vylqun

the first good devblog in quite a while.

PART TWO: UNDER THE HOOD 

In our previous blog, we spoke about improvements we’re making to our processes in order to get more efficient use of our resources and deliver the best game possible. Today, we’re taking a look at operation costs and how we’re working to make improvements in that area, too. 

THE COST OF DOING BUSINESS 
The server and database architecture behind Dual Universe is new and quite complex. As we had about the game itself,  we had made assumptions about how much running a game like DU was going to cost in various areas. What we found was that our estimations proved to be far too conservative. We had to confront the actual cost of scaling up operating costs for a larger, global player base. And that’s okay. We have a plan. 
 
After reevaluation, we determined that some of our design decisions have had a major impact on our operational costs (i.e. what it costs to run the servers). In particular, databases are a major part of these costs. For example, because the world can be entirely edited and every edit needs to be stored in a database then communicated between the server and the clients, it eats a lot of our I/O allocations, which in turn increases our database costs. 
 
THE IMPACT ON UPDATES
The consequence is that, in the upcoming months, we will be rolling out significant backend improvements in order to optimize these operational costs. We made the conscious decision to keep pricing low in order to make the game more accessible for people who want to play, but that means that we need to keep operational costs in check. Developing these optimizations is time-consuming, but it is fundamental if we want to have a viable game as the playerbase continues to grow. 
 
It’s important to make players aware of this because some of our upcoming releases may not seem like much to you. While they won’t appear to include much in the way of new features, they will be updates to deploy these fundamental under-the-hood changes. For instance, the upcoming 0.25 release will be primarily focused on introducing a “game-changing” incremental storage mechanism for edits to the game world that will have a major positive impact on our database costs. The good news is that we think that some of these modifications will improve performance for the players.
 
Speaking of performance: that’s another area where we’ve been doing a lot of work, using the in-game telemetry to optimize areas where performance was dropping. There are several projects in the works to address performance. Although these may not seem particularly sexy when you read about them in the patch notes, the difference in how much better the game runs and feels while you’re playing should convince you it was worth the time and effort we spent on them. 
 
One example is the in-game screens. They ended up being quite popular among players, but the use of HTML for screen customization has proven to be quite a performance bottleneck in areas where there are a lot of screens. We recently started testing a new system using simple Lua draw commands instead of HTML to achieve the goal of screen customization. This change should seriously alleviate performance issues in areas with a lot of screens while providing the added benefit of unifying customization languages in a more user-friendly way.
 
There are other optimizations like this in our pipeline, and they will be presented in due time. 

MORE IN STORE
Tomorrow, in the third and final part of this series, we’ll talk about DU gameplay, and the challenges of maintaining a delicate balance between staying true to the original vision while taking player feedback into consideration. 
 
Discuss today's blog here!

Imo you forgot to mention one of the most important player feedback options THE BETA FORUM. What about all the responses to YOUR posts on the updates/patches. We need you to let us know you are reading our responses. For instance your post on: 0.24 Phase One - Discussion Thread NO Dev or staff have responded to the posts there. It seems you start posts but I rarely see staff respond or interact after that. For instance what are you going to do about the issues mentioned in the post referred to above?

Could we get some information on the various elements promised on Pre-Alpha and where they fit on the timeline for game, for example avatar vs avatar combat?

 

"To provide better support we will now treat everyone equally and make you wait 1 months for issues that could be solved within minutes if you pm a dev in discord or ingame"
Really? Sorry that i post here, but really? For better support? Does NQ think we are retarded? At least don't come up with such an obvious lie as excuse when you don't want to provide the manpower for real time support...

"To provide better support we will now treat everyone equally and make you wait 1 months for issues that could be solved within minutes if you pm a dev in discord or ingame"
Really? Sorry that i post here, but really? For better support? Does NQ think we are retarded? At least don't come up with such an obvious lie as excuse when you don't want to provide the manpower for real time support...

"To provide better support we will now treat everyone equally and make you wait 1 months for issues that could be solved within minutes if you pm a dev in discord or ingame"
Really? Sorry that i post here, but really? For better support? Does NQ think we are retarded? At least don't come up with such an obvious lie as excuse when you don't want to provide the manpower for real time support...

having less posts than a player that doesnt play, he should be ashamed of himself then i guess
 
The problem DU currently has that the production of nearly all elements is way higher than the demand, which leads to collapsing prices whenever more than only 2 or 3 ppl sell the same type of element at the same location, and the schematic exploit only made it worse (which is why its even more weird, that it wasn't adressed properly)
Without a huge influx of non-undustrialist players or a good and meaningful system to destroy elements that wont change and the economy will stay as crippled as it is.

"To provide better support we will now treat everyone equally and make you wait 1 months for issues that could be solved within minutes if you pm a dev in discord or ingame"
Really? Sorry that i post here, but really? For better support? Does NQ think we are retarded? At least don't come up with such an obvious lie as excuse when you don't want to provide the manpower for real time support...

"To provide better support we will now treat everyone equally and make you wait 1 months for issues that could be solved within minutes if you pm a dev in discord or ingame"
Really? Sorry that i post here, but really? For better support? Does NQ think we are retarded? At least don't come up with such an obvious lie as excuse when you don't want to provide the manpower for real time support...

"To provide better support we will now treat everyone equally and make you wait 1 months for issues that could be solved within minutes if you pm a dev in discord or ingame"
Really? Sorry that i post here, but really? For better support? Does NQ think we are retarded? At least don't come up with such an obvious lie as excuse when you don't want to provide the manpower for real time support...

Very important, give the players who join a full inventory with stuff. Not many will be able to afford the time to grind up to endgame content for pure testing purposes.

Very important, give the players who join a full inventory with stuff. Not many will be able to afford the time to grind up to endgame content for pure testing purposes.

Very important, give the players who join a full inventory with stuff. Not many will be able to afford the time to grind up to endgame content for pure testing purposes.

Very important, give the players who join a full inventory with stuff. Not many will be able to afford the time to grind up to endgame content for pure testing purposes.

I completely agree with Lethys, it has to be a bit more complex than giving one wallet and every rights. We need at least a division into "every right" and "can only add quanta"
And it is also very important to be able to create more wallets, or as lethys said, divide it with individual rights for each partition. Its just way easier and more conventient to have a market wallet, taxes wallet, savings wallet etc.
 
Please do not half-ass this just because you can't/don't want to spend more time on it!

why not split the rights to sell/buy/edit orders?
 
can someone with the edit right transfer money too? (forget that, i just read the answer)
 
can ppl ONLY transfer but not sell/buy or vice versa?
 
can ppl create more than one "division" in an org wallet? so ppl/orgs have a "research wallet", a "pvp wallet", a "trade wallet" and so forth?
 
can ppl give rights to each of those divisions?

If/when they wipe then they really need:
 
1) NO magic blueprints - empty only. Otherwise they are carrying forward exploits
2) Keep talent points
3) NO ore bots whatsoever after the wipe, period , end of story , not for a minute, not for an hour ZERO ore bots ever again.
 
Then players might actually experience a progression curve. 
 

No.

No.

No.

No.

No.

I think what you're saying is that they need to fix element stacking, not add legitimate ways to do it.

Dear NQ, 
 
Please for the love Quanta, please increase the copy/paste size limits. 
 
It is the single most annoying aspect of build large ships. 
 
Love, 
Wadiss. xoxo