Samedi

This game was fine as a sandbox building game, kind of a big empty LEGO world.
Lego builders dont need entertainment or gameplay, they just enjoy builds. Cities skylines players also just like builds, they like to just follow an npc and just look around.
Train-set builders also do nothing but to watch their builds.
I think this game would attract so many builders from every corner around the world, that it would always have enough ingame players, and maybe not too many at once as some would always take a break.
 
Too bad nq didn't focus on the building/trading part and give us more things to build and trade with.
They gave us a false start with unrealistic sized doors, couches and beds, 3 types of toilets, the most useless empty plantcase and no xs space fueltank. Also crazy core sizes which make no sense to me, why 63(127-255-511) voxels and not 64 (128-256-512)?
Instead of adding more types of wings, doors, cockpits, trees, npc elements (ive made these myself with voxels later on, even made them interactive with detection zones and transparent screens), nq cut down on builders. 
There is lua for ships on water, something nq should have implemented themselves. I know for sure people would start digging canals (because of the ugly random generated planet with puddles) and just sail on them for fun. Videos of ingame builds would flood the tube channels.
The builders needed more things to easily make quests so we could make more adventures, to aquire items to open doors in mazes and labyrinths. Now it was only possible in lua.
I think, that players would subscribe just to see the amazing world that has been build by players. 
 
Nq could have focused on building(what this game started with). Expanding the game with the lua-ideas, just like other games implemented mods from the community, and adding elements that have a proper function.
But nq focused on destroying. Pvp, limiting and wiping that is.
And now you are here, a full wipe (so no world) and a few players.
 
Pvp bashing by me:
Pvp in this game is the fugliest version of space combat i have ever seen, even space invaders is more dynamic, at least you can dodge in space invaders! Territory warfare in this game would be just as ugly, boring and untactical as spacewar in this game is. You cant hide behind an asteroid, so why would you be able to hide behind a hill?
Pvp in this state kicks out the creativity of building. 
Pvp in this game reminds me of those old atari 5600 games, where the box art was nowhere near the ingame screenshots or the gameplay.
Tactics do not exist in this game.
 
In the end, I am sure that this game had more potential for a sandbox building game, than a pvp game.
But hey, nq is trying to proof me wrong, so ill keep an eye out.
 
 
Edit after 5 likes:
Its about this game being fine after 0.23

All great stuff to see. Those graphical improvements look amazing as well. Can't wait to see how it affects constructs.

Lua -- I just wanna say that I think this update will be very important for new coders, especially less-reliance on JSON. I like the idea of event-driven data as well, and can't wait to see what those nice-to-haves are... maybe if it's not too late we can ask for a few here.

@Mncdk1, global illumination is a graphically intensive feature from what I know, likely will be a setting. However, not personally aware what Athena brough that had quite a performance hit... could you elaborate on that xD.

"Polishing a turd" was the expression that came to mind while reading..

I understand there needs to be some for of flatline, BP's are key anyway, but most of our BP's contain elements that we won't be able to purchase or buy for an age of rebuilding.  What about ships we've worked to purchase from other players?  I have at least 2 ships that I know I will never see again as the players just don't exist in game anymore.

What about the player voxel store that has been a key place for old and new players alike to obtain or sample voxels?  Places like this are as key to the game experience as some of the player bases and space stations that have become landmarks, these weren't just built in a day or even a couple of months...

I don't know, 6 years of my life has been spent in this game building and designing a base inside a mountain, saving for BP's to build the industry I desired and working and working to get the parts to make my personal ships.  Yes, the game was in beta, but it's not like there's a been a flow of new players coming and going, most of the core players have spent years getting to where they are.  The game itself has come from basic mechanics to some really good content, but you can't deny that this game has been created by players... ALL the ships, all the events / Expos... to log in one day and find everything I've worked to create gone and a pocket load of BP's wouldn't be a thank you for your support over these years, it would be a big screw you, your efforts have amounted to nothing.

