Atmosph3rik

Greeting Noveans. Let us know what you think about our latest devblog, Precision in Building!

I've been thinking about this a lot, after rage-quitting over Demeter. How did DU end up so far removed from what was described on Kickstarter - what we thought we were getting, or what we had in alpha and early beta?
 
It occurred to me there is an observable pattern in NQ's dev decisions:
 
Problem #1: Fresh after launch. Players are setting up advanced factories too quickly. 
 
Instead of leaving basic manufacturing alone, or just auto-installing the new schematics for all players for the first couple of tiers, or coming up with more elegant solutions that extend end-game content without messing up existing player effort, like adding costlier tiers with higher specs, or any other solution that let players keep the factories we had built, nope. NQ bricked everyone's work completely. All the time invested in setting up our factories, layouts, linkages, was wiped. Unsurprisingly, a tonne of players leave.
 
Some of us stayed, not realising the culture at NQ had now been set for the next big challenge...
 
Example #2: Underground tunnels are causing performance issues.
 
The problem with mining wasn't that it was boring. That was a bad excuse. Players had already proposed the solution in the old voting system - a gem mechanic. If it's so boring, which is it still used on asteroids? Underground mining was about system O/H. It could easily have co-existed with surface mining. But instead of, say, writing a crawler routine that decays old tunnels when there's no player in proximity - which totally makes sense, and adds more interesting gameplay (i.e.: get buried alive if you AFK underground, caves collapsing...) - or wipe-on-claim, or just randomly propagating new dirt, or cellular automata, or new ore, or a bunch of other ideas, NQ reached for the hammer again and wiped all terrain, wiped all scans, wiped all underground mining, took away all our work finding ore deposits, buried our bases, and offered a tokenistic excavation request system that was slow, simplistic, under-resourced, and didn't consider 'add earth'. There were a dozen other ways to solve the problem, without creating new problems, and without losing so many players.
 
Next comes Panacea...
 
Example #3: The game engine still can't handle rendering too many constructs at once.
 
Here's where we are now. Instead of waiting for the upcoming salvage mechanic to wash out, or taxing constructs, or height limits, or larger static core sizes and better alignment between cores (this would enable better LOD since players wouldn't need multiple L statics janked together to build a base), or otherwise improving the actual engine, it feels like NQ are reaching for the hammer again, and not the scalpel. The Panacea announcement (here: https://www.dualuniverse.game/news/panacea-update-added-to-roadmap) brings the following change:
 
"Organization construct ownership (construct slots): a new way of assigning available construct limits to organizations."
 
It took ~2 mths to max out construct management talents to get enough cores to build a large base. That meant surviving without training any other talents, which meant sacrificing in-game money (refining skills) and time (like ship and movements speed). It was a full month just waiting for the final level of the advanced specialisation. Now, it sounds like NQ are going to nerf those skills, reduce the number of constructs available, while also potentially forcing many players to demolish parts of their bases to get under a new cap. There are going to be a lot of pissed off people. Again. 
 
At the heart of all of these problems is a single truth: a prevailing attitude at NQ that the player's effort, creativity and ingenuity is disposable. 'Kicking down the sand castle is good, because it forces them to rebuild it.' This attitude is implied by the oft-repeated analogy that DU is a bunch of toys in a sandbox. The toys/sandbox metaphor is not only directionless - not a great dev strategy - it is also condescending. It trivialises the elegance and art of what players do in DU. DU is sculpture, coding, architecture and engineering. And it is this artfulness that attracted players early on. It drove the economy - creating demand for manufacturers and miners, in turn promoting space traffic. But best of all it attracted more people - the no.1 dependency of the whole ecosystem. The more our creativity is enabled - not by capping our number of cores, but by finding ways to give us MORE cores - the more free advertising the game generates for itself on video, streaming and social media sites.
 
