Atmosph3rik

I definitely like the "flight assist" system in Elite Dangerous. It seems like a good balance of realistic physics while also allowing ships to be a bit easier to fly. Being able to turn flight assist on and off is really important though.

Woosh.

We'll be able to make permanent change inside of the building areas that we will be able to define. But outside of those areas i would bet that any changes will reset themselves after an hour or so, maybe less. It would just be silly for the damage to be permanent. Players would destroy a planet in a few weeks.

Because it wasn't in 18 point font i actually read Captain's entire post. And i hate to say it but i agree. Some games work great on a console. But this definitely isn't one of those games. Games that are designed to play on a console are a lot of fun to play and i prefer a controller for some games. But a game like Dual is going to require more then just a controller. And also like mr twerkmotor said, finding a setup that works for you makes a huge difference. I highly recommend a fancy mouse like a Razor Naga with the 12 button thumb pad. When you have a mouse and keyboard that you are used to, there is really no better interface. At least until we can control the games with our mind...

On a scale from LL cool J to Bob Ross, how much of a G are you captain?

Wait you can like your own posts? I like that, or at least i think i do. I'll have to hit post first to see if i have enough left.

While it's fun for game mechanics to have a basis in scientific reality i'm a lot more concerned with whether they make a game more fun and unique. All it takes is a little creative thinking and literally anything can be justified with theoretical science. Just take a look at the lore we have so far. I can't remember where i saw this but i remember watching some show or movie where ships were attaching to a beam of energy to travel at a high speed. Anyway it looked very cool. Some kind of fast travel based on attaching to or traveling inside a beam of energy might be a way for smaller or slower ships to travel between systems. Like highways for ships that can't handle FTL travel.

What's up everyone. I guess it's about time i write up a little introduction here too. It is seriously awesome how fast this organization has grown. And damn do we all have the coolest forum banners or what. Thanks Kiklix! Some of you already know me from Landmark. So hello to all my fellow Landmark refugees! and also a big hello to all the people coming from other games too! So ahh about me, my main interest in Dual is the voxel building. I'm a huge fan of modern architecture and a lot of my building inspiration comes from a childish desire to actually get to live in a house like Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater or the house from the movie Oblivion, which was the inspiration for the Landmark build in my signature. A lot of what i do is inspired by other people and purely for my own amusement. But occasionally i may manage to crank out something i would call original, and if i do i plan to sell and trade those creations under my personal brand ATMOCORP. ATMOCORP's goal is to bring a bit of luxury and class to the world of planetary exploration and colonization. Just because your house requires a proximity force field for protection doesn't mean it can't also have an infinity pool.

Or a Morpher with gravitational compression technology. From the Dev blog https://devblog.dualthegame.com/2015/08/20/dual-universe-part-4/

Really excited to get a bit more of a peak at the building tools in action! Pretty disappointed in IGN though. The title of the article is literally just "No Man's Sky Style game" and they never even bothered to tweet the article because they're too busy tweeting Dos Equis ads and pics of Gary Busy.

You seem to assume there will be no cost to trying to put that rusty chain on someone. Try me and find out.

I don't think that's true. I would bet that at any point in history no matter what level of technology is available, it would probably cost more to buy a human and keep them healthy and alive, then it would to acquire available technology that is capable of doing the same job. If there isn't any technology available then there's nothing to compare. And as a game mechanic it's just a bad idea for obvious reasons.

I would be afraid this would flood NQ with frivolous reports by people looking for a reward. And it would also give an excuse to anyone caught screwing around with things they shouldn't be. Making the game better should be reward enough. Why incentivize people to hack the game?

Rule #1 - No using huge pink fonts on the forums. Rule #2 - See rule #1

So i was thinking about pets and AI in the game a while back, but more along the lines of a ship's computer, or KITT from Knight Rider, or Tony Stark's digital butler guy in the Iron Man movies. It would be pretty cool to be able to add a component to a construct that gave it a limited npc AI. I'm not talking about automating it, i know we'll be able to do that to an extent with scripting. I just mean some kind of interactive voice type thing. Something to add a bit of personality to your home or ship. Maybe a few voices to choose from.

This made me laugh really hard. Thank you

PVE isn't competitive it's collaborative by definition, so no problem there. And in terms of mining and crafting i don't see how it could give an advantage. Please give some examples. If i can only control one character at a time i can only mine or craft on one character at a time. If someone has to control each character separately they aren't going to be saving any time or gaining any advantage switching back and forth mining or gathering with two characters online at the same time. edit: Just to clarify i am absolutely against any character being able to gain any skills or resources without a real human inputting clicks or keystrokes to gain them. No one should ever be able to just sit there and gain anything. As long as that isn't possible and botting isn't allowed i would hope that the style of multiboxing that was common in Everquest could be allowed. Dual is obviously breaking new ground in a lot of ways and we really have no idea how so many things work. But i have faith that NQ will make the right decisions regarding stuff like this.