I've wanted this game to succeed so bad and looking forward to release and some fresh Noveans... but this just sounds like a death nell for me, already I've seen so many talented players pack up and go.  I guess maybe that's the intention... you just want a constant renewal of players and subs... no history, no legacy.  How far from the tree we have fallen,

The problem I have with me is that if I were to "pause" DualUniverse now to play another game, that if I were to enjoy it, I wouldn't come back. No matter what game I stopped playing, I did not return for a second chance.

Like some other people, I got excited about the new gravity-inverted containers. I set up a spreadsheet and everything to see if they would be worth the exorbitant cost of production...only to find out that, by design, they do not work as anything but standard, lower-volume containers when linked to a hub.
For those who haven't tried making them, the schematic costs alone are nothing to sneeze at. I built a single production line for advanced containers, with enough sub-production to make sure there's always just enough stuff to keep the assembler running. Material-wise, it's not super-horrid, but time-wise it's a monster. Producing these containers (worse for rare, and I'm not dumb enough to even consider exotic, because the plasma cost and time sink are not worth the end product) is slow, so expect to only replace containers on ships you've already built....except....not even that, because, again, by design they don't work to reduce mass when linked to a hub.
 
In short, that means that you will now need to design new ships that put the containers at the center so that your adjusters will work properly (meaning turning doesn't result in pitching and rolling). Cost-wise, it would be better to just add more engines on a ship with standard containers, because at least then you can link to a hub and have the same result.
 
Sooo....why bother with gravity-inverted containers in the first place, if the intent was to have them act as single-container units from the get-go? What is the point? Designing a ship around individual containers, which you have to manually distribute resources between to get the center of gravity just right, was done away with when hubs were introduced. Why bring it back while wrapping it in the c***-tease "but you have a small mass reduction of the contents" ploy?
 
To be clear, I stopped my production of these containers. They're effectively lesser-volume basic containers that just cost a lot of time and resources to produce. That makes them worthless. No value added to the game except for ships designed around 1-2 containers with no hubs, and the cost doesn't even justify that for most cases. Maybe I'm just salty, but the fact that the official response to identifying the issue was to point out that they were intended to work this way doesn't give me much hope for the future of the game. If it was intended to work this way, but also to be changed later to work with a hub, then that would be fine, because that's the way of development...but not even that.
 
So a suggestion for the devs, if you want a feature to be seen as actually adding value to the game: make sure it isn't just a gimmick before releasing it.
This new gravity-inverted container type is a gimmick; a container that reduces mass, but only when not linked to a hub, and is supposed to go on a dynamic construct where mass and volume and center of gravity are important factors. The optimized containers at least work properly when linked to a hub, making them worth producing.
If it's about mixing container types/tiers, then do something simple, and make it so that the reduction only applies if all containers are of the same tier/type (independent of size, obviously). That, at the bare minimum, is reasonable.
 
This is a mixed rant and feedback. I wasted a lot of money setting up production, and got my hopes up that it would be worth the cost. Now I have millions worth of schematics that are worthless to me. Obviously, saltiness is to be expected, especially since it wasn't clearly explained that the mass reduction wouldn't work when linked to a hub. Something like that, for something so costly, speaks to incompetence or malice, given that it was by design, even if it was just an oopsie-doodle "I forgot to mention this really important 'feature' with this new element."

The slowing forums is people realizing their words fall onto deaf ears that say "we hear your concerns" all the same. We can complain and talk about all the issues here and suggest whatever we want, it just doesn't make a difference. This thread here alone is people voicing and talking about the wipe issue for a month now, making suggestions or stating opinions and observations on specific problems around the wipe. And NQ has not said a thing about it all this time, despite players begging for any word on the matter.

So here we are, talking to eachother and at eachother without the power to make it change anything. And with that realization comes apathy and activity slows down.

It's a game made by 2 people, and has more content and entertainment in it right now than DU has after spending 30 million dollars and 7 years of development.

There is a difference between your stuff not being safe outside safe zones, and your stuff being automatically given away to other players.
And since DU was supposed to be persistent, upkeep should have been something to keep the wheels turning with regards to industry etc. (aka power system) and not this cop out 10 minutes of dev time taxes deal wich makes no sense with regard to the game lore etc (land was given away for free in the 1800's wild west to incentivize settlements).
 
