Kezzle

Your observations and conclusions match mine. It extends to inventory state, too, and interactions between inventory state and "world" resources (pretty much "mining") are where the two sets of inconsistencies combine with most disruptive-to-gameplay effect. I found last night that if I started drilling through "rock" I'd get a "Missing parameter" message on the first 'dig' but it'd go away after that. I surmise that this error message comes up because the operation is interacting with my inventory to see whether it should collect the stuff that's being removed from the world, and it (sensibly) only checks that each time I hit LMB or the automine key. I could drill tunnels through rock all night with little problem. Most of the problems I had occurred when shifitng "stuff" from the world to my inventory, or vice-versa, in the case of repairing or refuelling. I don't know what you've seen about how NQ are using distributed cloud services to handle both the volume of compute and the issues of geographical spread, but my understanding is that the network based nature of the cloud and the way they're dividing up and even making local copies of the world to keep local pings-to-server low is going to have a much greater impact on the integrity of their meshed servers and 'master' databases than it normally would, and it wouldn't surprise me if their problems are a combination of "trying too hard to keep things centrally accounted for with millisecond precisions" and "the speed of light getting in the way".

And your evidence for this assertion?

I don't know if clicking your MMB does anything, but scrolling it definitely pushes it away or pulls it towards.

It'll be nerfed once all the bot buy orders are used up, then it'll be "true free market" conditions. Hopefully, that will mean Good Things, rather than the market being dominated by a few ultra-rich entities spending their time manipulating prices to their benefit and everyone else's detriment. And to the original point: before the 20th August, I (and my Org) were of the understanding that we'd be starting with literally nothing but a few quanta, the clothes we stood up in and some cool plans. Anyone who was here for the pew pew was going to have to hold their nose, pitch in and build the setting (you know, like the whole tagline of the game said) to the point where pew pew was possible, or sit on the sidelines, logging in to update their Talent queue, until their buddies/the free market needed their pewabilitiy. "You won't need to do [whatever]" could only ever be the case once the "civilisation" was more than people scraping the basics together. That was obvious. A question was asked about availability of stuff on a Moon. "When will..[stuff] be on the market there?" was asked. I would estimate that this will probably happen somewhere around the far side of never. It's a MOON. Nobody will build their industry there. The buying market won't be large enough for anyone to make a profit hauling there, with the risks (or expense of mitigating that risk) that will be involved once PVP becomes more widespread (or which are present even now, I think, for the moon in question, which lies in the PvP zone; can't be bothered to ferret about and check). Barbarians in the wastes don't get to buy stuff at markets, it's the reason they raid: to get the stuff they want. You want to buy stuff, go to the Markets that have stuff for sale. Don't expect the stuff to come to your rermote and isolated chosen base. Don't expect T2 and T3 items to be available for easy money at this stage. Build something T1 and go hunt haulers round the places people are actually working for a living. Then sell that stuff on the markets. Divert the intra-org traffic into the mainstream. Be a truly mercantile Robin Hood. Tears alone will not sustain your ammo bins.

And, since it bears emphasising any time: This is a true test (in oh so many ways), not the kind of beta that's really a free trial of something that's just being polished for final release. The server technologiy being used is bleeding edge, and there are a number of pillars of the "finished" game which aren't (and were never planned to be) implemented yet. I'd categorise it as an "Open, subscription-based Alpha", personally, but since in these days and ages, words mean what the writer means them to mean, it's been launched as a beta. And it does have some characteristics of a beta: it's properly checking how the thing actually scales in the face of being massively multiplayer with real people doing real in-game activities. Do some due diligence before spending your cash. Join the Discord, and lurk here to see what's actually going on. If you don't get the right feeling, don't spend your money. Or spend your money in full knowledge.

That's not a bad idea. A bit radical, perhaps, but maybe a good idea nonetheless.

You did read the part about how they're pushing the boundaries of what's possible on a server, before you signed up, didn't you? This server is the very opposite of "basic stuff".