Until NQ begin cherishing the time spent by players, all our creations, as much as we each cherish them ourselves, they will continue to impose collateral damage with every release. The very worst part of this pattern isn't even the dwindling number of committed players - which is bad. The worst part is, the original vision of enabling unbounded creativity was good, if only it hadn't been speared 5 minutes after launch. DU could have been bigger than 'Second Life.' (For those who never played Second Life, at it's peak it had 1 million active players and turned over $130m a year after inflation - with zero PvP.) Instead, the "player generated content" part of DU is incrementally nerfed, and DU is turning into nothing more than a shelter for EVE refugees.
 
There are many who may still return to DU if NQ start showing some care and respect for the players' time, creativity, and ingenuity. But that means not taking a hammer to everything, every time the devs face a challenge.
 
Use a scalpel to make changes - and preserve what players have built.
 
[EDIT: I’ve excluded a 4th example of hammer vs scalpel, being the screen tech API. For now the HTML/SVG nerf appears to be on hold. In this case, again, due to issues with the rendering of HTML/SVGs NQ was preparing to take the hammer to all the work done by players on screens, and many common LUA scripts, rather than surgically parsing problem tags. Like core caps, this is still TBA.]

Hello everyone,
 
Just to let you all know that we are looking into possibilities to make the element overlap detection a little less aggressive.
More news on that will follow soon.
 
- Deckard

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 

There are already some ship related sounds in game like `Shield activated` and so on.
I would suggest moving them to the audio folder and use your new audio framework to call those sounds from default script.
Or at least the ability to disable the default ship voice sounds.
This would allow us to make fully customizable "Ship Voice Assistants".

This, absolutely. The change is massively overshooting it's purpose and I called it carpetbombing while a surgical strike is needed. The impact of this is far to severe for what it is trying to prevent.

 
 
This comment from three months ago is very valid and a great example of foresight which seems to have been ignored.
 
As-is, this change will possible be the most destructive for the game as a whole and will cause a massive amount of problems and as @Atmosph3rik correctly states, the ability to use stacking has already been removed, this broadstroke change to exsiting constructs where the vast majority of identified "issues" in no  way relates to the reasons for the removal of the exploit is really a bad sign of things to come.

On top of this, it is communicated in a terrible way which is already leading to many frantically trying to fix something which is not and never was an issue in this matter. And as I really do not see how NQ can push this through unles they just choose to ignore it and decide to take it as it falls, all that effort will be for nothing so NQ will need to act and act quickly
 
 
@NQ-Deckard @NQ-Sesch .. please look at this withy urgency.. I fear you are about to throw the baby out witt hte bathwater here. 

@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.

@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.
 
 

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.
 
 

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.
 
 

Simply take a screenshot, open it in a graphics editor and sample the colours with an eyedropper tool.

This will just create an unpleasant situation where holding constructs hostage with giant dirt piles is the norm.
 
If the intent of the two-week timer is to give the former owner time to retrieve their stuff, then they should be able to access it.
 
If that's not the intent, then they should just forget the whole thing, and static cores should be abandoned when a territory is abandoned.   That sounds like a lot more fun than a two-week hostage negotiation.
 
 

The whole MU system is starting to burn me out. The problem is that you are implied to use all your charges and not waste any. It's a dopamine trap like many mobile games are. With the current implementation that means you have to calibrate every single day. I experience this as a somewhat stressfull time pressure. Ofcourse I have 3 alts so I have to spend more time on doing all the calibrations. Since the start of Demeter this is pretty much all I've been doing in DU and I didn't spend any time building. It's really difficult for me to ignore the addicting dopamine triggers but I managed to stop picking up all the surface ores because that was an incredible time sink. I really kinda want to stop mining like this all together but that also means no resources unless I go space mining which requires a very expensive scanner on a ship large enough to support it which I don't have yet and I'm also not looking forward to doing that because it's an even bigger time sink before I can start to mine anything. This mining mechanic is in my opinion compromising one of the few good gameplay systems DU has which is the building system.
 
The simplest solution or at least a better implementation of this system would be to lower the speed at which MU's lose efficiency and also slow the speed at which we get charges so we only have to calibrate every few days or so. That opens up time to do other things.
 
