Zeddrick
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Posts posted by Zeddrick
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On 6/3/2023 at 12:21 AM, JayleBreak said:
A value of 0 or 1 would evaluate to true in the if statement above, so the answer is: the code will not behave the same if changed to a boolean. But then, the original code was broken so...
You'd think it would be compatible, but Lua is a bit of a mad language though, why couldn't they have picked Javascript!
andy@smiley:~$ lua Lua 5.2.4 Copyright (C) 1994-2015 Lua.org, PUC-Rio > function foo() >> return 0 >> end > function bar() >> return false >> end > print(foo()) 0 > print(bar()) false > if not foo() then print("yay") >> end > if not bar() then print("yay") end yay > if foo() == 0 then print("yay") end yay > if bar() == 0 then print("yay") end >
Looking at the list of changed functions, there are going to be a lot of upset people using DRM protected LUA scripts when this comes out!
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On 6/3/2023 at 9:39 AM, DaSpitz said:
I can see the reasons for the changes from the perspective of NQ. However, with so much code in the game and a good chunk of it locked behind DRM while the owner/original coder may no longer be in game, this can potentially break and ground many constructs with no recourse.
A question would be is NQ going to accommodate opening up the DRM in these instances to allow for this code to be corrected/fixed or are the owners of the constructs in question pretty much left with a potato.
Disruptive changes like this really have no place in a released game where there are very real blockers preventing these issue to be resolved. NQ has a responsibility here and can't just walk away from that as far as I am concerned..
I don't think this is any different from things like the stacked element changes -- you could spend money on a construct and then NQ is happy to break that and send you back to the original builder for repairs. The original builder might not want to help you, and then you're on your own.
It's not a very good way to encourage users to create content in a game which relies heavily on users creating and selling content. I know of people who stopped shipbuilding because of the element stacking changes, for example.
You can un-DRM by picking up the element and re-dropping it. Then you have to re-boost and re-apply the new version of the code from whoever wrote it. If it isn't a standard LUA script you can download or buy you're SOL. -
20 hours ago, RugesV said:
In PVE you have a chance of gaining value. In PVP unless your going after goo, or pirating a miner, your not really gaining value. other then the lulz and salt.
But this has absolutely nothing to do with what I said. Did you even read it or did you just skipread 'PvE' and 'PvP'. GO back and actually read it. Explain how your brainfart is even remotely relevant to what I said?
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2 hours ago, Atmosph3rik said:
Even in PVP a ship doesn't just vanish, someone has the option to recover it.
The idea that someone might recover their destroyed ship after a PVE mission doesn't seem all that crazy to me. And completely repairing a destroyed ship is a cost.
Honestly it seems like your being intentionally unhelpful here, so i'm going to go ahead and ignore you.
So long as the PvE enemy is still there and you defeat it in order to get the wreck back that's cool too!
I just don't the idea that your shipwreck is somehow teleported back for you. You fight something and in wins they should get your ship. -
15 hours ago, Atmosph3rik said:
That seems like a silly reason to design the PVE missions that way. It literally has nothing to do with the PVE missions. It would just provide another random meeting point for PVP, the exact same thing Asteroids already provide.
The game already has that.
What the game doesn't have is a way for all those "cowards" to actually fire the weapons on their ship a few times, before going up against another player, and risking their ship.
I think they can probably find a way to balance the risk vs reward of the PVE missions without randomly dumping people's ships in PVP space to entertain bored PVPers.
Assuming nobody is a coward, they're fine with losing the ship to PvE if they lose a mission, right? I don't really see why dumping a ship in PvP space would be *worse* than exploding it. The player can just abandon it if they want, and then it's just like it would be if it got exploded in PvE. Or if they fancy a challenge they can try to save it and they might have some fun doing that.
Or are you suggesting that they lose a PvE fight and just get to keep their ship? That's PvE for cowards. -
On 5/10/2023 at 1:42 PM, The_Kurgan said:
You call people cowards at the same time saying you want the ability to run out and attack a broken and defenseless ship
Nah, I want to fight the other people who come out to try to get the ship. And hopefully the ship is still intact, just ran out of time in the mission. So it ought not to be defenceless.
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14 hours ago, Zarcata said:
It is primarily a building game for creative players who enjoy creating something permanent. These new instances are just to add some variety to the game, since many players are bored and have asked for content.
I meant why are they playing PvE, which is a combat game. But you knew that, right?
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19 hours ago, Kirion said:
and just like that even more players will unsub for a terrible idea, whether you have a jump drive, cells to go with, or the gas to get to the right speed before a cube from one of the pvp guilds murders you with absolution(full set railguns), it is an unsubalition idea.
