Kezzle

Creative mode? No way, not ever.
 
But not having a design mode is pure nonsense.
 
Don't they have CAD, in this world of magic nanotech and teleportation/compute-enough-to-image-and-store-a-working-human-being? Or even SketchUp?
 
Boeing don't have a hangar where they jam parts together until something works. Space Agencies don't just stack rocket parts together until they get a combo they like the look of. You don't have to have all the lego pieces in your box before you start designing.
 
Experienced DU shipwrights have a good handle on the sizes and shapes and capabilities of the elements because they learned in creative mode. By which I mean, they got free, or effectively free, access to every element on the market for a lonnnnng time. Good luck finding an ORG that'll take a newbie and hand them a library of multiple copies of every element to futz around and learn DU functional design with.
 
Having an environment which permits blueprints to be created from any element can't be bad for the game (done right). The bloops still have to be resourced and then tested for pseudo-world effectiveness before they have any material impact on anyone else. A blueprint alone is pretty useless.
 
However, I will not vote for "creative mode", because that is nonsense for different reasons, in the idiom of DU. "Creative mode" implies, it seems to me, almost a copy of the pseudo-reality, in which the "creative" constructs could be deployed and enjoyed. That's 100% counter to the raison d'etre of DU, which is to get us all in the same space using our constructs.  While the "Don't they have simulators in this world of magic nanotech and compute power....." argument applies if you're looking for plausibility, I think that's the boundary where the principles behind the concept of the game can be allowed to override verisimilitude.
 
No, a design mode would be purely an interface for bringing together elements and manipulating voxels in an offline, static, largely non-interactive (with the construct) space. It would be a single player environment, and could readily be run locally rather than occupying server and network resources. It would just allow viewing of elements and voxels, their insertion into and orientation within build boxes, linking and interacting with switches and such. It would provide nominal numerical data about the construct a la build helper box. It could have a parameterised skill list so you could see what levels of skill were required to make links work and how they'd affect the construct's calculated characteristics. It would include the LUA hooks so people can design cockpit interfaces and complex element interactivity. You would not be able to climb in the thing and take it for a spin. It would not grant achievements in Builder. At best you'd be able to export a BP, but even if you just had to remember what you did, it'd have a useful place.
 
If blueprints with no bits are useless, what's the point of reaching for the verisimilitude of a design mode? As I see it there are a few advantages:
Secrecy - your shipwrights will no longer have to have a closed hangar to keep their projects safe from prying eyes. Tidiness - you won't have in-design ships cluttering up your base. You wouldn't have abominations like my industry structure being a "work in progress" for weeks and weeks as I get distracted/need to mine the resources to complete; it'd at least look like a real building rather than a bunch of machines and containers hanging in thin air. Appeal - people who are more interested in design than other things will have a slot in the game which they can pursue. And if they want their spiffy designs to be built they'll need to interact inside the game and get the bloops sold. Many designers want to see how their ideas perform in the real world; that's where they get their kicks, and those are the designers we want to attract to the game, rather than those who just want to make things for their own satisfaction. Reduced server load - if it's a locally-hosted tool, the server doesn't have to support as many constructs, since most of the ones in the design phase will be offline. Plausibility - CAD for DU. It makes sense. Speed - design would be much faster. Aspiration - if you've got a design that needs a certain level of resourcing, there's a push to get out there and get the resources in that isn't there if you're just noodling that design around as a "might fit together" concept in your head. Heck, you could even have it not produce blueprints, if you wanted to retain the aesthetic of structure skeletons rising like the bones of antediluvian gargantua as the first one is put together.
 
Much of this could be achieved by simply releasing some assets in a common design tool format. That might even bring people into the game, if they find a bunch of DU bits for SketchUp, say, throw a design together and want to see it built. That probably wouldn't cover some of the in-game limitations on design, and I don't think could automate construct attribute calculations like thrust. Could probably do mass though.

EvE's PvE is terrible. And is effectively a springboard for the proper game out in 0.0. It's also instanced, for the most part, not open-world.

