WhiteZeus

Yeah... I have played since beta, as a Patron. It definitely was forgivable even in the first couple months for me. Working in game development myself, I understand how things may go. It didn't take long for me to soon see that it doesn't appear as though anyone here has any previous game development experience. The game is inconsistent, and while some features are robust, others are so lacking it's confusing. Overly complicated system, not good enough tools, shoddy performance and stability.

After almost a full year of being available to the public (not to mention the 2-3+ years in development prior, and nothing to show for it) there have been no meaningful improvements in performance, stability. Still haven't fixed the crashes, unhandled exceptions...

I played for about 3 months. Then stopped playing for about 6 months or something, only to come back recently. The coolest thing that has happened since is the community building things. There's literally nothing else to talk about. Nobody is missing anything by not playing. It's a shame really. The development team is aware, I'm sure, but I'm here to speak and say my opinion that the development team needs to stop production of half-baked features, to focus on stability and performance. If you did that from the start, the player base wouldn't be what it is now. The fact that I'm being told to update ports in my router as a workaround to my crashes, is a disappointment. It's not even a guarantee, and I'm not going to do all that. In the end you're losing customers, and those of us who're still vocal and here and speaking up, should be able to help guide the product to a healthy state.
 
I work in Quality Assurance for my job, and the quality bar is set really low on this project. The Project/Build Manager should feel ashamed. The producer should prioritize better, and the board members need to listen to the community and help support production to focus on quality foundations before adding features. Dual Universe doesn't know what it is anymore, and those of us who are still here, paying, playing, should and will dictate how the game proceeds. We got you.

Edited to add:
My whole org quit, they talk shit on the game. It sucks. lol Feels really bad.

-Crashing when flying
-Unhandled Exceptions after clicking play on launcher
-Server response time is absolutely garbage. Makes playing with other players a slide show when you're not on the ground.
-Loading times are garbage for absolutely everything
-Constructs/construct loading times/quality not optimized is also horrendous. Market 6 is perfect example. Market 6 should stay this way as a control bar for quality performance
 

Yeah... I have played since beta, as a Patron. It definitely was forgivable even in the first couple months for me. Working in game development myself, I understand how things may go. It didn't take long for me to soon see that it doesn't appear as though anyone here has any previous game development experience. The game is inconsistent, and while some features are robust, others are so lacking it's confusing. Overly complicated system, not good enough tools, shoddy performance and stability.

After almost a full year of being available to the public (not to mention the 2-3+ years in development prior, and nothing to show for it) there have been no meaningful improvements in performance, stability. Still haven't fixed the crashes, unhandled exceptions...

I played for about 3 months. Then stopped playing for about 6 months or something, only to come back recently. The coolest thing that has happened since is the community building things. There's literally nothing else to talk about. Nobody is missing anything by not playing. It's a shame really. The development team is aware, I'm sure, but I'm here to speak and say my opinion that the development team needs to stop production of half-baked features, to focus on stability and performance. If you did that from the start, the player base wouldn't be what it is now. The fact that I'm being told to update ports in my router as a workaround to my crashes, is a disappointment. It's not even a guarantee, and I'm not going to do all that. In the end you're losing customers, and those of us who're still vocal and here and speaking up, should be able to help guide the product to a healthy state.
 
I work in Quality Assurance for my job, and the quality bar is set really low on this project. The Project/Build Manager should feel ashamed. The producer should prioritize better, and the board members need to listen to the community and help support production to focus on quality foundations before adding features. Dual Universe doesn't know what it is anymore, and those of us who are still here, paying, playing, should and will dictate how the game proceeds. We got you.

Edited to add:
My whole org quit, they talk shit on the game. It sucks. lol Feels really bad.

-Crashing when flying
-Unhandled Exceptions after clicking play on launcher
-Server response time is absolutely garbage. Makes playing with other players a slide show when you're not on the ground.
-Loading times are garbage for absolutely everything
-Constructs/construct loading times/quality not optimized is also horrendous. Market 6 is perfect example. Market 6 should stay this way as a control bar for quality performance
 

Mother of god lol years of making nothing.  ?  At least Star Citizen is pushing boundaries as far game development is concerned, even if there's no "game" to play. This, though, is unacceptable.