Why? Either you lose the ship or you get dumped in PvP space and your location is broadcast. If you don't want to PvP you just force respawn and lose the ship, which is what would have happened anyway. Or if you feel lucky you can try to get back to safety and perhaps save something you would otherwise lose. Either way the PvP groups can go to the location and fight each other for the ship or just because they saw each other in space and wanted to shoot somebody. Seems like everybody wins.
I mean, some people are suggesting you should get to keep the ship anyway after losing at PvE, but if they're that risk averse why are they playing a combat game at all? Where's the fun in not risking anything? Perhaps the lower tiers could have small rewards and be for the cowards while anyone willing to risk their ship gets to do higher tiers and get better rewards? -
22 minutes ago, Wolfram said:
For the JSON part, I'd really suggest looking at the possibility of using some native C/C++ library for that and adding the bindings to the Lua runtime, since it allows that kind of thing. It should work way faster than anything built using just Lua...
I reckon it would be easier to just supply the data as nested dictionaries instead of JSON in the first place. Perhaps with on-demand loading of the data to deal with things which are rarely accessed.
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For consequences of losing a mission, please dump the player somewhere in the PvP zone complete with their ship in whatever state it was in when the mission ended and somehow announce the location to everyone. The player get the possibility to not lose their ship and PvPers can join in with the fun!
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22 hours ago, VarietyMMOs said:
Will these missions have time gates like missions/other vr quanta gaining activities? If the pve is limited to once/twice a day for example the disappointment all round will be huge.
I hope nq has really done the math on the quanta injection this will bring into the game and make sure it's sustainable - Unlike what happened with missions being introduced in beta.
Missions *still* inject an unsustainable amount of quanta. Look at DAC prices. It only works because of the low player count at the moment.
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On 5/2/2023 at 11:40 PM, Distinct Mint said:
IQ^N = NQ 🤣
Do you think they know that ^ means XOR in most programming languages? -
If a company that size is trying to do three things at once then either they're doing very insubstantial things or they're doing it wrong. Put the focus on one thing so you can be agile, create feedback loops with users and respond to change requirements fast.
Most likely they have a stack of tech, a product that's failing and no idea what to do next so they're just arsing about with whatever crazy ideas they come up with to see if anything works. -
2 hours ago, le_souriceau said:
Thing is, DU made it during KS, because lied to pretty much everyone, promising what everyone wanted to hear.
EVE-leaning crowd was the largest (and most activity-generating), this is obviously seen on 2016-2017 forums, when they gladly played own meta game in anticipation in forums/Discords etc, with 1000s of players involved. Yet EVE people not (generaly) stupid and they quickly understood they were fooled. And left. Its where game took huge population hit. And suddenly become quite empty and boring.
Builders, ''industrialists'' and random passengers usually bit slower to grasp where train is heading, so they zombied around in Beta/Release, but DU was goner at this point.
There is no fixing. Just wait until NQ will took out the plug.
Do you think it was really lying early on (implying intentionally deceiving knowing full well they would not be able to deliver what they were promising)? I think there was a lot of naive optimism and overpromising, probably because JC was new to the industry, but IIRC the actual lying started happening after 0.23 and JC's departure. IMO that was probably the moment the company realised they couldn't deliver on their promises and started, for example, to use 'constructive ambiguity' to charge people to play in a persistent universe which they knew they were going to delete later.
And, as with everything else it was trying to be, DU was a poor successor to eve online too. The real selling point was if you wanted a game which had all of these different facets available that could grow over a very long time. I think with proper focus and planning DU might have got somewhere really good after, say, 10 years of growing had it not alienated most of the players early on. SO I don't think it was really lies.
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4 hours ago, SweatyIndustry said:
I would have never worked on PVP to begin with. You spent all this time making this amazing voxel system, that could have been this awesome mesh of satisfactory and minecraft and you waste all this time trying to make PVP.
There's so many pvp games out there. What brought anyone here was the building aspects of this game. All they really had to do to be successful is make the game more like satisfactory. Factory chains, production, etc... really get into it. Conveyor belts, power, needing resources to produce energy to mine to produce goods.
Realistically though, If I'm talking about current state if it was launching right now?
Disable PVP, disable Schematics. Just make entirely about the building and flying/space trucker/construction aspects. Then I would have immediately took all those existing PVP parts and worked on PVE content to create a social thing for people to do together.For me one of the lamest gaming moments I ever experienced was mining an asteroid in PVP space, dug down deep in the asteroid, come back up and my ship had been disabled, and the two pvpers were trying to figure out how to steal and fly the ship out. I could no longer control it, it had been taken over. So all I could do was watch in horror as these people spent 10 minutes taunting me. I couldn't pull out a gun and defend it, nothing. Just watch. I logged off and never played it again lol. At least eve gives me plenty of ways to escape/stay out of danger in pvp areas and doesn't take nearly as long creating a ship/flying it somewhere so the loss/time ratio isn't as bad.
