Atmosph3rik

All we have right now are things that are kind of like the idea of a Metaverse, in one or two ways at best. But technologically we're a long way from anything that fits all the criteria. The internet itself is probably closer to a Metaverse than anything else. You can do business there, meet people, customize your appearance. it's not all in VR, but you can access VR content there. You can also access DU through the internet, so in a way it's already part of a Metaverse.

Every game that has flight in it attempts to create a good balance between realism, fun and difficulty. Too difficult or realistic and most people won't enjoy it. Too easy and it's like No Mans Sky, where flight is basically a pretty cutscene where you get to steer a little. But NQ has to consider balancing building too. They gave us overpowered, light weight adjusters, that don't consume any fuel, to make the game a little less complicated, and more fun. But if they produced thrust, they would be too overpowered. The one unfortunate side effect is that we can't use the Adjusters to nudge a ship to the side, when we're parking. I think the keybindings for strafe left and right are, ALT+A and ALT+D. If you put an engine facing in that direction, and then run the autoconfigure, it will tag them automatically, so they should fire when you hit the key. No LUA needed. And engines facing up or down will fire with Spacebar and C. A ship with rocket boosters facing in all directions would be interesting to fly. But i think it's always going to be more efficient to point all your thrust in one direction, and use Adjusters and Brakes to do everything else, because they are so overpowered, and don't cost any fuel.

If they gave us thrusters that were more effective than the ones we have now, that were intended for lateral thrust, everyone would just use them for forward thrust too. You can add space engines facing in any direction on you ship though. But each one you add is more weight. When you're moving at a decent speed in space, the more thrust to weight you have, the faster you'll be able to change your momentum. So no matter how many engines you decide to add, you'll have a more maneuverable ship if you focus all that thrust in one direction, and then use the adjusters to point it where you need it.

There is a way of doing it with the smooth tool. But it makes the top/flat side of the shape funny, so if you paste it above itself, it distorts. If the arcs don't distort when you paste one above itself, then they were probably designed and built one voxel at a time. Now that we have the vertex precision tool you can take any curve or shape and drag all the vertices down to make it two dimensional. It would just take a bit of patience.

I was harvesting some rocks the other day, because they happened to be right next to my mining units, and i was thinking about why surface harvesting is so horrible, compared to abilities that i've used in other games. Holding down the left mouse button is the first problem. It would be a lot more pleasant if it had a casting time, like a spell in other MMOs, that you activate with a keyboard shortcut, and as long as you don't do anything else, it completes on its own. But the timing itself is what i noticed. When you are about to finish harvesting a rock, there's this pause, when the progress bar is completely full, that feels like it takes an eternity, and if you release the mouse button during that pause, you fail to harvest the rock, and you have to start over. I'm sure this has to do with latency or something. But they managed to compensate for it in MMOs like Everquest, when i was playing on a dialup connection. So there has to be a better way to do it here. This isn't an issue with regular mining, because you can choose to stop letting the sphere grow at any time, so if you jump the gun by a second, you just get a little bit less ore. And the pause while the server catches up happens after you completed the action, not before. This same problem affects the Repair Tool too, but it's not as bad because if you release the mouse button too soon, it doesn't reset the progress bar. But the pause at 100% is still frustrating in a sort of subliminal way that maybe not everyone notices, but no one enjoys repairing a ship either. Abilities should have a satisfying pop when they complete, not a long awkward pause. If it takes the server a second to catch up, don't make me hold down the mouse button during that time.

I only play the mini game half the time, but when i do i'm just leaving the rocks there. I'm wondering how many piles of rocks can be deposited on one territory. And what a territory will look like after a year of that? I know they said they are adding talents, and hopefully an option where you don't have to hold the mouse down the entire time you're harvesting a rock. But i still might skip it i don't know. An option to trade the rocks for more bonus calibration, or longer up-time, would be great.

