3D engine from scratch, developed the full server stack from scratch, built all 3D assets in house and has it run on their own metal server housed in datacenter in UK. 
 
NQ with 35 people (if the number is to be believed) and 20.6 mil in the pocket , merely licensed Uniengine2, licensed core of the server tech,  purchased most 3D assets, and leased server capacity in AWS.   
 
Now granted, CCP initial development window was in the period between 2000-2003 so it would be just fair to adjust the budget for inflation which puts it just to little above 4mil in 2020 money.
 
I rest my case
 
As i've mentioned in my previous posts, i have no regrets about forking out for being alpha backer, i did get my money's worth out it. It is but a pity that it did not go much beyond that.
I still hang around DU for tiny slim off-chance NQ gets its house back on track,
But I will not be throwing any more money at DU unless NQ can, through their actions prove, that they can get out of that development ruth they've been stuck in for past 2 years and i would caution against newcommers commiting to paid beta access until they do. There simply isn't enough value on the table for the time being.    
 
 

Ehh.. If I fly my explorer ship into a glass panel in SE, the glass panel shatters and I move on.. If I fly my L core ship into a glass panel in DU my ship is toast and the glass panel does not even have a scratch..
 
If I take off and touch a microvoxel in SE, my ship will roll around the voxel, if I do the same in DU, my ship goes poof
 
Not sure how that is "fair" .. DU collision mechanics are at best severely broken.

I supported Arma-3 right from the start and had hope at the beginning, that several hardware upgrades would fix the performance issues, but nope, that didn't change a thing, lol. ?
 
I have Arma-3 still installed, but didn't play it for several years.
 
I actually never came across UC, but a short read-up about it, doesn't draw a pretty picture about it, lol. ?
 
But hey, even Duke Nukem Forever was in a better shape, when it finally got released. 
 
DU even shows me, how much worse Cyberpunk 2077 and Star Citizen could be and don't forget the latest ED DLC disaster, which I luckily didn't buy yet !
 
It's a bit sad to be honest, because DU has had a great potential feature-wise, but "I think it's dead, Jim !". ?

To be fair, the voxel compression in 0.25 seem to have helped with performance. But then again, not having voxel compression up until now in a voxel based MMO is kinda crazy..

yes, that's because 'leaving it up to the players' DOESN'T WORK as a strategy to build a good game. It's lazy and short sighted. Want PvP? Then STRUCTURE IT. Want 'things to do' game content? STRUCTURE IT. Until then....Dual Miner will be just that, until that goes automated and they take the only thing to do in game away, then it will just be DUAL. 

I believe each and every customer has every right to express their concerns and grievances for the product they have paid for and in no mean resembles project advertised in kickstarter much less anything akin to what you see in videos and early pre-alpha previews.  Additionally majority of the issues with NQ's product were well known and documented all the way back 
in early alpha, and very little was done in terms of remedies to these issues. What's even more interesting to consider is the fact the NDA we had to agree to was never lifted, not even after beta launch. I've been in quite a few alpha programs, both paid and free  and i have never ever encountered such draconian terms.
 
Now before you resort to pejorative expressions like "whining" let's put a few numbers into perspective and compare them with other past projects of the kind. 
 
First of all NQ is not indie developer by any meaning of the word.  The moment you have venture capital involved, you're not independent anymore. It's not necesarily a bad thing, quite the opposite.  But even if you were to broaden the definition to anything self published on a dime 20mil+KS money+Alpha backer money gives you a number which is very much outside of realm of what is generally considered indie community backed project.
 
Now let consider past project that bears the closest semblance to DU and even JC's original pitch can be summarize as "that game" but bigger and in voxels.
 
CCP developed Eve Online in 2.5 years  with a team of 35 developers on a buget of 2.6 mil euro in a small country of Iceland the pool of available developers of which is a fraction of what you'll find in Île-de-France alone and where everything is pretty much 2x as expensive as anywhere else in Europe.
 