To amplify: An XS ship can have an L radar. The same radar as an L ship. The XS ship can have L railguns. The same guns as an L ship. It's hard to squeeze it all into the package, but it can be done with a skilled shipwright and toons with placement bonuses. So the XS ship can lock the L ship out at the max range of the railguns. The L ship will have to wait til the XS ship is at 1/8 the range before it can lock the XS. If the XS ship has better acceleration it can keep the L ship in its targeting envelope while remaining out of the targeting envelope of the L ship, until they're bingo fuel or ammo and need to RTB. This is the "current meta", AIUI, for high end PvP. I hope to heck it changes, because it's really boring. I hope they do it right, because EWar has to be a factor in a technological warfighting scenario for it to remain plausible.

Resources need to be treated as fractions, since there are Talents which let your industry require less of a thing to produce a batch. Floating Point calculations aren't the killer they used to be for compute, and databases tend to be more strongly impacted by the number of data points held than by the data size of those entries. It won't have the impact you suspect. Some people have fun crunching the numbers to get things optimised "just right". Happens in all MMOs. Doesn't mean you have to, though.

Nice work. I won't benefit from it (AMD rig), but I hope someone does!

It was better last night (about when you were posting... maybe you got on later and experienced an improvement; maybe I was lucky). That's one of the legitimate aims of a classic beta (which we all know this isn't really, but it's part of the intent of releasing what they're calling a beta now): discovering and resolving problems that arise when you scale by orders of magnitude.

Who exactly are you to be able to judge that? Do you have insight we don't into the development issues that NQ are facing? It's your opinion, based on pretty much zero information. I would agree that "More than enough time has passed for JC Bailly to put a quick webcast together to explain what's going on, in line with NQ's touted transparency." But to assert that "enough" time has passed to fix a problem when you have NO IDEA what the problem actually entails or how to fix it, is the height of ignorant arrogance. You can legitimately say "It's taking an unacceptable amount of time, for me, and I'm unhappy." Or you can provide some sources. Including any necessary financial ones to say they could throw more money at the problem, if that's provably a solution. But you aren't going to be able to do that, are you?

Someone was saying it's an attempt to reduce the number of Industry operations, to reduce the load on the servers. Which seems plausible, at least. It's been half-assed, though, especially in the display of batch size (it created significant confusion for one of our industry builders last night, almost leading to wasted construction of machines), batch sizes and the minimum quantity of honeycomb. Having the produced-batch-size relate to the "generally used number of things" better would be a more efficient optimisation of server usage too, since there would be less need to keep track of irritating little tag-ends of unused batches, making the asset databases smaller.

Not necessarily. RenKhanHar was responding to the OP who wants a *limit* on the number of skills any one toon can have, so it wouldn't be possible to do everything, ever, let alone "right away". This would lead to even casuals like me wanting/needing to start additional toons, which would be a Bad Thing, in my book.

The members of my ORG on Discord, which includes Alpha backers, Alpha backer Beta key accounts and some beta subscribers, aren't clamouring much in Discord about being denied log on, except for the queue length, which is often understandable as everyone scrambles back on after a short server downtime. Loads of other problems, same as everyone else who actually gets in-game, but there definitely seems to be a population for whom "logging on at all" is a problem. Hopefully it's a population with a common denominator that can be identified and fixed.

That is kinda the point, yeah. Both those things, though the latter more so than the former, I feel. What's the response time of AWS autoscaling to an application needing more server provisioning? Looking at their blurb, it seems like it's pretty dynamic. Every player is carrying a bit of server capacity allocated to them, and the travel speeds will give time for additional server resource to be allocated to handle the exponentially increasing number of interactions as players get closer. I think that some buffer capacity would give enough notice for additional overcapacity to be brought online. I think that's a bit of a stretch. What they're shooting for is a pretty hard target that no one has hit before. I'd give it at least til the end of the month before calling it "ample", and would hope that before that time, CJ Bailly would be making some comment on the state of play. He should have been doing that regularly over this past week of Pending Operations; he's CEO, and shouldn't be getting his hands dirty in the guts of the code. I pick "a month in" to draw the line, because of the suggestion that people will be credited an additional month of play time, so it can go a month without resolution, without anyone having lost anything. That may be the case. At which point I lose my backer bet I hope it isn't, though. Those mass space battles would be Epic.