Or they ran a bunch of competitions and contests and got the most competitive people as the winners. Or it was a conspiracy to ship all the sociopaths out to a new world: there was no imminent extinction event and that's how humanity achieved a peaceful society on Earth.
 
The lore behind the game is as holey as my granny's crocheted antimacassars. We have nanotech, but no Internet. We can teleport solid matter, and levitate potentially millions of ton of spaceship with our suit but there are no tractor/pressor beams on spaceships or long distance teleport pads. There exists a scanning and recording mechanism sufficiently precise to be able to send a spec to a fabricator that is capable of printing a new body, its mind, memory and personalities in the space of a few seconds. But it's impossible to get a lock on to a quarter kilometer ship more than 160km away. A territory unit can stop anyone digging the ground for half a click round it, but ships don't have protective shields.
 
Gold makes good armour.
 
Don't lean on the lore. It will fall over.

Or perhaps you should both wait and see, from the livestream the other day JC REITERATED that pvp will favour the defenders and that it will be difficult to attack planet territories, he also made it clear that there will be a LOT of bonuses for owning a lot of tiles in the same location, suggesting that interior tiles of a large claimed areas would even be totally immune from attack unless exterior tiles are defeated first, showing AGAIN that they are looking for planetary pvp to be more than just bullshit offline raiding that you see in 'survival game', much more considered.  Pretty clear to me that they want to give us all the tools we need to defend ourselves, or at least those of us who are working together to build civilisation.  All those solos, running off to hide in the hills to be 'self sufficient' yeah they are pretty screwed lol.

Or they ran a bunch of competitions and contests and got the most competitive people as the winners. Or it was a conspiracy to ship all the sociopaths out to a new world: there was no imminent extinction event and that's how humanity achieved a peaceful society on Earth.
 
The lore behind the game is as holey as my granny's crocheted antimacassars. We have nanotech, but no Internet. We can teleport solid matter, and levitate potentially millions of ton of spaceship with our suit but there are no tractor/pressor beams on spaceships or long distance teleport pads. There exists a scanning and recording mechanism sufficiently precise to be able to send a spec to a fabricator that is capable of printing a new body, its mind, memory and personalities in the space of a few seconds. But it's impossible to get a lock on to a quarter kilometer ship more than 160km away. A territory unit can stop anyone digging the ground for half a click round it, but ships don't have protective shields.
 
Gold makes good armour.
 
Don't lean on the lore. It will fall over.

Yes, and this game is focused more on those people than...
...those.
Yes. With conditions. Pervasive free-for-all PvP is always going to be a thing. It's always been advertised as being a thing. That isn't going to change, I'm confident of that. There will be places that are generally free from disturbance. Until player-run enforcement agencies are patrolling in deterrent strength, though, space won't be one of them.
You can be free of ganks by several means.
 
The easiest is to never enter PvP space. Nothing anyone needs is currently unavailable in safe space. All the minerals exist on the celestial bodies currently in safe space, so anything you want can be made there. Eventually, that will decrease to only the Sanctuary moon and maybe (part of) Alioth. At which point the Sanc Moons will be reliant on imports of things over T2, and even for large quantities of T1 and T2. But you can do most things with T1.
 
Evade it. People do traverse PvP space without getting ambushed and killed, and without having to fight.
 
Get help. Lots of people like to fight, and would happily escort a juicy target, in the hopes that someone tries to kill it. At which point, even if you do get killed, you've not been "ganked", you've simply failed to defend yourself, which will happen to everyone.
 
If you don't want to bother to do any of these things, this is not the game for you. The President, founder and Creative Director of Novaquark has very recently said that he wants people to be prepared when they enter PvP space. If you do enter PvP space how about not taking stuff you aren't mentally prepared to lose with you?  You aren't special, and you don't get special treatment. If you make yourself an easy mark, someone will bounce you if they get the opportunity. It's not about "only being happy if they are ganking others", there are plenty of raiders who do other stuff too. And most of them are as happy to fight other armed ships as they are to unload on a fat, slow, unarmed freighter. At least right now; that may change when conditions do.
 