@anyone: How do you feel about the current state of gathering resources? 

This will just create an unpleasant situation where holding constructs hostage with giant dirt piles is the norm.
 
If the intent of the two-week timer is to give the former owner time to retrieve their stuff, then they should be able to access it.
 
If that's not the intent, then they should just forget the whole thing, and static cores should be abandoned when a territory is abandoned.   That sounds like a lot more fun than a two-week hostage negotiation.
 
 

Hey folks,   -Does anyone know if talents restrict how many static cores you can requisition? I found an abandoned tile with 20 or so cores on it. I have core unit upgrades 4. 
I wonder will I be able to requisition all 20 something cores? They are already placed, so is that going to invoke a restriction, bypass it, or create a bug situation? Anyone know?
 
(Pardon me if this has already been addressed, I searched and did not find an answer.)
 
 

All your territories with constructs on them (up to five) were automatically assigned as a "Headquarters" and won't become abandoned, even if you don't pay the tax.  You have up to five Headquarters per account.  So unless you had more than five tiles claimed, then you shouldn't have lost anything.
 
And i think, even if your territories became abandoned, someone has to claim them, and then you have another two weeks to log in and move your stuff, before the person who claimed the tile can salvage anything.
 
 
 

I've been noticing the 100% obstruction bug occurring a lot more often after the recent changes to obstruction in Beta 1 r0.27.11 - "• Reduced engine obstruction fluctuations." Whatever you guys changed made this particular problem worse. My issue is that after entering build mode, these obstructions clear up. Why can't they already be clear?
 
We've always had issues with engines being 100% obstructed when you first start up a ship after logging in. The way players fix it is by entering build mode once before using the ship, which appears to force DU to recalculate obstruction. But that's suboptimal as you can often forget and not notice that a bunch of elements are 100% obstructed until you're airborne. It would be nice if the game would calculate obstruction before flight.
 
My suggestion is that obstruction be calculated once, VERY THOROUGLY, with many rays when a player exits build mode. Then this obstruction data can be recalled every time the ship is used. This way the obstruction doesn't need to be recalculated in flight or every time you visit a construct. It's just loaded from a previous calculation. I don't see a problem people cheesing obstruction with this method since it would calculate it every time anyone exits build mode. Any changes made would be accounted for.

Examples:

^These large adjustors become completely unobstructed after you enter build mode for about 10 seconds. So why are they 100% obstructed if I don't enter build mode? Moreover, why is the medium space engine there obstructed? There's nothing in the way forward. The cone is just hitting the sides of the ship. Why must the obstruction cone/cylinder be so wide?

^Notice in the second screen shot that only one of the four forward adjustors is firing when I try to yaw to the right. The other three are 100% obstructed because I didn't enter build mode before taking off.
 
Thank you for your efforts to improve and perfect the best ship building game on the market.

Everyone playing in the same universe, and the building, are what brought everyone who's already here.  Remove that, and there's nothing that hasn't already been done.
 
So i'm not sure what you are proposing that would pay the bills...
 
The game needs more, not less.

Everyone playing in the same universe, and the building, are what brought everyone who's already here.  Remove that, and there's nothing that hasn't already been done.
 
So i'm not sure what you are proposing that would pay the bills...
 
The game needs more, not less.

Please show me a space engineers video with something like this:
 

I mean, if it did, it would be leaving all those poor star citizen players with nothing else to play, because the two games have almost nothing in common other than the word Space.
 
 

I mean, if it did, it would be leaving all those poor star citizen players with nothing else to play, because the two games have almost nothing in common other than the word Space.
 
 

I mean, if it did, it would be leaving all those poor star citizen players with nothing else to play, because the two games have almost nothing in common other than the word Space.
 
 

It's a term that originated in the early Eve days (as far as I'm aware). 
Where you go out and blow the stuffing out of npc pirate ships.

Ratting was the act of destroying ships that were in the act of piRatting.
Personally, it always sounded weird to me.