So what NQ did just tells me that they have given up on ever implementing territory warfare, which was how this whole not in a safe-zone / upkeep thing was supposed to work.

Lest I sound too negative, I should probably just add that the stuff that @NQ-Ligo has been doing recently, and posting about potentially doing in the future, is very encouraging. It will take time, but I have a small glimmer of hope that not all is doom and gloom...

Kickstarters are always a bit of a punt though aren't they?  Nobody expects to get 100% of what they backed every time and everyone is aware that when they back a kickstarter it might or might not ever get to the end of the project.  Particularly in software engineering -- software engineers are notoriously bad at knowing in advance how much effort is actually required to make something.
 
It should be obvious to everyone that whatever kickstarter money DU had is gone now.  We can stamp our feet and quote the letter of the promises as much as we like, but if the money is gone then the money is gone.  NQ devs can't just say 'oh yes, you are right, we won't pay ourselves any more and will work for free to make that'.  What we have now is what you got for your kickstarter money.  You might not like it, you might quote the original words from 6 years ago, but the money has been spent and this is what you got for it.
 
Space markets would be cool, but I think the game would need to change quite a bit to enable them (not having all markets in one list, for example, and also answer questions about people being excluded from key player run markets without the recourse of being able to destroy them).
 
 

Main problem as I see it, is that NQ is adding more and more time gating and grind as a quick and easy way to try and extend game play, instead of actually adding more features to the game. And sadly the end results is that by doing this they end up removing game play instead of adding it.

So if we are being generous a score of  (0 + 0 + 0 + 0.5 + 1 + 0.5) = 2 out of 6, after how many years of development?
 
Basically the one thing that mostly works (building) we have had since start of pre-alpha testing in late 2017, and the rest are just half finished add-ons hold in place with gaffer tape and bubblegum. And some functionality has even started to regress in the last year. That is such a unbelievably bad level of performance from a dev company the size of NQ, that it is almost impressive in it's own weird dysfunctional way.
 
And I hope that when NQ collapse (they show no indication of changing, so it is just a matter of time in my opinion). Someone from the inside will finally tell the true story of what went on behind closed doors at NQ.

Based on NQ's linkedIn, there's definitely been turnover, but nothing akin to their entire dev team being laid off or quitting. NQ still has 6 job postings for permanent contract -- (which usually means full time employment with benefits AFAIK), not what you'd see from someone that laid off their whole team. 
 
The slow pace of development isn't a big surprise even with many full time devs -- it's an old codebase full of bugs and performance issues...and there's not a lot of devs that have experienced the entire 6-8 years of development with the project, which likely means corners of the code no wants to touch. 
 
Plus, we've seen how slow it is for their leadership to make choices...that filters down to devs, too. Hard to plan for the future from an engineering perspective when leadership refuses to plan the game's direction in a reasonable way. 
 
Finally, loss of morale is a huge thing -- if devs working on the game 8+ hours a day don't believe in it, they simply won't care. They'll do things in a sloppy half-assed way, not want to research or refactor legacy code, and just won't move as quickly in general.
 
This is especially true if NQ feels the need to do crunch time -- oh you want me to work 10+ hours a day on a product that has an almost 0% chance of success...? Riiight, that's a sure way to make things slower and get even less than 8 hours of work out of people. 
 
TLDR: slow dev usually is a symptom of bigger issues, but doesn't mean NQ has sacked their entire dev team...

This is .. sigh.. just yet another example of subpar code and features implemented in the game by NQ.
 
Low latency data transfer in games (and in general) is a SOLVED problem and has been so for ages, even for MMO's.
 
So regardless of how much voxel data the game needs to stream to the player clients, there should be a separate data stream containing critical low latency data like construct and player positions etc. Meaning that even if the construct is not finished loading and looks like melted cheese, there is no technical reason why positional data should be lagging also. Other then a bad network code implementation that is.
 

I will not let you die, my little topic, until NQ made those changes!
 

