Samedi

I think there are separate problems: control links (which is a more general problem), and access to multiple fuel tanks for refueling. I'd like to see some sort of control-hub to fix the first problem in a more general way than just fixing fuel tank links. The whole "wiring" architecture is insane from any kind of lore point of view (haven't these guys ever heard of a serial bus?!), and should be rethought in a way that maintains the desired balance restrictions but addresses the pain points. For the second problem I'd like to see a fuel-pump element which can move fuel between tanks. It could have some basic modes that don't require lua (auto-balance, explicit percentages, manual activation, activation when fuel goes above/below a level), but could also have a lua interface for complete control. Then we could actually build ships in a way that manages the physical layout constraints of mass and volume, but still have a way to move fuel around. I really don't like the idea of a hand-wavey fuel hub that magically distributes fuel (and presumably fuel mass) around the tanks (any more for that matter than I like the actual container hub!)

Yep, that's the other thing. Keeping the machines loaded with schematics is tedious in the extreme, even for a small factory. I've got 8 assmeblers right now, and I can never keep them (and the machines that supply them with parts) all happily fed! If the idea is to discourage mega factories, then they should have done something where the difficulty started lower, but scaled exponentially - so it was easy for small setups and much harder for large ones. This feels like the balance might be a bit off. In order to stock all the machines for a long time, I'd need a hell of a lot of money, to make a hell of a lot of schematics.

I don't have a problem with there being some money sinks, but the whole tile tax thing does seem badly thought out (like so many aspects of the game design). I grabbed a nice tile on Alioth near District 3. I started building out my factory there, completely forgetting about the tax. A week later, boom - nothing working until I pay my 500k. For now I've done it, but I'm seriously contemplating decamping the whole thing to Sanctuary, even though it will be a massive hassle. I'm not aiming to be making 10s of millions a week, so that rent is subtantial. The stupid thing about this from a game design point of view is that I like being based around a relatively high population area like D3, as it means that there are people around most of the time, which gives me a sense that I'm actually playing an MMO - even if a lot of the time I'm just doing my own thing. If I move everything to Sanctuary, I'll spend most of my time on my own (even though my tile there is also near the equivalent District 3, it is deathly quiet compared with Alioth). So the net effect of this bit of game design is to discourage me from basing myself near other people - which does not seem like a positive for an MMO... 😕

Yes, completely agree. There are many little immersion breaking details like this. They are not catastrophic, but are a constant low level irritation.

Yeah, good call, have now done it as a backup.

Possibly I am confused, but I thought that there was mention of a few free days at the beginning - enough to give us time to apply our DACs? As an alpha backer I also haven't had a paid sub in operation, and was assuming that I'd be ok to start with my DACs (or would have been clearly and explicitly told that I couldn't -- which hasn't happened). Like you I will be very annoyed if after all this time I end up losing out because I backed the game early. Although that does sound par for the course.

So bizarre. This is not how you do a release. Leave it another week, give QA time to make _sure_ it is working, and allow all your users to know for sure what is happening, when.

The “(estimated)” is mind-blowing. The idea that they might not have built sufficient margins into their schedule to be able to guarantee meeting their own launch date - the single most important release in the game’s history - where do I even start?

For a lot of the NQ staff, and especially at this stage of the process, the choice will be between reading/responding, or fixing the game. Depending on how much of a crunch culture there is, and how much of a deathmarch it has been, exhaustion and burnout are also a factor. For the person/people who’s job is actually community relations, this is less true - but they still may be overstretched or have multiple roles, particularly if resources are constrained. On the whole I think we have to cut these people some slack. Most of the time they will be doing the best they can with the cards they’ve been dealt. If there is fault, it will be with the senior management. Either for the way they’ve set up the structures, or just for trying to do too much with too few resources.

I posted up a small example for my Modula scripting framework. It's still early days, but hopefully it will be of interest to someone, somewhere (possibly in a galaxy far, far away...).

It was back to 100k on the PTS this weekend. Not sure if that is indicative of the final release.

Current count of 839 territories claimed on Haven for the PTS, so I guess a few other people are also infected.

🤣

You may be right. Three "Alpha: yes" with hope though. So whatever is wrong with us, it looks like it takes a while to get over...

No, I'm not saying that. Heaven knows there's a lot of "lore" that makes no sense at all from an immersion point of view. All I mean is that I like the idea of the real (main) instance being the place where everything happens. The more separate sandboxes and challenge spaces there are, the fewer people there will be in the main instance at any one time, and the less life-like it will feel.

From a practical point of view, this is a great idea. From an immersion point of view though, I quite like that developing flight scripts happens in the "real" world and is therefore scary , and requires things like cheap test vehicles, wide open spaces, low gravity planets, and so on. It's hard to get the balance right, but the game will benefit when there are reasons to go to certain places and do certain things! Just as a thought experiment, an alternative might be some sort of test mode for a dynamic core (or a special kind of core) which removes or greatly reduces collision damage, but ties the location of the core to within a few km of its starting location / current tile / whatever. So it can be used to test flight, but not for anything practical.