Unfathomable lol 8 years... just :mindblown:

AC was bunch of orgs
Let me try.
 
<story starts at beta release>
AC was a bunch of orgs, mostly carebears, limited amount of PVPers under alliance named Ascendancy or something.
ATOM joined them and did some white knight PVP under name of "AC ATOM". Did some fun events for PVP and generated content.
Here come the asteroids and ATOM decided that protecting other AC carebears is no fun especially if they don't pay and left AC.
Some AC orgs that do at least some PVP followed ATOM and they formed legion.
AC remained with mostly carebears and will most likely be irrelevant now.
 
All this "majoir political event" and MMO drama involve no more than 2 dozen people at this point.
No one outside of AC/legion really cares about this.
 
On the first day of legion being formed, "AC ATOM" ship got cored in PVP space. ATOM leaders denied it is one of theirs saying it's fake. It turned out to be a lame try to cover a carebear loss of ATOM member.

AC didn't dissolve, they just renamed to Legion lets be honest. XD
 

Player jetpacks vs. hover vessels
 
The sense of scale in this game has always been weird to me. When I started out back before having any talents, the world felt very big, and very mysterious. In this, a sense of immersion was there, not knowing what was over the hill in front of me, while also taking a long time to get there. This, of course, is no longer there in much manner.
 
Currently, the idea of a hover vessel is entirely overshadowed by a player's two feet (and a jetpack sprint), for literally any purpose other than short-distance lugging of some resources early game. Especially with a maxed out jetpack-sprint talent, you move at 81km/h, which is literally faster than a hovercraft that's trying to stay safe.
 
Additionally, players can jump extremely high with the use of a jetpack, with an oversimplified "refresh" method. Side note, but a better method is how Empyrion Galactic Survival does jetpacks. Google it

Due to these very simple, but highly underbalanced features, the sense of scale, immersion, and a need for hovercrafts is broken (as mentioned before). Therefore, buildings and ships feel much smaller, planets feel much smaller, to the point where even a kilometer feels much smaller (a KM in the real world takes a while, even in a car!). 
 
To fix this issue, of player movement being comparable to a hover craft, I suggest 2 major changes. First, remove the double tap sprint* (in this, of course reimburse the players that have it upgraded). It's quite confusing to have 2 different sprints, and on top, one that is objectively better than the other for literally all purposes but immersion. Removing this alone makes need for a ship of some form a lot more valuable (including slowing progression in a sense). My second suggestion regarding player jetpacks is to simply make the jetpacks very similar to Empyrion.
 
*Double tap sprint would just enable the normal sprint instead.
 
Mobility Part 2: Electric Boogaloo
Let's talk engineering and aerodynamics!

The second part of this post I wanted to direct attention to the engineering side of the game. There's 2 major problems within the game's progression and ship construction, of which stem from 1 major issue: calculations for proper center of lift, lift itself, are not very advanced.
 
The first of the two reasons for needing this is that hovercrafts, the most simple form of ship design, as well as normal omni-directional thrust space ships are almost extinct, due to literally being able to slap some wings on them and call it good.
 
While of course the major downsides of a change such as this would be scrapping a lot of designs that rely on wings to function, I see a lot more major upsides for at least me personally (and I'm sure others will agree with me).
 
First, ships that want to use aerodynamics (and wings) will have to prioritize proper shape, to optimize the amount of lift (and where the lift is located), will need to go through more rigorous engineering, and give more meaning to each ship crafted.
 
Due to this, planes will be a specific market, of which space ships (without wings), and hover crafts will once again have a purpose due to being more simple to engineer. Additionally, anti-gravity will be even more valuable to larger vessels, due to air-space maneuvers being much more difficult, and requiring more skilled piloting to do normally.
 
Continuing on, a better marketing image for the game, as well as an interest from the space ship engineering side of the community, would most likely arise from this. Due to the changes in how well crafted ships have to be, each ship will have a higher chance of looking more believable, and help with both marketing of the game (in luring people interested in aerospace engineering), and of course immersion. 
 
Lastly, major changes to ship progression within the game. This is because it would make each ship's thought toward the engineering side more pronounced, will make the progress slower, and for a lot of people more interesting and fun. Making your first proper plane will be an accomplishment, and if done right very rewarding (achievement tree for this stuff maybe?).
 