You want custom handmade boutique screws? 😉

Wouldn't that time-scale negate the point of having a decay feature? If it takes months or years then all it will really by doing is annoying people who forgot to do the upkeep before dismantling it (or whatever else requires it to be topped up).
 
Agreed.
 
Unfortunately it is not just a game, but specifically an mmo, the "law of conservation of ninjutsu" very explicitly can't apply. If one person or a small group is capable of producing something, then a proportionately larger group must be proportionately capable of producing even more of that something. It would take an unrealistic amount of complexity to make it possible for a small group to have any area of production where they could out-perform a large one. NQ could add a thousand different skills today that each take a month to cap, and by this time next year several of the major orgs would have at least one member that had level 5 for any given one.
 
Where'd be the fun if I didn't? X)
 
Scripting perhaps, but anyone with patience and an understanding of physical shapes is a voxelmancy-wizard now thanks to the voxel precision tool. Either way though, if just anyone could make a McLaren by letting a couple of timers run for a month or so, then it wouldn't really special, it would be just like Ford, but with a different decoration on the front.
 
Until NQ weighs in with a bunch of hard numbers, opinion is all any of us have.  

This is the only scenario that actually makes any sense, and which serves both goals of allowing new players to start on a (more) level playing field, and allowing existing players to retain their hard-won stuff.
 
I would do it slightly differently, but it's the same principle:
 
- add a new solar system
- new players start in the new system
- existing players remain in the old (legacy) system with all their money and stuff
- allow free travel between new and old systems; but you can only take blueprints with you - not property, and not money
 
That allows existing players to blueprint their stuff and recreate it in the new system if they want to, but they have to bootstrap themselves again financially. As discussed elsewhere in this thread, they will still have a large advantage due to the skills they've got etc - but at least they won't start with vast cash or equipment reserves.
 
Crucially, it also allows existing players to still visit, use and modify their stuff in the old system. Which means they don't instantly lose years worth of investment in creative endeavour. It also means that they can customise things before blueprinting them, which makes it a lot easier to just take the bits they want to recreate.
 
Over time the legacy system could be deprecated and maybe even removed, but it should be in the order of years and not months before that happens.
 
 
Could NQ do this in a reasonable timeframe? In theory, the two systems are pretty much two parallel setups of the game, so it ought to be pretty easy to bring up a new solar system. They would probably want to change names and maybe configurations of planetary bodies, so that's some work. The main new bit of code would be a mechanism for "travelling" between the two, which I think essentially means logging out of one, into the other, whilst preserving / moving any blueprints in their nano pack. That's obviously some work, but it is work that would be very valuable as it could also be used to allow people to share blueprints with the PTS - which makes the PTS a lot more attractive as a place to try things out, prototype, build, etc.

I'm in an org with another guy - 4 accounts between us - and this is how I play DU.
 
I log in before work to calibrate MUs.  My org has a spreadsheet for this. Once the MUs are calibrated i check the status of the warp cell factory, and add resources as necessary. I check for any territories that need their taxes paid.
We have MUs on two different planets. Once a week per planet, we go get the ore and take it to market. I call this "Space Trucker." This is my favorite part of DU because i get to fly spaceships. As a terrible pilot, this is exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. Landing 7000 tons on Alioth may be easy for you fancy people but for me it's hard, and fun, and scary in equal measure. My crash rate has declined, but it's not zero.
 
And that's it. I'm not good at PvP. I'm not good at building. I log in every day because i love the game, but i log out because there's nothing to do unless i'm hauling ore.
 
Reply to this post and tell NQ your game play loop. 

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Why do people keep bring up this concept that Lua somehow has anything to do with any of the other parts of the game? Lua is it's own thing and I doubt the devs behind Lua have many, if any, responsibilities with other parts of the game.

The reason us Lua people are always happy is because we never had any updates or changes for quite some time, and now we're getting them. And I love how you say "they bring very little to the game"... I think you're really salty or something. I don't know how many people use ArchHUD, but almost every ship that is after market has some alternative HUD that makes ship control better. And PVP HUDs that bring much more to the PVP environment, and AR systems to allow for 3D damage control or custom waypoints.