Edit: Oops. Misread the OP. Thought they were asking "when" we'd get round to explaining the reasons... Still, someone might find it useful, so I'll leave what I writed.[endedit] The servers are regularly taken down for maintenance, for short periods. They are also, frequently, at the moment, taken down to add patches to fix things, because... it's not going "as it should". These wrinkles are also causing the devs to shut the server mesh down just for recovery sometimes, too, so it doesn't just fall on its face ungracefully. There's a lot of downtime at this stage in the game's development, but much of it is to deal with the development that will make it so that the vast majority of the rest isn't necessary either. I'd give it another couple of weeks to see if we get any significant improvements; longer than that, and I'd be fearful that the meshing architecture can't scale in a distrubuted-enough way to credibly achieve the "one shard" goal with the current user level.

What's going on with this? Another ( ? less predictable, perhaps, cos it's a bug/exploit ? ) thing to shaft the "player led economy" pillar of gameplay? Has the issue been identified and fixed so it can't be repeated (til, obviously, the next bug)? Or are cheaters still busily squirreling away ill-gotten gains?

The reason they (NQ, in the person of CJ Baillly, the head honcho, IIRC) gave, in a video, somewhere, for requiring 3 months investment up front for the "Beta" was to put off those who would pay 7-10 bucks to come in, litter the place with abandoned constructs and then quit after a week. They wanted people who were prepared to stick it for the long haul, and felt that 20ish bucks was a good price point to set. I make no comment on the legitimacy or effectiveness of this approach, merely report what has been publicly released. There is, somewhere, a roadmap of the planned development. They were sticking to it quite well, for a sequence and going for Beta with pretty much the feature set they said they'd hit with. I suspect the problems with scaling that they're encountering will push the actual months out, but the sequence of additions probably isn't going to change much. At the moment, I would estimate that I'm getting more than 7 bucks' a week entertainment out of the game, but I also do not judge that someone starting out solo at this stage would get anything much more than frustration. This may go away soon (tm) if they can get a handle on the server issues; come back in a week

Those issues are always going to potentially be there in a game with the underlying architecture of DU. How frequently they occur is related to the number of people trying to play and the level of AWS that NQ has paid for. Ideally, they should be rare because there's enough AWS backing the game up. Obviously, they are anything but rare, so there's something wrong with either the load-per-user scaling predictions or the money supply for buying more AWS. If it just needed more AWS, and the money was there to buy more, the problems would have gone away. So it must be more complicated than that (or as simple as "it's probably never going to work under the current architecture"). The exact nature of the relationship between those two factors has been discovered to be different to what DU thought it was (or DU didn't/can't throw enough cash at AWS to get the needed-predicted level of service to support the client base). Determining the true hurdles to scaling up in this fashion is an entirely legitimate aim of a Beta Test, and they're doing a lot of "discovering". Nothing they've done by way of a fix, so far, seems to have improved things very much, but the problems are about how the game deals gracefully with scaling, and scaling is a legit BetaTest subject. I would counter that it is whatever it is, and labels these days are open to wide interpretation, so caveat emptor. I completely agree with all of that. It "should" never have been released as a "Beta". There's another pillar of the player-based economy that's missing: the ability to advertise for services. Right now, a hauler, say, has to find their customers by either Discord chat or trolling round all the locals seeing if they need hundreds of kL of stuff shipping somewhere. Same with people offering protection against random PvPers. Good. You were meant to. But still, the big things that are stopping people playing the game as they wish remain in the realm of "expected" (though extreme) beta test issues. And maybe the promise of free game time will come to pass, and isn't some marketing guy going off at half-cock. I hope so, for the sake of the new subscribers; doesn't affect Alpha backers.

Yeah, just mash those voxels together. Use the Maneuver tool for fine adjustment...

At the moment you're stuck with the two core situation. To combine them you'd need to get a core the next size up, and move everything across from your two old cores to your new larger core. It would be nice to be able to "extend" into an adjacently-placed core, but I'm pretty sure that would be impossibly hard work for the game's underlying architecture.