On a side note, similar problems that this change would highlight would be the flight model, which doesn't work very well for omni-directional thrusters, due to not having automatic dampening against gravity (see most other space piloting games, one of the best examples would be the flight model of Elite Dangerous for this matter imo).
 
What I would like to see specifically change to how wings and aerodynamics works is very similar to how Kerbal Space Program (and actual aero physics work). Firstly, surface area for not only drag purposes, but also rotational purposes would be appreciated.
 
The way this would work, is that you have pre-baked model wings to work with (of which are literally just props), but additionally have "ailerons", or a more simple name "control surfaces", of which are controlled using yaw/pitch/roll depending on how they are set, and help control your vessel.
 
While of course on their own, these mechanics don't really make sense in the current model, as aerodynamics don't exist (past drag), adding proper use for the cross sections of ships, as well as the aforementioned player-built wings, and pre-baked control surfaces, of which depending on how they are animated (extended, retracted, inverted extended) will apply to the cross section differently, would have 1 major effect. Due to the sudden change in the "air current" on one side compared to the other in terms of center of mass, and the surfaces seen (such as a control surface extended), would rotate the craft accordingly.
 
Going "too fast", and turning suddenly would create a sudden increase in lots of drag, of which of course would in turn rotate the ship, as well as not only (potentially) damage elements (due to drag and high G forces), but also decelerate the ship, causing it to fall, and also cause the player to lose control of the vessel, if they are not skilled enough. High stakes KSP, OUCH!
 
The final change that this would make is changes to air brakes, to become directional. First, I must preface this as "only if omni-directional thrust flight model is fixed". If it is not, this feature will make the game too difficult to actually brake properly not in a plane.
Since by themselves, air brakes only increase the amount of surface area of the plane, proper placement would be necessary to make them functional. The proper mechanic here would be more that they extend and retract, and the drag mechanic does the rest. Of course, their "goodness" is still given in a different quantity (surface area when extended) as a stat.
 
When piloting a plane, a player will have to use a combination of both braking properly to not decelerate too much to drop out of the sky, while also using drag of the wings to "skip in the air" (pull up, dive, repeat), to both glide with efficiency, as well as land.
Good piloting will of course be required with this feature. Did I mention that already?
 
The final change I'd make is indirect with the topic of aerodynamics, but more simply to do with space brakes. Since air brakes require more knowledge to use, a similar amount of thought should be put forward to make space brakes omni-directional, and apply thrust only where they are facing, of course the angled ones would also provide braking force to those directions as well.
 
Conclusion
While of course this post is 2 pronged, the first being the player jetpacks, the second being construct engineering, I felt that the topics combined in a way that they merited being in the same post. I hope that you enjoyed reading the post, as much as you hopefully want these feature changes in the game.

This game is affected by text processing problems that were solved in the 90s.
 
but since the UI has undergone zero meaningful change since they apparently let the interns loose on it a year or so back and made everything take up twice as much space and require twice as many clicks, I’m not going to hold my breath for any improvements to be made. 
 
They really need to rework the UI from the ground up, it’s a hodgepodge of legacy code, some that clearly dates back to the very first “release!”
 
 

@NQ . A few small tips on UI that will lower aggravation:
    1.    If you have a button that is precisely for one thing and not easy to get to then you don't need a second prompt asking people if they really meant to click on it. For example the Exit VR button.
    2.   All fields for entering data should preferably select all text currently in the field, not start at the end of it. Or just blank.  This is true especially for the fight on entering currency which I can't believe is still an issue.
   3.   No Horizontal scroll bars like on Achievements screen.
   4.   Keep the part the user needs most as center of attention and don't use up half the form for some large Icon.  It may look pretty the first time, but is very annoying when it stays in the way of getting things done.

We got this instead

.

First off, Kudos for acknowledging the absolute mess that is crash to desktop issues, along with telling people to not use VR due to bugs. Though, it wasn't communicated very well and has caused major issues because of it- still kudos for trying to communicate with the community better vs staying silent.

Myself and others have been "Bugged Out", no skills seam to be applying now after using a VR station and crashing to desktop. Can't use industry. Can't mine efficiently. Can't deploy my ships with boosted skills.  No mention of this on the login screen, or in game- and the announcement didn't get published to all the discords mirroring announcements- so few people saw it. 