The part where i'm doing the actual calibrations is no fun at all. Having enough ore and quanta to do what i want in game, is fun though. But to have fun with the ore and the quanta, it has to have value in the game. And to have value, it has to be hard to get. So the part that's not fun, is essential to the part that is fun. When you are calibrating an MU, the moment that you click the START button, you spend one Charge, and immediately receive the base calibration gain. So as soon as you click the START button, you can immediately click the X in the top right corner to end the mini game. You don't even have to wait for the screen to finish loading. Then you have to click a conformation dialog box, then close the main calibration window and you're done. If the base calibration isn't enough to get me to 100%, then i'll play the mini game sometimes, but i put very little effort into it. I drop a large circle in the corner closest to where the drone starts, if the hot spot isn't there i just keep dropping large circles, based on where i think it might be. If i haven't found it by the 3rd circle, and the location isn't obvious, that usually means it's on the edge somewhere, and i just give up and pick the highest spot visible. It's just not worth it to me to waste time thinking about the mini game. I just blast through it and move on, if i do it at all. My schedule isn't anything fancy or complicated either, i just wrote down the days of the week, Monday thru Sunday, on a piece of paper, and then assigned a cluster of 7 territories to each day. I have two clusters on Alioth, one on Jego, and one on Lacobus. I calibrate everything on Alioth in person, and i calibrate the outer planets by VR on workdays, and i pick up ore and calibrate in person on my days off. There are not enough days in the week to hit all 4 clusters twice, so one day i have to double up, so i try to save a few extra charges for that day. Pre Demeter i probably spent less time mining. But i also had a lot less ore and Quanta. I might have been able to make, in a day, what i make in a week now. But now i make that every week. Whether i feel like it or not. It's a bit more work overall, but it's a system that works better for me. I like being able to spread out the pain, instead of spending a whole day mining, once a month. i spend a few minutes every day.

I'm maintaining 28 territories. I worked out a schedule where i spend maybe 10mins a day calibrating MUs, and an hour or two on weekends picking up ore from the outer planets and warping it back to Alioth. It's really not that much work. i never gather the rocks, and i only play the mini game if i absolutely need the bonus calibration. And i still skip it sometimes if i'm not in the mood. A little effort results in a little ore. More effort results in more ore. It's really up to you how much time you want to spend doing it.

If they want us to move to space all they need to do is move Market 6 ? But really it would be more fun if they give us player run markets, and let us pick the new market 6.

I think JC was focused on the How and wasn't really considering what it would look like as a game or a product. When I think back to all those interviews with JC, where he's talking about players building a Death Star, he was always very adamant that it would take many players collaborating to make something that big. I always assumed he was talking about the time it would take to build, i remember thinking, "Nah i don't care if it takes forever, i'd rather just build it myself". In terms of core slots, with NQ's current plan, it would still be possible for players to combine cores to build something that large, or larger. Performance around it would be another issue, but what JC was describing is still possible. It just requires players to pay for the costs. People can say what they want about JC, but i think it's entirely possible, that if there had been someone in the room from the beginning, with a lot more experience making this kind of game, the result would have been a very different game, or no game at all. Mistakes may have been made, but i think the only way THIS game was going to happen, at this time, was someone like JC getting the ball rolling, not necessarily because it was a good idea, but because it was a cool idea.

It seems like some of you are stuck on this ridiculous idea that until recently, NQ had planned on allowing you to deploy an infinite number of cores in their game, for 9.99 a month. Does that sound realistic? Does that sound like a business practice that would lead to the game being around long enough for anyone to enjoy it? I think NQ made one rather huge mistake, way back at the beginning, and that was failing to predict how much players would not enjoy being given access to all of a product, while it's in development, and then having that product slowly taken away, and sold back to them, as a finished product. NQ could have done a much better job of setting expectations, and helping people understand that testing a game involves having access to things that you might not have access to as easily, in the finished product. Do you really think it's possible, that an entire building of game developers totally failed to consider that their game would have server costs? Is it possible that instead they just failed to consider that people would throw a tantrum when asked to pay them? They could have done better. But there's really no excuse for not understanding what's happening now, when it's happening right in front of your face, and NQ has explained it very clearly.

What changes? other than the Sanctuary moon increase, the output of tiles hasn't changed since Demeter was released.

See this is why the Alt thing seems like it's messing up this whole discussion. NQ isn't trying to limit cores, they are trying to decide how many each player should be given, with the purchase of a subscription. But because the subject of Alts is touchy, i feel like they were kind of tiptoeing around how you go about buying more. Until Deckard's post at least. There are definitely players in the game right now with 300-400+ cores, who are using every single one of them, or contributing to the game in some way with them. But there are also a lot of people with some junk lying around. Myself included. The players with the junk, need to be encouraged to clean it up, because real estate in the game has value. And the players who actually need 400 cores, need to start paying a bit more than everyone else. You shouldn't feel like they are trying to stop you from building, you should feel like they are cleaning up their product (making it profitable, ect), to make room to sell you the ability to build as much as you want.

Yikes. was that like a bit you were doing? or roleplay? Why pretend that you're in a negotiation like that? ?