But if you "don't like PvP" have a serious think about whether you're happy to play in this game's mechanic-moderated safe zones, which will become smaller and smaller as time goes on. But bear in mind that most people in a "real" civilisation don't have to engage in PvP, because they have soldiers and police to do that for them, and NQ are aiming to have Dual Universe be similar (probably more soldiers and police, as a proportion of the population, than the RW, cos there will be more hostile powers and predators as a proportion, too). Whether that goal can be realised remains to be seen.
 
 

Why do people buy into games that offer gameplay they do not want and then start complaining about it afterwards?
 
"This great new type of bread has a distinct vanilla flavour"
"Great, I will take two"
"Here you go"
"I don't like the vanilla flavour, can you make bread without it?"
 
If you do not want PVP be a part of games you play that's fine but do not buy in to games which clearly and openly show PVP is an integral part of said games.
 
If you feel PVP currently is not balanced that's different, be constructive and bring arguments to the table as well as idea on how it can be better for everyone.

Yes, and this game is focused more on those people than...
...those.
Yes. With conditions. Pervasive free-for-all PvP is always going to be a thing. It's always been advertised as being a thing. That isn't going to change, I'm confident of that. There will be places that are generally free from disturbance. Until player-run enforcement agencies are patrolling in deterrent strength, though, space won't be one of them.
You can be free of ganks by several means.
 
The easiest is to never enter PvP space. Nothing anyone needs is currently unavailable in safe space. All the minerals exist on the celestial bodies currently in safe space, so anything you want can be made there. Eventually, that will decrease to only the Sanctuary moon and maybe (part of) Alioth. At which point the Sanc Moons will be reliant on imports of things over T2, and even for large quantities of T1 and T2. But you can do most things with T1.
 
Evade it. People do traverse PvP space without getting ambushed and killed, and without having to fight.
 
Get help. Lots of people like to fight, and would happily escort a juicy target, in the hopes that someone tries to kill it. At which point, even if you do get killed, you've not been "ganked", you've simply failed to defend yourself, which will happen to everyone.
 
If you don't want to bother to do any of these things, this is not the game for you. The President, founder and Creative Director of Novaquark has very recently said that he wants people to be prepared when they enter PvP space. If you do enter PvP space how about not taking stuff you aren't mentally prepared to lose with you?  You aren't special, and you don't get special treatment. If you make yourself an easy mark, someone will bounce you if they get the opportunity. It's not about "only being happy if they are ganking others", there are plenty of raiders who do other stuff too. And most of them are as happy to fight other armed ships as they are to unload on a fat, slow, unarmed freighter. At least right now; that may change when conditions do.
 
But if you "don't like PvP" have a serious think about whether you're happy to play in this game's mechanic-moderated safe zones, which will become smaller and smaller as time goes on. But bear in mind that most people in a "real" civilisation don't have to engage in PvP, because they have soldiers and police to do that for them, and NQ are aiming to have Dual Universe be similar (probably more soldiers and police, as a proportion of the population, than the RW, cos there will be more hostile powers and predators as a proportion, too). Whether that goal can be realised remains to be seen.
 
 

This game desperately needs in-play comms systems. Even if it's just to pass coordinates around reliably without having to depend on "word of mouth" chat with pepole who're online.
 
And any voice comms really ought to provide the possibility of a heirarchical net, so that squadron can talk within squadron, and listen to wing; squadron leaders can talk and listen to wing, but only listen to command, etc.

Only it's really bad business to make promises to people and then break them. The people who backed this game, you know, the people who spent 60-plus dollars on something that might never have seen the light of day, did so, in very large part, on the back of the USPs of the game, one of which was pervasive, FFA PvP. They would be right to feel betrayed and quit the game entirely if that promise was reneged upon.
 
How hard is it to realise that the thing that sells this game is the vision of its producers, mostly in the person of JC Baillie? He wants to make a game that encourages societies to form and govern the space they putatively control. He doesn't want the game to do the governing for them. If PvP is restricted, there will be no need for society in the endless space that is non-PvP-enabled, since anyone will be able to have what they want off their own bat, eventually. Because if it's a half-and-half game, the new territory they open up has to have "room for non-PvP" too, else the non-PvPers will eventually exhaust the starting areas and legitimately (because they've been sold a non-PvP game) complain there's nothing in the game for them.
 