I jumped on to the PTS yesterday and was pleased to realise that it has the reset world in it and took me through the starting sequence again. I've not been through that sequence since the start of the beta, and I must say I found the new version way better. I also found myself enjoying the feeling of a fresh start - even though of course on the PTS it's only a very temporary one. If like me you've been feeling very cynical about everything DU, I'd definitely suggest giving the PTS a go. Despite all the things that are still wrong, and all the things that could go wrong with the launch, it seems to have made me feel cautiously optimistic and surprisingly enthusiastic.

Well there is a limit to how many you can create during a given period of time, which is what I meant. I do think that it does make a substantial difference, and it's interesting to imagine how much pain it would be to keep a mega factory running with the way things are currently set up -- which gives me some cause for optimism. What I worry about is how much pain it will be to keep even a single-product factory running. There's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle which allows people to produce stuff and sell it, without a singe person or group dominating everything. For anyone who hasn't tried it, I would suggest diving on to the PTS. You can test it on the normal server of course but it feels different on the PTS in a world where there are pretty much no items on sale right now in any of the markets.

Something I've been working on: https://samedicorp.github.io/2022/introducing-modula/. Not completely ready for prime-time yet, but I'm interested in any scripting community feedback.

If only software development worked like this! A lot has changed since those days. In theory of course the important fixes should still be there. In reality a tiny and seemingly inconsequential change somewhere could have completely screwed everything but only show up under heavy load. Yeah, fair point! I guess maybe I shouldn't worry about that and just accept it as a fact of life Yeah, I've been playing a bit - though mostly writing lua and not actually doing much in-game. I still find it hard to believe that the industry changes (and effect on the economy) will get properly tested in time. I'm certainly not going to rebuild my factory (yet again) knowing that it'll all be wiped in a few weeks.

So we're at the end of the beta, there are a whole bunch of changes going into the game just before release, and a lot of people aren't playing because they know there's a reset coming. My first fear at this point is that the servers are going to fall apart of the day of release (when was the last time they were solidly stress tested by us all trying to log in at once?). Once we get over that, my main fear is that the economy will once again go south because things like the industry changes will turn out to be unbalanced or not to work as planned. This will only become apparent when everyone starts playing again, and that's not going to happen until launch. This, it has to be said, is not an ideal way to run a software project. It's almost as if we need another beta...

The good: - limiting the amount that a single person can build is good - letting people trade away their building allowance for money, or for influence within an org is good - having in effect a "building tax" is good, as it gives NQ another economic lever The bad: - almost everything else about this design Discussion: You can see the ability to create a limited amount of schematic copies as a "building allowance". I think that's a good thing. It gives people uninterested in building something that they can trade. It also means that people have to combine in order to build a lot. The fact that making schematic copies costs money is good in some ways, since it is a mechanism for tuning industry. However, I think the cost is being levied on the wrong people. It should be levied on the person doing the building, not the person making the schematic copies. How it should work: - People should have a building allowance which is just another form of currency/points. It should build up over time with no user intervention. People should be able to trade this allowance. Orgs should be able to hold a balance in this allowance. - Factories should be powered by these points. Individual machines shouldn't need "loading" with them. Either a single machine should need loading (for the whole factory), or the points balance of the factory owner should be automatically consumed. - Consuming these points should cost some money for each item they build. This can be justified any way you like - as the cost of the power used, as a "tax", as the cost of Aphelia converting the points somehow, whatever. All the other stuff - having to micromanage which schematic copies to make, having to keep manually making them, having to manually load them into individual machines - that's all tedious nonsense. It adds nothing to the fun, and it is just another boring game mechanic which looks like a naked attempt to force users to log in every day. There are vast numbers of users for whom that's impractical, or unattractive. In its current form it will simply discourage people from industry, which will damage the game economy and push the power further into the hands of big orgs. Side note: - Can we at least have a better name than "schematic copy"? In English, it's awfully clumsy. I realise that English may not be the first language of some of the game designers, but I was hoping that by release time these sorts of bits of clunky language would have been cleared up; there are a number of them, but this one is particularly egregious.

I was thinking of a partially automated solution. So the player would have to perhaps set up some configuration parameters. Even a solution that just pumped from tank a to tank b would be useful if you could initiate it during flight. It would take time to run, too. So you could set up a complex network of pumps with some Lua to automate everything, or you could just have one pump with a manual switch to pump your emergency reserve into your main tank.

The resemblance is fairly superficial. I gave the demo a go last night though, and it's quite addictive...

To be a little contrary, I've always thought that the centre-of-mass property of container hubs was super-weird, and made designing ships way too easy. I can accept a certain amount of simplification in the physics model (eg the separation of thrust and torque), but being able to shift the mass around like that just makes zero sense from a lore point of view. Not that it's alone in that. So many aspects of the flight/space mechanics seem to be arbitrary, with zero lore explanation, and transparently exist to either simplify the game implementation or the gameplay. The whole thing is a hot mess. FWIW instead of container hubs I'd have some sort of transfer unit that could balance mass between containers, but in a way that took time and where you had to set the parameters (eg 20% mass here, 10% there, and so on). I'd also like a similar fuel pump unit.