Crash to Desktop issue announcement? Awesome, thank you NQ for acknowledging it- though it's hidden away in an announcement within discord. and in discord discussion people were told by an employee to "not fly their ships if they're at risk of crashing", aka- stop playing in general discussion. 

NovaQuark should not have to rely on Discord(which not all players use!) to push announcements to the game- and the in game pop-up misses a ton of people as if you're not logged in when it's sent you wont see it..... Literally, a simple pop-up/notification at the login screen could have saved a lot of heartache this week.

If it wasn't for these serious, show stopping, game breaking problems- 0.26 would have been a solid update with content and quality of life improvements(better FPS, interface improvements, and little baby asteroids that took almost zero player input from PTS). I hope the dev & GM team, and most likely managment that pushed the dev team to go live- learns from this. Also- get a couple more GM's for the weekends when the player base is most active like any other MMO with a subscription model has.... and a pony, yes- I want a pony too... well I mean pets were promised in the kick-starter after-all...  Who am I kidding? I'd just settle with a game that works, and I can play.

This is definitely an accurate description of how I feel. I can't even remember the number of times I have had to spend a long time repairing my Ships. It's insane.

Additional issues:
-Transparent Screens not working (it's just white)
-Detection Zones not working (doesn't turn on my Programming Boards)

Please do something to fix these issues.

When game first launch beta to public I was a bit more forgiving during the first couple weeks but now there should be no excuses. Game has been out for almost a year and software quality has continued to decline as you rush patches out the door with little focus on QA.
 
Things that cause game to crash :
 - Landing near market
 - Landing near base
 - Landing.....
 - Flying over buildings
 - Opening inventory
 - Opening market/remote market
 - Opening crafting menu
 - Opening map
 - Walking around?????
 - ...and breathing
 
I'm sure there are countless other things i forgot to mention but this is an absolute embarrassment NQ's part. Org members have been telling me they won't bother even playing due to all the game crashes.
 

I'm here to share my voice and opinion.
 
NQ is dastardly and shameful for your responses. How dare you penalize other players and ban them for taking advantage of your blunderous buffonery. It's YOUR fault. What the hell?
 
"So the situation with the market is clearly covered by section 5.2 of the EULA: “You must refrain from engaging in any behaviour that could harm NOVAQUARK’s image and/or reputation, that could harm one or more other Users or have a negative impact on their gaming experience, or that is detrimental to the proper functioning of the Game.”"

Bullshit, you ruined your own image and reputation by screwing up and not having quality assurance and quality control and good tools. Your response is childish, and my stomach churns over this pretentious behavior given the sad state of your game currently masquerading as a beta which is really an alpha. How dare I support such a goofy group of greenhorn game devs who act like this.

NQ, you screwed up big time, and your response is indignant and telling of your emotional intelligence as an organization. Clearly you do not care for your customers or the money and assistance they bring in.
 
"Let us be clear, we will not tolerate this kind of behaviour during any phase of the development of Dual Universe."
 
Get good at game development. Your team doesn't play your own game, and you clearly don't have good development tools, and it shows.
 
"Now, this does obviously not apply to NQ-built constructs, which are designed to serve a specific purpose in the game."

Oh jesus christ on sale. lol Childish response from an administrative perspective. Banning players for doing things you allowed in game? Why don't you admin it back the way it's supposed to be? Or did you not think of that because you've never developed a game before? I'd think this and CS would have been top of mind for a game like yours.
 
Whining and complaining about how "bugs take manpower to fix" Yeah no shit, go fix them. It's your problem not ours. It's your fault, not ours.

You allowed this to happen. It's your fault. I do not approve of this action, and it's a real shame that you, NQ, acted and responded like this.

I'm here to share my voice and opinion.
 
NQ is dastardly and shameful for your responses. How dare you penalize other players and ban them for taking advantage of your blunderous buffonery. It's YOUR fault. What the hell?
 
"So the situation with the market is clearly covered by section 5.2 of the EULA: “You must refrain from engaging in any behaviour that could harm NOVAQUARK’s image and/or reputation, that could harm one or more other Users or have a negative impact on their gaming experience, or that is detrimental to the proper functioning of the Game.”"