This graphic perfectly explains everything that i had to say on the subject. Thank you! I never saw anything negative about multiboxing in Everquest when it was usually PVE and someone bringing in an extra support class to buff and spot heal or something like that. It usually just made the game more fun for everyone. Someone botting several characters in PVP, cloning keystrokes to control all of them with the same mouse and keyboard is just cheating. I think that can be dealt with on its own without wasting time trying to stop people from multiboxing.

I think he is talking about snapping together smaller mesh elements into one larger functioning element. So voxels wouldn't need to be involved. I think this is a great idea. It would allow for a bit more personalization from ship to ship, in terms of performance and appearance.

In a way, we should be able to change the size of something like a triangle. But on the small end it can only really go as small as one voxel cut in half diagonally. You'll probably be able to make a triangle almost as large as you want too, but it will technically be made up of many voxels. You can make a voxel smaller then the standard grid too. But because everything is on a grid, you are also making all the surrounding voxels larger, or at least moving one corner in closer to make the central voxel smaller. In reverse you can also make one voxel appear larger, but to do it all the surrounding voxels have to move to make room. Working at the highest detail level with voxels can be pretty tedious in other games, but i think their aim for DU is that we will be doing much less tinkering with voxels on the smallest scale and more building with pre-made shapes at a larger scale. edit: Here is a little piece of someone's tutorial from the game Landmark. They're basically explaining two different ways that a triangle can be made. You can see in either example it requires other nearby voxels to be altered too.

Each corner of each "voxel" has a home point. When all eight are at that home point it forms a standard cube. But they can each be moved a certain distance from that point to form more complex shapes. In Landmark each corner can be moved up to 1.5 blocks in any direction, outside of the standard cube shape and inside of it. I don't think we know exactly how far we will be able to move them in Dual or how we will be able to move them. But from the one screenshot of the voxel tools at work it looks like it should be similar to Landmark. The important thing to remember is that you can't move a block, they're locked to a grid. All you can do is repaint them or change their shape. so they can't really "snap". Or i guess you might say snapping is all they can do. You can make a block look like it's off the grid, but technically it is still locked to that location. Although once you build a ship you will be able to make that move! but that's a different story.

The movie Field of Dreams has the answer to this question. "If you build it they will come" I really hope Novaquark continues to focus on making an awesome game rather then wasting time and money on all that smoke and mirrors. Look where it has gotten other games.

That's funny i never really thought about it, but i think i always pictured that being the turret on the starboard side of the Millennium Falcon, but i just looked closer at a picture and that's the cockpit. It would be tough to fly that thing from way over on the side of it like that. I've got a whole new respect for Han Solo lol

I am happy to hear this. I do understand why other games like Elite Dangerous choose not to allow it. The immersion of being in 1st person in the cockpit is awesome. But i've noticed a funny thing that happens with the design of the ships in Elite Dangerous. As the quality and price of the ships go up the cockpit on the ships extend further and further out from the front to allow for closer to a 180 degree view. On the huge freighters your basically in a little glass bubble sticking out of the front of the ship. It makes for a much better view but in reality it doesn't seem like a very realistic design. Putting the pilot out there on the front of the ship like that, one little slip of the controls when your landing and you'd be a pilot pancake. That just got me thinking about how it might really work in the future. So we have backup assist cameras on SUVs now, so i would imagine on a spaceship in the future you could have cameras all over the ship and maybe even some kind of 3d composite view of all the cameras that might look and feel a lot like a 3rd person view in a video game. So as much as i enjoy 1st person view sometimes i'm glad we'll have the option for both. I was also thinking that the "Drone Camera mode" could be used for building. I know initially there may only be a 1st person view for building, which i think will be tough. If we could enter that same Drone camera mode when we're building with some sort of movable pivot point and no clipping, that would be great. A building camera mode exactly like that is supposed to be in development for Landmark still i think.

I like Voxelmorph a lot. I didn't like the term Voxelmancy either. It grew on me in a sort of Stockholm Syndrome kind of way i guess, but i don't like how it equates effort to some kind of voodoo. On the subject of whether it's a good thing to have it in the game, i guess it's sort of a double-edged sword. First i think i should clarify exactly what i think "Voxelmancy" means though. At one point i just thought of it as highly technical building. But as building in Landmark has evolved my definition of what it means definitely has too. What Voxelmancy means to me now is more like unsupported building techniques, or unintuitive methods. Doing something with a building tool that produces an unintended result. We had to use these tricks in Landmark because we had no other way to create many shapes. The voxels had the ability but we just had no way to shape them. So the more tools we have to shape voxels, the less need for Voxelmancy. If we are just talking about depth in building, or how technical you can get, then i personally can't get enough. But I think the building can still have all that depth and also be accessible if it's intuitive and well designed. One thing i love about Landmark is that even though it essentially has no progression, when i log in i'm a level 80 Voxelmancer, and the best part is i can delete the character and make a new one and still be a level 80 Voxelmancer, because the progression is all my own. I guess the trick is just to make the learning process something that's enjoyable and a part of the game too. People shouldn't have to go out of the game to learn how to build if possible. So maybe some kind of system that allowed players to create in game building tutorials might be the answer. What if you could record a hologram of your character performing a few building steps then add instructions to it and save it in game somehow. That might be too complicated to make happen but it would be cool