Ammiziva

HUNT FOR THE GOLDEN GOOBER

Upon the briny, vast and deep,
The Golden Goober’s secrets sleep,
"All that glitters is gold," they say,
Let’s embark on this treasure hunt today.

Pirates scheme, their hearts aflame,
A cat in gold glitters more, a game!
With cutlass honed and wind-filled sails,
We’ll chase our dreams, catch the tales.

The universe is vast, but we won’t fret,
For we’ve got courage, you can bet.
To find this treasure, we won’t delay,
In this grand adventure, we’ll make our way.

Hunt them down, both near and far,
Betwixt a planet or a shooting star.
With laughter and joy, we’ll persist,
In the Golden Goober’s hunt, we enlist!
 
 
💬Stay tuned for the first clues that will appear next week! 🔍🕵️‍♂️🕵️‍♀️

Greetings Noveans, there is an important part of our Athena update that we have not discussed yet: our new First Time User Experience (FTUE) tutorial. Let’s remedy this without further ado!
 
Dual Universe’s FTUE has been drastically improved upon to provide players with an easier to understand, more concise and overall better introduction to the game.
 
Here are the details about what the new FTUE includes:
 
SAFE MOONS

As many of you know, we provide every player with a Safe Moon territory. Safe Moons are planets placed in a Safe Zone of space, where no PvP actions are allowed. In addition to being PvP-safe, the territories on these Safe Moons are permanent, which means once you have claimed such a territory, you have a persistent residence in the solar system. The Safe Moons are also excluded from Upkeep Costs.which we believe are a crucial aspect for a player’s peace of mind, should they need to take a break from Dual Universe at any time.
 
As the game continues to expand and more Noveans join the adventure, we added a brand new planet: Haven. It is one of the Safe Moons of Alioth, the other one being the well known Sanctuary. With this update, new players will now land directly on the moon called Haven, which is designed specifically to be friendly for new players: it has three main rings of land, each of which present with different environments, as well as no bodies of water. Haven has a total of six biomes, and 20 new markets - including 10 districts that connect Haven to both Alioth and Sanctuary thanks to a shuttle system that players can take freely. No matter where players find themselves, they can now easily visit their fellow Noveans!
 
Haven
 
Shuttle Station
 
STARTING THE FTUE
A big change in the new FTUE is that players will begin their journey by landing on Haven. Once they complete their character customization, they will then be required to select their starting territory. The new players will then find themselves in a lander directly over their selected territory. It will automatically be claimed by the player and Aphelia will guide them through the rest of the FTUE.
 
Players will also choose an Outpost to deploy on the planet as part of the introduction to the game. Outposts are small bases that allow players to try their hand in Dual Universe’s basic features. They are equipped with a Resurrection Node, a VR Station and a Basic Mining Unit S (small) to provide them with a smoother start. Aphelia will direct players to the location of these elements in each Outpost, and explain their purpose.
 
There are ten different outposts to choose from. Which one players choose is purely a reflection of their design preferences. For example, they may wish to go for a new settlement aesthetic and choose the Station Outpost. On the other hand, the Pilot Outpost provides players with a runway for an aviation environment. Don’t forget the Tri Outpost with how it brings a sci-fi feel as it elevates just off the ground!
 
 
Station Outpost
 
Tri Outpost
 
After the quick introduction is over and players have explored their Outpost, they are then free to do what they like. Players can find suggestions of next steps using the Outpost’s ‘Objectives screen’, use the VR Station for advanced tutorials, expand their Outpost constructs or venture out into the universe with an organization or as a lone wolf.
 
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With the fundamentals learned and the introduction complete, players will now have what they need to begin their Dual Universe journey. What will they create? Which organization will they join? The tools are in your inventory Noveans, what will you choose?
 
Your feedback on the new and improved FTUE is invaluable so that we can welcome many new players to our game and improve Dual Universe. Please help us make this the best experience possible for everyone by providing your feedback here!
 

*cough* Utopia Station *cough*

edit: For reference, Utopia Station is about 1SU from the centre of the safezone. We've been there for over a year. It would have been great if this was a player element that could be attached to existing, long-standing, trade outposts.

PART TWO: UNDER THE HOOD 

In our previous blog, we spoke about improvements we’re making to our processes in order to get more efficient use of our resources and deliver the best game possible. Today, we’re taking a look at operation costs and how we’re working to make improvements in that area, too. 

THE COST OF DOING BUSINESS 
The server and database architecture behind Dual Universe is new and quite complex. As we had about the game itself,  we had made assumptions about how much running a game like DU was going to cost in various areas. What we found was that our estimations proved to be far too conservative. We had to confront the actual cost of scaling up operating costs for a larger, global player base. And that’s okay. We have a plan. 
 
After reevaluation, we determined that some of our design decisions have had a major impact on our operational costs (i.e. what it costs to run the servers). In particular, databases are a major part of these costs. For example, because the world can be entirely edited and every edit needs to be stored in a database then communicated between the server and the clients, it eats a lot of our I/O allocations, which in turn increases our database costs. 
 
THE IMPACT ON UPDATES
The consequence is that, in the upcoming months, we will be rolling out significant backend improvements in order to optimize these operational costs. We made the conscious decision to keep pricing low in order to make the game more accessible for people who want to play, but that means that we need to keep operational costs in check. Developing these optimizations is time-consuming, but it is fundamental if we want to have a viable game as the playerbase continues to grow. 
 
It’s important to make players aware of this because some of our upcoming releases may not seem like much to you. While they won’t appear to include much in the way of new features, they will be updates to deploy these fundamental under-the-hood changes. For instance, the upcoming 0.25 release will be primarily focused on introducing a “game-changing” incremental storage mechanism for edits to the game world that will have a major positive impact on our database costs. The good news is that we think that some of these modifications will improve performance for the players.
 
Speaking of performance: that’s another area where we’ve been doing a lot of work, using the in-game telemetry to optimize areas where performance was dropping. There are several projects in the works to address performance. Although these may not seem particularly sexy when you read about them in the patch notes, the difference in how much better the game runs and feels while you’re playing should convince you it was worth the time and effort we spent on them. 
 
One example is the in-game screens. They ended up being quite popular among players, but the use of HTML for screen customization has proven to be quite a performance bottleneck in areas where there are a lot of screens. We recently started testing a new system using simple Lua draw commands instead of HTML to achieve the goal of screen customization. This change should seriously alleviate performance issues in areas with a lot of screens while providing the added benefit of unifying customization languages in a more user-friendly way.
 
There are other optimizations like this in our pipeline, and they will be presented in due time. 

MORE IN STORE
Tomorrow, in the third and final part of this series, we’ll talk about DU gameplay, and the challenges of maintaining a delicate balance between staying true to the original vision while taking player feedback into consideration. 
 
Discuss today's blog here!