Whether the input or output containers are declared as your "linked container" will have absolutely no effect whatsoever on the ability of your Assembler to extract or deposit materials/parts/elements from or into them. You need a Container big enough to hold the materials the Assmbler needs, and another, different Container (it is not allowed to have the output of a machine be the same Container as its input). Each Container needs to be linked to the Assembler (in the right direction) in Build Mode. You can always unlink a Container, even from running machinery; the machine will stop when it tries to use that container, either for input or output. Press B to go into Build mode, once you have the three elements needed (2 Containers and the Assembler). Use the Link tool. Its icon looks like some links of chain; it defaults to 6, I believe, on your toolbar. You may see purple lines with arrows going between the elements; these are the links between the elements. If the environment is crowded, it can be hard to see the links, and where they go. If you hover your mouse over any lines you can see, you'll get labels popping up saying which elements the link joins, and which is in and which is out. Holding the ALT key and hovering over a line will turn that line red; clicking the line at this point will delete it. If you can't see any links they may not have been made. To make a link, click on the element you want to be the origin, then click on the element you want to supply. Valid elements for you to link to will highlight in green when you hover over them having clicked your origin. They'll quickly go red once you do click, but that's because they're now ineligible to be linked to. If you just want to look, use the "Move Element" tool (defaults to 9) to shift any obscuring elements out of the way. Hover the mouse (don't click!!!) over the thing you want to move (it'll highlight yellow), then press an arrow key (any arrow key). The Element will glow white-blue. Now you can use the arrow keys to move the element around, and hold T to use the mousewheel to move the element in the third axis. Hold R and the mousewheel to rotate it. If it can't be placed where you've moved it to, it will turn red. When you're happy with where it is, click the element again. If you think you've messed up, just press 9 again, to stop using the (any) Move Element tool and the Element will go back where it started. Move the element you're concerned with out into some free space, so you can see all round it. Then switch back to the Linking tool and you should be able to see any links that the Element has. In your case you should probably work along the line. In Build mode, using the Link tool, Click on your input Container Hover over your Assembler; it should highlight in green. If it doesn't, it's either got as many input links as it can handle already. Click on your Assembler. It will flash to red, then green again. This will have established the input link. You can look in the Assembler "Production" tab to see what Containers are linked (bottom left of the pane). To link to your output Container, click your Assembler again; Hover over your output Container. Again it should turn green. Click the Container. It should go red, then green again. Don't fret if the flashing red then green doesn't happen; that might go away when the servers are a bit speedier. As I mentioned above, you can see from the Assembler what Containers are linked to it. Input (up to 7) is on the bottom left of the Production tab. Output is bottom right. You can also see what materials relevant to the job at hand are in the Input and Output Containers, from the Container tab in that pane. There's a button to switch between looking at the In and the Out.

It's worth bearing in mind that the current combat model is a first iteration. The roadmap has a second version as one of the next things for them to get sorted, before CvC and AvA combat, even, IIRC. Hopefully, that version will have more restrictions (by making things bigger, probably) on targeting radars, and have room for a rich EWar environment, and that the whole will give every ship size a role in a brawl. At the moment, tracking and evasion are probably way out of whack: there's no way (short of dumb luck on a vanishingly small probability) a railgun at 100+km should be able to hit an XS core with 8-plus Gs of acceleration; it just won't be where the railgun was aiming by the time the rounds arrive, since its volume of potential maneuver would be so large as to make prediction near-impossible. But then, there's a lot of ship design that's going to go out the window when the placeholders are junked. Gold and Marble for armour? Not commonly employed in any setting with pretensions of reality, and DU is desperately trying to be realistic as far as is possible, with newtonian physics in space and requiring radars and controls as well as guns. Lots of work to be done by NQ and once that's done, lots more work to be done by the shipwrights and test pilots. It's also worth pointing out that littler non-railguns are just as effective against overmatched targets. But at the moment jaeocordeiro is correct to at least some degree: smaller cores are better for actual fighting.

It's a paid beta. Simples. The big problems they are hitting now are precisely what a classic beta hopes to discover: issues based around scaling the number of real concurrent users, whether with infrastructure or compatibility with "uncommon" client hardware configurations. And by that measure, this is an insanely successful Beta; just look at the problems it's unearthing! Not that it's a "classic" beta; there are still several significant game pillars which are non-existent, including Avatar to Avatar combat, and Construct v Construct in Atmosphere. But those weren't scheduled to be in their Beta; they launched to Beta with the major features they planned to, per their roadmap of last December. And if 20 bucks meant that much to someone, perhaps they should have checked what features the game had before they forked out.