With those 35 people  and 2.6 mil in the pocket  CCP developed their own 3D engine from scratch, developed the full server stack from scratch, built all 3D assets in house and has it run on their own metal server housed in datacenter in UK. 
 
NQ with 35 people (if the number is to be believed) and 20.6 mil in the pocket , merely licensed Uniengine2, licensed core of the server tech,  purchased most 3D assets, and leased server capacity in AWS.   
 
Now granted, CCP initial development window was in the period between 2000-2003 so it would be just fair to adjust the budget for inflation which puts it just to little above 4mil in 2020 money.
 
I rest my case
 
As i've mentioned in my previous posts, i have no regrets about forking out for being alpha backer, i did get my money's worth out it. It is but a pity that it did not go much beyond that.
I still hang around DU for tiny slim off-chance NQ gets its house back on track,
But I will not be throwing any more money at DU unless NQ can, through their actions prove, that they can get out of that development ruth they've been stuck in for past 2 years and i would caution against newcommers commiting to paid beta access until they do. There simply isn't enough value on the table for the time being.    
 
 

I believe each and every customer has every right to express their concerns and grievances for the product they have paid for and in no mean resembles project advertised in kickstarter much less anything akin to what you see in videos and early pre-alpha previews.  Additionally majority of the issues with NQ's product were well known and documented all the way back 
in early alpha, and very little was done in terms of remedies to these issues. What's even more interesting to consider is the fact the NDA we had to agree to was never lifted, not even after beta launch. I've been in quite a few alpha programs, both paid and free  and i have never ever encountered such draconian terms.
 
Now before you resort to pejorative expressions like "whining" let's put a few numbers into perspective and compare them with other past projects of the kind. 
 
First of all NQ is not indie developer by any meaning of the word.  The moment you have venture capital involved, you're not independent anymore. It's not necesarily a bad thing, quite the opposite.  But even if you were to broaden the definition to anything self published on a dime 20mil+KS money+Alpha backer money gives you a number which is very much outside of realm of what is generally considered indie community backed project.
 
Now let consider past project that bears the closest semblance to DU and even JC's original pitch can be summarize as "that game" but bigger and in voxels.
 
CCP developed Eve Online in 2.5 years  with a team of 35 developers on a buget of 2.6 mil euro in a small country of Iceland the pool of available developers of which is a fraction of what you'll find in Île-de-France alone and where everything is pretty much 2x as expensive as anywhere else in Europe.
 
With those 35 people  and 2.6 mil in the pocket  CCP developed their own 3D engine from scratch, developed the full server stack from scratch, built all 3D assets in house and has it run on their own metal server housed in datacenter in UK. 
 
NQ with 35 people (if the number is to be believed) and 20.6 mil in the pocket , merely licensed Uniengine2, licensed core of the server tech,  purchased most 3D assets, and leased server capacity in AWS.   
 
Now granted, CCP initial development window was in the period between 2000-2003 so it would be just fair to adjust the budget for inflation which puts it just to little above 4mil in 2020 money.
 
I rest my case
 
As i've mentioned in my previous posts, i have no regrets about forking out for being alpha backer, i did get my money's worth out it. It is but a pity that it did not go much beyond that.
I still hang around DU for tiny slim off-chance NQ gets its house back on track,
But I will not be throwing any more money at DU unless NQ can, through their actions prove, that they can get out of that development ruth they've been stuck in for past 2 years and i would caution against newcommers commiting to paid beta access until they do. There simply isn't enough value on the table for the time being.    
 
 

Hardly high profile, mate. every time I have ever uttered the phrase Dual Universe, I've been met with the question-mark-dude meme. Basically nobody knows about this game, evidenced by the number of streamer video views (in the low ks or 10s of ks) and anything other than the "release" trailer in April 2020 which admittedly did get over 1kk views after a shotgun(?) article.  
 
There was a brief period last year when it looked like the game might actually become something.