Screen tech is like a foundational part of the game, you see screens literally everywhere. You can make minigames on them, literally. And yet, you say "they bring very little to the game". I have no words for you if you honestly think Lua developers in DU bring little to the game.

EDIT: If you meant "they" as in NQ, I apologize, but if you meant us Lua devs, what I said above remains.

And that was the great thing about DU ie. make your own game. But it did not fit the PvP crowd that wanted to play iteration 2364 of the same old game. And so DU is now slowly changing to something .. not DU.
 
And this is probably the biggest mistake NQ did early on. They had a great foundation for a more open world building focused MMO, but wanted to please everyone by doing everything. And we all know how easy (not) that is..

Honestly, I think that the design ship has long-since sailed, so I'm posting this more in the spirit of floating an idea of how it could have been, rather than any expectation that it might happen. That said...
 
I've been thinking about what is broken about the economy/industry, and the main thing that occurs to me is that unlike real life, there is no real niche for "artisan" builders.
 
In the real world, mega factories and mega corporations do exist, and they do largely dominate the market for cheap consumer goods (whether we want the game to mirror real life is maybe a question for another day, but at least we can probably say that in this detail, the game isn't massively inaccurate).
 
However, in the real world, there are also people and smaller companies who make high-quality, low-volume stuff. You can either buy a mass-produced Ford, or you can buy a custom-made McClaren super car. The super car is ridiculously expensive, but to some lucky people it is worth it, because it is very rare, and very high quality. Likewise you can buy some chairs from IKEA, or you can find someone who makes amazing chairs by hand. You'll get something extra from the artisan furniture maker, but it will cost you, because it takes a long time to make them and each one is unique or at least very rare.
 
This is where I think the Dual Universe simulation falls down: there is no way to express the quality of something, other than the very crude tier system. Furthermore, there is no sense in which an "artisan" builder can get themselves to a position where they can make better stuff than a mass-production builder. Even worse, really the only barrier to building high tier stuff is having the ridiculous amount of money required to buy the schematics - which I suspect makes it virtually impossible for someone to do it without first becoming so rich that they can effectively make a mega factory if they want.
 
What I think would help with this would be if every item in the game - from ore through pures through parts all the way up to elements - had a quality stat. Probably expressed as a percentage, so that it has a large, continuous range, rather than just the crude "low, medium, high" kind of thing that tiers represent right now.
 
Being able to make high quality stuff would require high quality input materials, high quality industry equipment, and high skills for the particular item(s) being built. If you want to specialise in making something to a really high quality, it should be possible to do it without being insanely rich, but it should take a lot of time; enough time that no single user could ever make everything at the highest quality. Megafactories could still exist, but they'd have to compromise on quality. This would carve out a niche for individuals to become artisans, and they wouldn't even necessarily need to be making actual elements. Maybe all you ever do is make top quality screws! If someone is making top quality military engines, they will need those screws, and they may not have enough time / skill points to make the screws themselves, so they have an incentive to buy yours. Orgs will still exist, and still have power, but that power will derive more explicitly from the combination of the skills of their members.
 
What I like about this idea is that I think it might create more of an incentive for people to work together, and it might make the trading economy healthier and more diverse.
 
Of course, the quality stat would also have other uses. Equipment could reduce in quality over time if it was used, so that eventually it "wore out" and you'd want to replace it. Weather effects could slowly erode the quality of anything exposed to the elements, which again would give a reason for things to be replaced. This should be slow (taking months or years) but gradual. Repairing an item would bring it back to full functionality, but reduce its quality - which would serve the same purpose that the "repair three times then you have to replace it", but in a much subtler and more lore-friendly way.
 
As I said at the start, I doubt very much whether design changes of this scope will ever happen now. It's nice to dream though...
 

Yeah, power/energy is definitely something that would help with a lot of design flaws. Fairly mind-blowing that it wasn't there from early on. Some sort of quality stat might be another option. 
 
The main point - and again, this has been said multiple times in this thread by others - is that a reset on its own won't fix the economy, and without it being fixed, we will just end up back where we are in a few months. How to fix it is up for debate but that it needs more than a reset should be self-evident.