The fact that JC's vision encompasses more than just PvP is attractive to some, it would seem, but it's important to know that you can't have "part of" a vision. Everything is linked in JC's head, and if you try and take away a part of it, you might not get anything at all. That's the way visionaries are.
 
Right now, no one has been sold a non-PvP game. It's as obvious as the nose on Kenneth Williams' face that this game has a strong PvP focus, and only a very little bit of research would tell you that PvP will, in the fullness of time, be very nearly everywhere. If you've bought the game without knowing that, you only have yourself to blame. Or maybe you can blame NQ for making you buy the game before you could ask this question here and be set right as to NQ's vision, aims and goal.
 
I'd suggest that you'll find that less than half the people are happy with the outcome in any democracy.

The takeaway I got was that there would be no safezones "in space" at all enforced by game mechanics. I haven't seen any NQ statements about how space stations might be protected from drive-by random strafing, though, so there may be something for Space cores in the pipeline. But in the end, I get the impression that the 500km radius and the triplanetary no-fire-zone will be going. Maybe not at the same time, but gone they will be.
 
They could get rid of the triplanetary safe zone when they overhaul combat, but I think the close-in safe zones are here until we get Territory Warfare; they have to go at that point, or they entirely stop making sense. There could be an intermediate stage where combat can go all the way down to the core of the planet, outside of protected zones, but before the mechanism for attacking protected zones are finalised.
 
Definitions I'm trying to stick to:
Safe zones are zones where you will never be attacked. Game systems will always prevent direct PvP. Sanctuary Moons will always be safe zones.  Protected zones are areas where game systems protect you from PvP until specified game conditions apply or are removed. There are none of these at the moment; they may become relevant once Territory Warfare is implemented Defended zones are volumes where player action is declared to protect you from PvP. These are only as safe as the enforcement is effective.

Just a suggestion, and I hope that it might be considered for addition into the game at some point.
 
Containers and linking to industry. On the surface a pretty simple thing but once you start upscaling it can grow real complicated, real fast. (at least for my teeny tiny anyhows ?)
 
Though I guess going into a build with all the stuff needed and a solid plan is the best way to go at it, building a frame structure only, dumping down all the industry where you want, being able to clearly see where all the lines are going etc. But, if your new at it, or enlarging an industry in an already built structure, then you are going to have issues tracing those lines, not because you didn't name all your containers and industry (if you didn't then good luck sorting out that hot mess) but because more often than not you cant see where those links are going, a problem compounded more with multiple floors.
 
Anyhow, to the suggestion.......  In containers and industry, under the containers tab, wouldn't it great to be able to select Input / Output links via a dropdown searchable list of all the constructs linkable elements. Even better if we could see how many links are used/available on each one of those elements. And Even Better if we could also see to which elements they are currently (if any) linked to. 
 
Please, for the sake of my sanity and mental well being , make this happen ?
 

 
 
Cheers in advance ?
 

I just want to be able to click an element once when in link mode and instantly everything it is linked to also glows until I click something else. 
 
This feature (like many in this game) is infuriatingly underdeveloped, currently.  

You mentioned baffling game design decisions in another thread. Care to elucidate? It's not a very useful warning to newbies when they don't know what you consider "rational" or "sensible" game design decisions would be. And what appear to be "decisions" may just be "placeholders", and that may not be obvious to you, but could be explained if someone who was au fait with the developments could be aware of your perception.
 
There are plenty of strange things in the game, I'll grant you, but most of them you can see where NQ are coming from, at least. And "baffling design decisions" seems to be the stock-in-trade of MMOs in my recent experience.