Completely disagree with the 'what brought anyone here was the building' comment. Look at the few people who are still here, a lot of them have 'alpha' tags. Back when there were a lot of people interested in DU it was mostly people who came through the alpha and early beta stages of the game. Those people came because of JC's original vision of the game and nothing since then has succeeded in drawing even a fraction of the same number of players here.
As a building game DU is mediocre at best. Voxels are slow, hard to work with and really really bad at very simple things like 45 degree rotation of part of a construct, curved surfaces, etc. Also the detail is coarse, there are minimal surface texture options, etc. Look at the difference when you start adding decorative elements, etc. If voxels were good enough we wouldn't need elements. It's sort of nice for a video game because it means that there can be skill, but the problem is for the less skilled and less patient people there's a ceiling which means that most people have built everything they want to build within a month or two and then the building game part ends for them. The rendering engine is also poor, rendering voxels and elements at different distances so you can see through doors as you approach them, for example.
Factory gameplay is fun for some, and quite detailed with a bit of depth although NQ seems to have completely forgotten about concepts like opportunity cost which would have turned it into an actual game with optimisation decisions, etc instead of an exercise in just putting more and more machines down forever to build everything. If I put a machine down there should be something else I can't do because I chose to run that machine, then it would be good. Again you'll get to a point fairly quickly where you have done a big factory and only a few will want to continue on from there.
Your point about PvP is a good one. Being able to go shoot those people who are stealing your ship (or fly up and board theirs while they loot you or whatever) is something which would have added a lot of depth to DU. I spent a fair amount of time doing PvP and I don't find being on the opposite side of that (shooting someone on an asteroid) to be very much fun after the first couple of goes either. Other types of PvP are fun but the game relied on multiple PvP focussed groups developing to provide PvP content and that didn't happen (partly because of limited reasons for it to happen) so PvP never really took off enough to attract a large crows.
When I was a computer science student a lecturer put a picture of a duck on the board. "This is a duck. It can swim, fly and walk but it isn't particularly good at any of these things". And went on to explain how if you try to make your software do too many things it isn't very good at any of them. And I think this is the problem with the original DU in a nutshell. You can go back and find JC quotes to the effect of "you've seen all these features before but not all in the same game". They tried to make it do too many things. And we all liked that because it sounded like a great game, and that is the only thing about DU which has ever attracted a large enough crowd to sustain an MMO. Nothing they have done since has drawn people in and retained them in the same way.
Everyone will have their favourite part, but will admit that it isn't perfect and needs more work. But I don't think any single part of the game is strong enough to carry the game without significant work. Any sort of 'take out all but XXX' change would instantly lose most of the players and the remaining game would fail to attract replacements, so they're stuck. Based on the things NQ is saying it looks like the studio are doing something along the lines of what you suggest, but it won't be DU, it will be a completely different game that isn't held back by trying to do too many things. -
4 hours ago, blundertwink said:
I don't know if it's driven by huge egos that despise any form of criticism or deep insecurities, but the end result is a ubiquitous lack of respect toward playing customers...and no real effort to change their communication/PR strategy.
I feel it leans toward arrogance...and that their next projects will invariably fail as a result. They haven't learned a single thing from developing DU. They haven't wanted to learn.
They still don't even know what "content" means in a game and rave about UGC without an ounce of actual game design understanding.
They still think games aren't games, but "content platforms" for some web3 metaverse fantasy. With their next project, they seem to be doubling down on the concepts that don't work with DU instead of taking the time to learn about game design.
I wouldn't be shocked if their tagline, "The metaverse company" is actively discouraging for people that are considering working for them, hence all the recruitment posts...even asking for interns.
Would anyone want to join a company that advertises themselves as such...? Would you seriously view it as a stable, long-term job...? I wouldn't trust a company as an employer that's still clinging to the corpse of the metaverse concept, especially after one failed product launch that took them 8 years!
I do feel bad for the actual devs that NQ's leadership is so myopic and refuses to understand or acknowledge basic tenants of game design because they think they are smarter than a well-established discipline.
The thing about web3 is that you can make all your money upfront doing some scammy crypto-token thing and then move on without having to get the hard part right at all.
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The fact that you can post this and not get a ton of replies telling you that you'd be mad to sub for 12 months because the game is dead tells us everything we need to know about the current state of DU.
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On 4/13/2023 at 3:55 PM, BlindingBright said:
While I agree with you, every MMO beta/launch I've been apart of has suffered hard to track exploits regarding currency, and in game items... especially at launch. the 'standard' way of doing it, while can work has not worked in the 20ish years I've been playing MMO's. The last two 'new' mmo's I've beta'd through launch are DU and New World, both of which suffered from major exploits at launch... New World exploits just got more coverage as it had an actual playerbase.
