Samedi

Am I the only one who is annoyed that refining certain ores increases their total mass? 
 
For example, 65L (5.04 kg/L) of Hematite is 327.6 kg but is turned into 45L of pure iron (7.85 kg/L) which is 353.25 kg. This only gets worse with better talents letting you use less then 65L of Hematite to get the same amount of iron.
 
In addition to being unintuitive, it's a pain to have to remember which ores are supposed to be refined before transport and which are supposed to be refined after transport to be as mass efficient as possible. 
 
Either the ratio of ores to pure products should be increased or the density of Hematite and a few others should be increased so it's almost more mass efficient to refine at mining location then transport the pure products instead of the other way around.
 
 

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.

Wuh? Discord, I could understand. And/or a post on the forum (preferably linked to from this thread). Because those are the things you get to from their own webpage under "community") And something on their own website front page, or at least under "news". But Twitch? As the only medium?
 
I guess I shouldn't really be surprised at NQ's flaky comms strategy.

Because that would be par for the course and I'm not getting a clear answer on the DAC question, I just did the markeedragon thing for 3 months at the beta rate. That should get me in as soon as the servers are up (and I can DL the patch) and give NQ 3 months to explain how to use the DAC to continue the sub.

Suggest the $9.95 today and just buy a months worth.  You still can for a few more hours.  Its the path I took for my Patron account.
 
Look, this is NQ we are talking about.  Its less than 24 hours before the rumored launch time and we still dont have  A) a new client to download or B ) an official launch time.  These are the same guys that "Announced" the Demo server over a day AFTER it went live on Steam.

As a Patron backer you will receive 12 DACs at launch, and you will be able to use these for game time, yes. Exactly how this works, we are waiting for NQ to tell us, but it should be active for launch tomorrow.

Way back in the start I got the biggest alpha packet, my status states I got alpha acess and patreon status.
Do I need to pay more now? I thought I get like a year of subscription and stuff at launch.

Will we be able to apply DAC to game time before the server opens to be ready to go as soon as it's up? And how?

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?

@Tekhamon
@Thunderchrome
@Wyndle
@J-Rod
@Deathknight
@Squidrew_
@Triopalite
@Jinxed
Clean-up of the pinned topics is coming for the launch. Please be patient a bit more.
With that, will come a smoother process to reply to announcements.
 
@Aaron Cain
No conspiracy theory, please...

@lunaprey
You've crossed a line here.
We can understand that you can be frustrated by the price increase, but rejoycing/celebrating/hoping/whishing for people to loose their jobs, whatever the situation may be is an absolute no go. You're not welcome on this forum anymore.
 

Last night I took one last slow walk around my complex on Sanctuary. I symbolically shut down the factory, flipped the switch on the mining units, deactivated the DSAT and sat in the chair on my rooftop observatory and took in the view one last time. The silence was deafening. 
 
I felt a little emotional as the time I'd spent working on all this had been one of the most difficult parts of my life. Every time things had been difficult, I'd found myself retreating into this game as a form of therapy to help me through the events going on around many of us for the past few years. I think in a world that feels totally out of control at times, its amazing that we have the technology to be able to immerse yourself into being somewhere else like this.
 
Out of the probable thousands of games I've played since being a youngling I can say proudly that Dual Universe is one of the very few that has made it into my upper echelon of games that I love and have spent a significant amount of time with.
 
So I just wanted to write this positive thread to say thanks to NQ for the development of this game. It's not a perfect game by any means, there's still glaring omissions in features as well as bugs galore but its a special game to me nonetheless. I sincerely hope it manages to ride the storm over the coming weeks, months and hopefully years to reach its full potential as I feel it deserves it. I've played all the other similar and inspired games such as Elite Dangerous, No Mans Sky, Space Engineers, Starbase, Star Citizen, Empyrion, and Eve Online but this one holds my interest in a way the others didn't. 
 
I took one final screenshot from the observatory before descending the lift one final time to the habitat area that I never got around to working on. The enormous empty room contained a solitary bed and a bonsai tree. I made one more cursory check of my Nanopack to make sure all the blueprints I would need for the coming journey were there before laying down on the bed and stared at the slightly janky ceiling voxels.
 