I'll try...
You can hook grids together. Historically, there have been issues getting perfect alignment using player tools. But in theory I don't think there are any stoppers. You'd need a lot of people though, just to be able to have that many cores (each person and each organisation has a limit on the number of cores they can own). The death star is 160km in diameter, which would need a couple of trillion Large cores... Or you could just dig a big crater in Alioth and call it done... it's nearly as big...
Skills are hard caps on some things. You can only have so many cores, you can only use cores of a certain size, and these limits depend on having trained Talents. You can only attach so many of a given weapon to a particular seat, but enough of the right skill lets you attach more. So 'efficiency' in a broad sense, mostly, but those efficiencies do let you do things that you couldn't do before, like get some kinds of ship to orbit, just because your skills give enough of a boost to push a construct's "efficiency" over a line. Industry talents and crafting talents are a combination of time improvements and actual efficiency of use of materials. But if someone owns that L core ship and lets you pilot it, there's nothing stopping you hopping in the seat and flying the largest dynamic construct as soon as you leave the spawn chamber.
Generally the ship's core pops before crash damage ruins the voxels. Battle damage is more localised and can blow holes in your hull. At the moment, structures will not take collision damage because of the rules about how it's determined. Roughly speaking, the participant in the crash who was going fastest and taking least action to avoid the crash at the moment of the collision will take all the damage. Since static cores are by definition always the slowest in a collision, they will always take no damage. Personally, I don't see this changing, since I believe NQ don't want suicide collision to be a thing, ever.
AIUI, there's nothing below the T5 layer. Generally, there's T1 close to the surface, all kinds. Then any given planet has a few other possibilities in other tiers, and each tier is deeper than the last. The deepest is the T5 layer, and not all planets have even that. So a claim (by which i take it you mean a hex - the amount of land granted to you for your sole disposition by a Territory Unit) can, indeed be mined out. Sanctuary Moon claims get mined out quickly, because they as a rule have only T1 deposits (and I think these are "moon density" which is lower than "planet density" too) and one T2 node. They have infinite T1 and T2 on the surface as respawning rocks though. It's just not a very efficient use of time if you've other sources available. If you have made a claim off the Sanctuary moon, you can pick up your TCU after a week and move on. There's more than a single operators operator-week of ore in a given hex, though, so you won't be twiddling your thumbs waiting to be able to move on. And off the Sanctuary moon, you don't even need to have a claim on the land to mine it. Sancutary TUs are one-use, though, and necessary to mine the land they claim; neutral land is unmineable on the Sanctuary moon(s).
Every construct can have LUA script added to it, often in multiple places. Autopilots are common examples of code added to pilot seats. The possibilities are very broad, though there are some limitations. NQ are keen to avoid automation of some tasks: turrets for example, and so some hooks that would be useful for UI customisation are blocked from use by the construct custom LUA.
Hope that's answered some of your questions. I'm sure if I've misinterpreted something along the way, someone will correct me.

Wot? You mean like the marketplaces and Districts that existed by magic before a single player had left the Arkship? All of that is "something no player or org would be able to do in the time frame we are talking about."
 
Get a grip.

That's an interesting observation. It's great if it's not dependent on subpar performance by the railgun sled driver.
No. Just no. Gold is a soft metal with bloody awful mechanical properties. It's hitpoiints relative to steel are as ridiculous as the existence of structural material made out of Fluorine. Marble is equally redonculous. Much of the "material science" in the building system is unnecessarily nonsensical. Nonsense that doesn't even achieve the goal of introducing variety and progression. It needs addressing as a basis upon which to build a plausible industrial and combat system.

I fully agree that there should be T5 materials with great hit points. But call them "Unobtanium", "Collapsium", "Neutronium", or even "Handwavium". Or find some actual tough alloy names based on actual strong substances. Don't apply misfit labels of real IUPAC chemical elements. It's science fiction; use science as the basis, not random assumptions that density=resistance to damage.

That's an interesting observation. It's great if it's not dependent on subpar performance by the railgun sled driver.
No. Just no. Gold is a soft metal with bloody awful mechanical properties. It's hitpoiints relative to steel are as ridiculous as the existence of structural material made out of Fluorine. Marble is equally redonculous. Much of the "material science" in the building system is unnecessarily nonsensical. Nonsense that doesn't even achieve the goal of introducing variety and progression. It needs addressing as a basis upon which to build a plausible industrial and combat system.