I quit DU largely after coming across how to do resource duplication, and realizing NQ had no proper way to track it or the items created through it. Also... why was I gonna grind for a game that has so many issues like that? When someone can just exploit wealth into existence.
A proper chain of custody, along with a public ledger, would allow the general public, aka players to sniff out abusers much easier... and it'd make it easier to track for issues with money laundering, gold selling, and of course exploits. All of which a MMO devs needs to be aware of, and many don't put neatly enough development time into it ahead of launch.
I'm not saying it'd stop exploiting or resource duping .. just that it could go a long way to reducing, tracking, and dealing with offenders. I'm sure a lot can be done with just checking database calls and logs, though from what I've seen it hasn't historically been enough.
All kinds of bad things would happen in a game as small as DU with a public ledger. For example, if I sell you something like a beacon then I know which entity in the ledger is you and I know everything you buy and sell from then on.
Really one would need to have 10s of thousands of trading entities at a minimum to make it work properly.
And I don't think the blockchain adds anything here. You still have to trust NQ to actually put all trades onto the blockchain and to track entities inside the game and ensure that only one in game entity is represented by each object on the blockchain. At that point they might as well just keep their ledger in a database and give you an API to query it, the blockchain adds nothing at all besides noise, buzzword compliance and the illusion that someone is going to somehow magically create a tradable commodity out of it and make a lot of money from that on the side. -
I enjoyed the changelog. The dancing gnomes were my favourite.
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The beacon exploit thing reminds me of the time when they gave everyone cheap schematics in beta and just let them keep them because taking them back was too hard.
I mean, it should be really obvious that this was dodgy and really easy to find where the beacon went. It's not like there are many of them in the game. And surely it should be really easy to see who ran the maintenance unit on there.
This is not just going to go away, everyone will remember that the second strongest PvP group in the game cheated to avoid losing the most expensive item in the game and NQ just let them get away with it, just like they let people keep all those schematics.
Of course looking back at the schematic thing now it seems fairly obvious that they had already decided to wipe the game and were therefore only prepared to go so far to keep things running. It makes me wonder what decisions they have made about the current game if they won't put in the effort to take that beacon back? It's a far cry from the NQ in the first month of release swinging the ban hammer for exploits ....
- Knight-Sevy and Aaron Cain
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On 3/28/2023 at 12:29 PM, Aaron Cain said:
So in short, OP has a point to ask this question and wonder about digital safety.
But most likely their PC was compromised by something completely different and this is just a symptom.
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1 hour ago, blundertwink said:
Yet some will still talk about how things will change "when Territory War comes" like someone waiting for Godot, even as NQ has said very clearly "hey, we're actually working on another game".
PVE will save us all!
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3 hours ago, BlindingBright said:
No, the alternative is not what we had... it is what we should have had: Each construct gets a magic BP that is sent to a market container/inventory of the players construct upon canceling their account. To retrieve a ship, redeploy bp, for a static, move it to a container and then fly yo final placedown spot.... this isn't rocket science or the most difficult thing to implement. No permanent HQ tiles/placed constructs.
I enjoyed the whole requisition thing when it was first done. It was good content and DU wouldn't be the only game to make you lose your stuff if you stop playing without putting it away correctly. Given the problems with people losing constructs due to org construct slots and it being hard to see that I think a magic BP would be better actually.
I did enjoy the post wipe for a while, it was fun building back up again and it did get a lot of people back into the game who hadn't played in a long time. But I agree that it was a missed opportunity because, as many of us predicted before it, they just made all the same mistakes again and ended up right back in the same place as a result.
Perhaps they will try it again? -
On 3/26/2023 at 4:08 PM, BlindingBright said:
If I wanted to take a break from DU, depending on your constructs/spread could need to spend hours dismantling, transporting, and storing raw materials your starter tile... a lot of /work/ to take a break.
But the alternative is worse, right? The game puts everyone into a shared space and if people are able to claim bits of that space and then disappear forever (like they could in beta) the result is going to be wasteland around all of the premium real-estate because nobody will ever have a reason to give back a market 6 tile, high quality mining tile, etc. They will just leave the game with those in HQ mode in case they ever want to come back. Rich players can just buy a DAC, use it to sub a new toon for 1 month, give it some HQ tiles and then unsub it so they can hold a very large number of tiles, thereby inflating the value of tiles and supporting their DAC purchases.
The maintenance unit does make it easier now to take things apart, although if you have a huge amount of stuff then yeah, that's still work. Perhaps people with huge holdings are better off selling them or handing over their org to someone who still plays when taking a break? And isn't that better too? Do we really want a load of orgs run by people who aren't even bothering to subscribe any more?At the moment though I don't think anyone has to worry about what will happen to their stuff if they take a 3 month break....
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Javascript has inconsistencies, sure. But array subscripts starting from 1? It's not right.