I like the brutal honesty too. I don't know exactly what was being discussed on Discord. So i might be missing something. But on the subject of Alts, I think there are a lot of people who are opposed to Alts because of the added complications and stress. Personally, i can only handle one Alt, if i have any more i just won't get around to logging on the 3rd account, half the time, it's just too much fuss. It's not how i want to spend my time in the game. So i can understand someone not wanting to deal with an Alt. It would be so much less complicated to be able to purchase additional core slots for your main account. For some people Alts are also associated with paying for an advantage. But in this case, it's really not paying for an advantage, it's paying for more of the product that NQ is selling. I think there could be a decent number of people who would be a lot more likely to spend more money on additional core slots, then they might be willing to spend on additional accounts.

@NQ-Deckard Posting here because the devblog discussion thread is a little busy discussing core slots?. I know you are rethinking the detection system already. But i wanted to add a bit more feedback on how the current detection is working. I have a very small speeder type ship. And after the stacking detection was enabled, several elements on it were flagged, despite being placed without any exploit. On the front here, on each side i have three S Atmospheric Brakes, placed directly on top of each other, and then an adjuster placed directly on top of the brakes. All placed simply, no trickery at all. But the brakes and the adjusters were all flagged as stacked. After rebuilding the front of the ship. I moved the center brakes, to account for future air brake obstruction too, and repositioned the adjusters. And nothing was flagged at this point. I checked, and double checked. Then i made a blueprint, and created two more of the same Speeder. I also checked the new constructs, and they had no elements flagged. So i compacted one of the new speeders, and flew to Lacobus. Where i uncompacted it, and entered the command seat to fly it, and that's when i got the red message on my screen telling me that elements were stacked. So the two speeders on Alioth are both still fine, the original, and the one made from a blueprint, i checked when i got back to Alioth. But the third speeder, when uncompacted on Lacobus, has elements flagged as stacked. And just to make things a little weirder, once i got back to Alioth and uncompacted the speeder, no red message on the screen, and no flagged elements in build mode.

Usually when there's a gold rush, the people mining that gold aren't frantically, desperately, screaming "look gold! who wants some gold? come get this free gold!" If that doesn't make you a little suspicious, then i think there's a place right at the bottom of the pyramid, just for you. Buy the dip! lol

I think they are postponing the whole thing so they can rework the algorithm. That's the way i understood it at least. Maybe the system for finding them needs work too, but honestly since it's only needed to remove the remaining exploited elements, just once, and then we'll never need it again, i don't think they should waste much time on that part of it. I'd rather just not need to find any flagged elements, because there aren't any stacked elements on any of my ships to begin with.

I'm really happy to hear that the element stacking issue is getting further consideration. If you can stomp out the exploit, while still allowing as much freedom and flexibility in the system as possible, it's going to make ship building a lot more fun, and make ships look a lot better overall. Great news!

I think this is what they are talking about. I think they are saying they might not allow us to apply a texture to a voxel that has a negative volume. I hope they forget about that though. It's not really hurting anyone as far as i know. And there are a lot of situations where a shape has a very slight negative portion. Like the inside of very small curves. It would be a shame to have a limit like that get in the way of using those shapes.

Somewhat related to the topic. If we had something like the "Voxel Library" where you could save and redeploy voxel shapes. And another long-requested feature, the ability to copy/paste elements. I think those two features together would make building large ships a lot less tedious.

Running out of fuel is supposed to be a problem, if it wasn't, then why would anyone bother to carry fuel around with them? If NQ delivered cheap fuel everywhere in the solar system, it would kind of remove the need to even think about fuel at all. At that point they might as well just remove the need for fuel all together. NQ is kind enough to seed those markets with expensive fuel, to save you in an emergency. But if they sold it cheap, it would also undercut players trying to make money selling fuel. K1 is 18.99 at market 6 right now. Buy some and bring it to Madis moon 3

@NQ-Deckard It looks like the new stacking detection system is affecting elements that were placed without using any exploits. It would be a huge shame if all those ship designs were rendered non-functional, just to remove the remnants of an exploit that can't even be done anymore. There has to be another way. Please rethink this.

Name another persistent world, multiplayers building game with better graphics. Please, if it exists i'd like to play it. Even outside the building genre, I don't think there are any games with a larger seamless world, or more possible concurrent players in the same world. DU may not live up to its own standards. But no one else is doing anything better.

So, what are you still doing here? It seems like you've reached the point that you're so pissy that other people are enjoying the game, and you aren't, that you're actually mad at the players now too. That doesn't seem healthy.