I fully agree that there should be T5 materials with great hit points. But call them "Unobtanium", "Collapsium", "Neutronium", or even "Handwavium". Or find some actual tough alloy names based on actual strong substances. Don't apply misfit labels of real IUPAC chemical elements. It's science fiction; use science as the basis, not random assumptions that density=resistance to damage.

Nice one! Ta. Sorry for being paranoid.
 
Some good pics too!

I strongly object to arbitrary limitations. If they don't want L weapons on XS cores, make them not fit in an XS build box. Don't just say "That thing that looks like it should work? It doesn't. Why? Becoz." There are enough levers to pull to avoid the sort of arbitrary restrictions and develop a variety of approaches... For example, you could make L Railguns not fit in an XS box, but L cannon might be left able to fit; it's L railguns that are the problem, after all, not L Cannon. 
"See it. Kill it. Leave quickly." It's the fighter pilot's mantra now, and will probably remain so into the future.
 
Hopefully there will be room for (analogues of) Battleships and attack subs and ASW ships as well as torpedo boats. While the dynamic between small ships will be post-WW2 because of the accelerations involved, it'd be nice to have a WW2-style range of ship sizes rather than it being more an analogue of late C20th/early C21st naval conflict.

Okay, I fixed the link and added some samples to the post.

As a player who has spent and enjoyed many, many hours in EVE as a non combatant and travelling to the deepest and darkest regions of New Eden I feel I can safely say the issue here is not EVE nor DU, it is your expectation and perception of these games. 

As such yes, maybe these games are not for you, nothing wrong with that but you need to accept that and move on, not try to find or fix an issue that is not with the games, but with your expectations.

Nothing absolute, no. Members of the ORG I'm part of have "Base jumped" between planets. Takes a while, though. Dropping off ships in orbit is relatively common, especially if the inbound vessel is being piloted by a noob (I was that noob) and might take a while to ease down (or go "pop" on re-entry; choose your highest-probability risk  ).

As someone who has been engaging in PVP for the last week and a half, I can assure you that PVP is currently quite balanced.  I would even hazard that the "balance" is heavily tilted in favor of the party that want's to nope out of there.  Safe zones are quite large, and radars can spot potential adversaries at 2SU (400km).  The biggest issue the poor innocent non-PVP industrialist types have is that they have put no thought whatsoever into designing their ships with PVP in mind, and are consequently unable to meaningfully effect the outcome of a confrontation once the "PVPer" has initiated it.  I have killed quite a few cargo ships that were quite adequate for carrying cargo off of planets and through space to Alioth or wherever, (and a few that were barely even capable of that) but to a ship, they have been built out of the cheapest materials, with no consideration to armoring anything.  It is entirely possible to haul kilotons of ore from place to place in a transport ship, even through blockades, but you need to design your ship to handle it and at least have an escort through dangerous areas. 
tl;d if you want to do your peaceful industry on Sanctuary, and just make pretty ships, you have to pay to protect your incoming shipments.  The alternative is to develop a contract with an org that is willing to supply you with stuff from PVP areas.
 
If you are a solo player or small group, consider signing on with a larger org for protection.  Just about every big org needs miners and industrialists, and they will happily let you do that while they go off and fight bad guys for you.  Being in a big org in DU is not like other games.

Completely wrong sorry I run an org with 20+ people, NONE of them 'like' pvp in as far as they do not play the game for pvp, they do not look for pvp, they joined an industrial org, BUT 100% of those players ACCEPT that pvp is part of the game that they bought, and that it WILL EVENTUALLY be mainly player regulated.  All your comments are based on the ridiculous notion that it is only players that LOOK for pvp that want it is the game, this is fundamentally WRONG, sorry and I can put your in contact with 20+ org leaders who feel the same way. There are a lot of groups in this game who will be happy to defend the assets of those willing to work with them.

We are working together, alongside other orgs, to put in place measures to make sure when PvP EVENTUALLY (several months away) comes to the rest of the game we are prepared for it.  So should everyone else.

Noone is yet to address my point that you can do everything in the game currently with zero risk of pvp anyway (apart from fly in certain areas of space where there is nothing to do but pvp)