Bullshit, you ruined your own image and reputation by screwing up and not having quality assurance and quality control and good tools. Your response is childish, and my stomach churns over this pretentious behavior given the sad state of your game currently masquerading as a beta which is really an alpha. How dare I support such a goofy group of greenhorn game devs who act like this.

NQ, you screwed up big time, and your response is indignant and telling of your emotional intelligence as an organization. Clearly you do not care for your customers or the money and assistance they bring in.
 
"Let us be clear, we will not tolerate this kind of behaviour during any phase of the development of Dual Universe."
 
Get good at game development. Your team doesn't play your own game, and you clearly don't have good development tools, and it shows.
 
"Now, this does obviously not apply to NQ-built constructs, which are designed to serve a specific purpose in the game."

Oh jesus christ on sale. lol Childish response from an administrative perspective. Banning players for doing things you allowed in game? Why don't you admin it back the way it's supposed to be? Or did you not think of that because you've never developed a game before? I'd think this and CS would have been top of mind for a game like yours.
 
Whining and complaining about how "bugs take manpower to fix" Yeah no shit, go fix them. It's your problem not ours. It's your fault, not ours.

You allowed this to happen. It's your fault. I do not approve of this action, and it's a real shame that you, NQ, acted and responded like this.

I'm here to share my voice and opinion.
 
NQ is dastardly and shameful for your responses. How dare you penalize other players and ban them for taking advantage of your blunderous buffonery. It's YOUR fault. What the hell?
 
"So the situation with the market is clearly covered by section 5.2 of the EULA: “You must refrain from engaging in any behaviour that could harm NOVAQUARK’s image and/or reputation, that could harm one or more other Users or have a negative impact on their gaming experience, or that is detrimental to the proper functioning of the Game.”"

Bullshit, you ruined your own image and reputation by screwing up and not having quality assurance and quality control and good tools. Your response is childish, and my stomach churns over this pretentious behavior given the sad state of your game currently masquerading as a beta which is really an alpha. How dare I support such a goofy group of greenhorn game devs who act like this.

NQ, you screwed up big time, and your response is indignant and telling of your emotional intelligence as an organization. Clearly you do not care for your customers or the money and assistance they bring in.
 
"Let us be clear, we will not tolerate this kind of behaviour during any phase of the development of Dual Universe."
 
Get good at game development. Your team doesn't play your own game, and you clearly don't have good development tools, and it shows.
 
"Now, this does obviously not apply to NQ-built constructs, which are designed to serve a specific purpose in the game."

Oh jesus christ on sale. lol Childish response from an administrative perspective. Banning players for doing things you allowed in game? Why don't you admin it back the way it's supposed to be? Or did you not think of that because you've never developed a game before? I'd think this and CS would have been top of mind for a game like yours.
 
Whining and complaining about how "bugs take manpower to fix" Yeah no shit, go fix them. It's your problem not ours. It's your fault, not ours.

You allowed this to happen. It's your fault. I do not approve of this action, and it's a real shame that you, NQ, acted and responded like this.

I know, you should resign immediately. ;)

Excuse me? Are you saying no blueprints were made of those markets? 'Fixing' it should be as simple as deleting the old construct and replacing it. A task that would take a couple minutes, maximum, with the blueprints.
 
This is a reaction I would expect from children in a sandbox, not mature adults.
 
edit: Apparently the 'quick fix' is a reference to the market orders.
 
To which I have exactly one reply: What?

Market orders should be stored in the database and no removal of market constructs should EVER affect those.

Can we get a dislike button?

Beautifully said. What a genius example, and well written! Could never have said it better myself. Thanks.

Wow, you're charming(!)
 
Solo play doesn't mean living in a vaccuum or a bubble, most solo players are with friends or even within orgs.
I for one don't consider mining for X hours per day to sell to bots 'community engagement' - it feels more like court-ordered community service.
I'm a solo player, I practiced self-sufficiency, I built my own vanity projects, I'm also a member of a big org and contributed to theirs.
 
To me a sandbox game is one in which you get to build things. The ideas of elements and voxels in this game started people building weird and wonderful things. Most of the biggest, most eye-catching and wonderful ships at the last EXPO were the products of a single (deranged) mind - often solo players building something because they wanted the accomplishment of having built it - largely from their own work.
That's a sandbox to me and I guess I'm as guilty of them because I thought that was fun at the time. Now I can't do that anymore and it's not fun.
 
