Kezzle

To which: If DU is a sideline/tech demonstrator, the pace of development isn't going to get any fater though, is it? They'll do jut enough to keep those 50 die-hards interested. Are you going to be happy with that?

I see people using video calling all the time, while they're just walking around. Total frellin' menace to navigation, they are. It also has practical uses, and I think the coming-of-age of Zoom/Teams/Discord/FB videocalling during COVID is more than a little significant. Tech companies are selling specialised devices for the purpose, too. Sure, there's a contrarian reaction, too, but to say "video calls are rarely used" is, I would contend, an overstatement that overlooks the broader applications of the technology.

Abboud: "Word salad." It's beyond stupid that they're even talking about a European ecosystem for "the Metaverse", which, if it's to do any of the things it's vaguely framed around doing, need global cooperation. Walled garden metaverses will be as useful as a walled garden Web would have been back in the '90s. It's this incoherence that makes the effort being expended ultimately a crying waste.

Obviously, there will always be exceptions. But that just makes it worse, since it puts people like yourself at a disadvantage that's not really deserved, while not achieving the aims of the OP in the first place.

That's sad. The current system, like so many DU features is a hurriedly-slapped-together placeholder that wasn't sufficiently well thought-through (whose idea was it to have Talents that make tracking the progress of industrial processors unnecessarily intensive?) and actually provides pretty much only lip service to the "objective" of specialisation.

Generally, in order to have specialisation, you need choices to have impacts beyond "you can't do [the other thing] yet." So specialising in one thing "should" make learning other things progressively more difficult. That way, once you go down one path, you've an incentive to go "all in" on that path. A well-designed system would make a "generalist" possible, but practically preclude them from being "the best" at very many, or any things at all. Such a system would require much more interesting results from skills though, than the current simplistic approach allows.

LOL. Sorry BBDarth. Not laughing at you. Sardonic laughter at the parlous state of support in the game. It's no better than we've come to expect from NQ.

It makes me also why they refused to have idle tunnels "collapse" after a while, especially on the territories which had been completely mined out. Should've been easy enough to code a check for active player constructs in the tunnels to cater for buried bases.

I realise I have a question about the wreck system: are they talking about "spawned" Wreck objects, or the tracking down of wrecked/abandoned player-constructs? I'd initially thought it was just the latter, but I suspect there wouldn't be nearly enough meat on that bone to merit a whole new game loop. Oh look, a new (since launch at least) game loop! Yay! I think the asteroid changes are the right direction for asteroids because the genre-concept of "belter" involves at least some speculative prospecting, and the whole "it gets made public knowledge" thing sucks dead donkey genitals anyway (productive asteroid coords should be valuable secrets, not automatically broadcast). Yes, it takes time. But at least for once in this game, it's an activity which "ought" to take time. So long as we're having to grub around for raw materials in this free matter-energy-matter conversion tech setting, it might as well feel like "proper" asteroid mining.

Ooo. Well, good. These look like improvements. And super-soon, after 1.1. I don't think anyone was expecting such things before Christmas! Edit: And 5 hours before anyone comments? Astonishing! First!

I wonder why. It doesn't seem to involve anything more "process heavy" than pre-levelling the terrain before deploying the static on it would. Maybe there's a peculiarity to the actual activity that requires too much data interchange.

Would be great, that, if "honeycomb" voxels clipped the mining sphere, whether you're depositing or digging. Don't think it's a thing, nor likely to be one, though. Particularly when the engine adds lag for every voxel you remove or add to the planetary surface; we have a nodig rule for round our org's bases, since it already takes long enough for structures to render in on approach.

Are you really thinking that T-war would come to existing groundspace? I'm sure you're right if all the currently safe planets suddenly became FFA PvP, but I think there are some things that make your pessimistic assessment unlikely to come to pass. Firstly, I don't think even NQ are boneheaded enough to turn FFA PvP on "just everywhere, all at once". Now, I know that's not a certainty, given some of the asinine design choices they have made, but it would be such a massive mistake that even NQ wouldn't make it. Maybe 90%. Perhaps that's over optimistic, but we're allowed to hope, right? Second, the vague appreciation of the "vision" behind T-War (such as it is, and as it has, patchily, been expressed) is that assaulting a ground location will be expensive in both time and "treasure". "Random destruction" isn't, if I'm reading the tea-leaves right, going to be very viable; the intent is that people will only initiate T-War for "good reason". Again, some optimism rides in this statement, and it does rely on NQ picking a "cost" that actually does deter the knuckle-draggers from random vandalism. So, maybe 50-50? Yah, like I said, some optimism Third (and perhaps the most optimistic ) it would be easy to design a T-War system that makes it easy for anyone to support a defender, so that attackers have to be seriously serious about attacking a location that would have "popular support" to remain un-flattened, again making "casual vandalism" a non-worry. But that definitely relies on NQ nous in MMOs, so is way short of "likely": 10%? So, on the whole, I'd guesstimate that there's about a 95-96% chance you needn't worry overmuch about T-war leading to mass destruction of the cultural capital of the Helios system "for the lulz". There would be collateral damage, from "legit" warfare over resources, but if you're not on such a territory, or in the way of forces fighting their way to such a territory, you'll "probably" be left alone. But all the above is moot, since T-War isn't going to happen before the studio runs out of money to keep the servers spinning.

Yep. The UI is a mess. Basic definitions and standards seem to have been eschewed, or architecture decisions have been made which make adherence to expected conventions impracticable. How we could ever have expected an outfit that can't manage to fix these basic problems to effectively implement the "one shard, space-to-ground" vision that was one of the USPs of DU?

Or just having "Enter" behave like everyone expects in dialog boxes...

Something I got showed the other day is that the scaling goes up to 5. Higher values increase the brightness/intensity of ths source. They don't seem to have any effect on range, but the light level is higher where the light has any effect at all.

I have to disagree about ore abundance. The market says it's abundant. There's more slopping about than people can/want to use, so the prices are rock bottom. Money (for schematics, mostly) is the bottleneck.

Currently DU is neither. Ore is abundant (still, in spite of the toning down of calibration mining), but money is not. Unfortunately, money sinks are deep and voracious (and don't eat ore), even though the faucet has been turned down to a dribble, from its initial firehose state. NQ don't seem to comprehend this; they don't comprehend that people don't necssarily have the time to consistently run missions. It's not some high level discussion about style of game; NQ don't understand what they have well enough (or if they do, they're laughing up their sleeves at us all as they ratchet up the social compliance experiment) to actually make changes that keep the game fun. There's abundant evidence of this over the last couple of years.

Or maybe they've got so much money sloshing around, they don't even need to think about alternative revenue streams... As if...

Aye. I suspect the issue is one of security. Can you imagine if someone discovered a way to dupe data items? It probably doesn't matter too much with the current range of data items, but when there's actual value involved...

Nor does anything in the patch notes, that I saw. That's actually, potentially, really annoying.

Likewise. I didn't sub for pets, back at the end of Alpha. I subbed in the hope of dropships and boarding actions (AvA) and TW... Looks very like I'd lose my bet except I also subbed for "fun with friends" and I got some of that... Pets were always quaternary attractions. I wish they'd focus on the big promises.

Poor comms from NQ? Shurely shum mishtake.

I want to know what "3d blogging" is... Other than some nonsensical buzzword.

I would have thought that would be covered by "griefing". Since it's in safespace, doing things that interfere with your play is not permitted, is it?