Lets see whats out there...

Something else to keep in mind is that for each time a NQ* name appears in conversation it significantly increases the number of people directly talking to that individual.  I have been guilty of this as well. 
 
I try to be playful and helpful on the forums.  There is an infinitely tiny chance I may sometimes consider a tiny bit of trolling in good fun, but you didn't hear that from me. I've been in jobs where everybody wore no less than 5 hats each.  No matter how much you accomplish there is always a handful of other important things that don't get the attention they need.  None of us can make NQ's job easier but you can be sure dozens of people will let them know they missed a spot.
 
 

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. 

Yes, this is a discussion forum. Posts like the 2FA one are kept around because it is important information, but it is no longer a topic of conversation. Move all this stuff to its own section and let some player posts get up near the top!

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...).

Some schematics are in really over-simplified groups. The most obvious example for me, is Detection Zone L. It's a tiny little electronic doo-dad that apparently needs to take as long, to make a schematic for, as an advanced large engine. That's honestly just stupid.
 
There are probably many other good examples (gates maybe), but generally, items seem to be grouped around their naming schemes. It would make more sense to me, to group things around which machine size is needed to produce something.
 
Please fix the groups. A detection zone L shouldn't be considered a large element.

Or a really slow onset of symptoms that is still building.

Hello, noveans! õ/
Today I bring you a project I've been working on for a while now, that intends on making Lua development quicker and more organized!
 
About:
This tool was initially built as a wrapper around hdparm's excellent wrap.lua script, which among many things allowed developing scripts outside DU, automating the creation of JSON config files, making events easier to work with, etc, and eventually evolved into a tool on its own.
Basically, the CLI is a small command-line that allows you to create Lua projects from all sizes and shapes, be it a simple greeting script up or a multi-project system.
 
Main Features:
- Support for Lua scrpts with code distributed over multiple files, accessible via require statements, also supports multiple entry-points per project (multiple PBs or render scripts)
- Support for importing of external packages via the CLI or from LUA_PATH
- Support for render scripts
- Support for minification and (experimental) compression
- Support for code completion (intellisense) on Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ Idea, requires EmmyLua installed in both cases
- Element link management built-in, allows you to indicate what each of the linked elements should be named as and its type
- Autoconfig export in JSON, YAML and CONF formats
- Syntax checks at compilation time
- Optional helpers for linked element management, etc
 
Website / Documentation / Source-code:
https://github.com/wolfe-labs/du-luac
 
Requisites and Installation:
- You will need to have the Node.js runtime installed! Version 16 LTS is recommended.
- For some functions to work, it's ideal to have Git installed too. Lua is optional.
- Install via the command: npm i -g @wolfe-labs/du-luac
- After installing, you should be able to run the CLI via the command: du-lua

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...

We'll see, I don't think I agree unless it's full-creative, and even then it's a maybe.  I think it will be rare because DU is a time-investment-based race of sorts; any time spent in VR is time you could have been making income in the real world.  Even if the VR world gave you everything up to and including creative mode, the people who would hang out there, are people who wouldn't have kept playing in the main world anyway
 
 
But you do definitely bring up a good point, because there's a very fine and arbitrary line between a sandbox to test lua scripts in, vs a creative mode, and all the arguments against creative do apply to a lua testing environment.  If they allow one, why not the other - and if that why not is good enough, then they probably shouldn't allow either one

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.

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.

This could be a very interesting idea. I will share it with the team.

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.

With the return of element lifetimes the development of Lua flight scripts (e.g. flying_construct.conf) carries the risk of excessive costs.

The solution would be to provide a VR environment similar to that in the "Challenges" tab of the Surrogate Pod UI, but where the ships have no DRM restrictions on their controllers. The code loaded into those controllers should not be saved to the server, but copy & paste should be permitted. Loading of configuration from the lua/autoconf/custom folder should be allowed.

Offering a variety of ships would be great and if a variety of elements (radars, guns etc.) were available to modify the ships it would magnify the development possibilities.