If you think a sandbox box is one in which most of the in-game currency is being spent on schematics from bots and most of the players time is spend grinding to sell to said bots and where every quanta spent on a bagged plant is a waste when it should instead be feeding the almighty advanced-pipe factory then I'll admit you've got a different definition of 'fun' than I do.
The patch may or may not have affected your avenues to fun in the game, but it's completely removed mine.

Probably the dumbest quote of the year. Tons of sandbox games, if not the majority of them are great for solo play.. and up until the patch this game was one of them...

Finally someone said it

The problem with blaming CPU bound on low FPS, is that with regard to DU the CPU is used to calculate voxels/stream server meshes. So there is a paradox here. Not being able to stream all the voxels in time (causing high CPU usage) should actually translate to less work for the GPU and higher fps. But this is clearly not happening in DU, and the effect we are seeing are typical for badly designed graphical systems that does not properly decouple CPU and GPU operations.

I present to you this carrot.

This is a carrot.

Now, several times, it has been inferred that what I actually presented was a potato.

I can assure you that a carrot was presented to one and all. Several people were successfuly able to recognise that it was in fact a carrot.

At the first instance of potato confusion, i presented a handy guide - a 101 to identify what a carrot is and what it means. SInce then, said carrot has repeatedly been referred to as  a potato.

Performance logging = carrot - Performance issues = potato.
 
The order in which instructions are carried out, and the degree = carrot  - The speed at which an end user can execute said instructions based on their hardware = potato.
 
My point = Carrot - The inference of 2 individuals as to what my point is = Potato

You don't have to like carrots - nobody asked you to, but I can assure of this:

This here carrot I showed you sure as f**k ain't a friggin potato.
 


As a simpler example:
 
Right now, if you walked in front of an automatic door, logic would dictate that the door should open for you. At present what's actually happening is that, the door opens, but only after several windows have opened and a desk lamp somewhere on 3rd has turned on. Nothing on my end is going to affect the door, the only thing affecting the door is the decisions made on how the door should operate when the door was placed.
 
What I am looking to discuss is whether or not anyone looked at the door when it was installed, tested it's function, watched the windows open and shut, watched the light  blink on and off on 3rd before the door finally opened and decided that they were OK with how that functioned and that it would be okay to charge people for use of the door.

That in turn would lead to discussion on why decide to charge for the door, when there are other free doors that just open and shut. What drove the decision to charge for a door that doesn't operate in a sensible manner? Was cashflow a pressing issue. Because if cashflow is a pressing issue at the point of putting a door in and you've still got a house to build, well - that's a bit of a concern isn't it.

Furthermore, if said door was 6 years on from its initial funding round and over 21 million has been raised across several rounds of funding for said doors, you'd be inclined to ask where the f**k the money went and why the f**k the windows are opening at random because that could be fixed for free.

I only say this because the door I made opens and closes. I took great pains to ensure it does and when I advertise, I will be taking further pains to ensure that what I offer is what I made when it comes to asking people to part with money. If it's not quite done when I ask for that money, that's fine - but I'll be required to disclose in my advertising that teh advert is not reflective of the current product.  90% of my development has been ensuring sh*t is kosher.

It's a beta. I don't care that it isn;t finished - per my commentary elsewhere.
 
I do care about dishonesty and a lack of transparency in the industry I want to be a part of, because it makes it so much more difficult for everyone in that industry when somebody knowingly sh*ts the bed.
 
 
...

To be honest, I think you're willfully ignorant - especially as others haven't had the difficulty grasping what you two haven't . The fact that I've unsubbed doesn't really impact any of the points I made.The appointment of more community staff and still no comment either way on the vast majority of technical topics is of relevance to me. If you want to pay, good for you, enjoy. Nobody is trying to ruin your fun. I'll be back at a later point once it's polished. It's not the first time anyone's joined a beta and decided - "nah".

There's 41 other voxel based projects that are live right now, there's several single server MMO's, there's several betas throughout this year alone that were released without charge with more content that didn't advertise what they weren't and there's far more community engagement from other developers.