Atmosph3rik

Boredom has really made its bed here if this is all we have to talk about that is anything close to "juicy" right now.
 
Quick, someone do a big scandal. 

Responding negatively to spam doesn't make this a toxic community. It means we want the spam to stop. That's all. Dunno why that's hard to understand.

I agree with the OP. Element doors are fine, but eventually players are going to desire different art forums to fit their style. If Dual makes a ton of money so future development is not only ongoing but healthy, then i am fine with them making all the doors elements as long as they can fit the majority of our needs, but that seems more difficult and costly vs a voxel door assembly.
 
I do not believe elements will be able to be scaled, which for doors is kind of a tough thing. Players are going ot want to add lots of immersion into their builds so a door could be anything from an entry into the ship, an entry into a room, a door to a cabinet, a cargo bay entry, etc. The list goes on and on. The ability to reuse and repurpose elements will go along way into solving the needs of players.
 
In the beginning it makes sense that all the styles will be similar (not ship shape, but elements) as we all come from the Arkship. I think though, as time goes on, factions break apart, people find even more distant planets to inhabit, we should also see a chance or rather an evolution of styles. Sci-Fi can be clean like Star Trek, a bit dystopian like Star Wars or Firefly, or alien like Prometheus. I would like to see elements that allow for players to break out of the Arkship mold so to speak.
 
Anyway, point is. The variance of needs (ramp doors, large docking doors, aperture portals, etc) and styles greatly necessitates voxel construct animation.
 

Spam is bad, and clearly they have made a few rookie mistakes, but let's not clobber them for no reason here. 
 
Everyone here is right, Solar Secure has permanently damaged its reputation. However, excessively attacking them isn't going to help, it only makes the rest of us look bad. 
 
Solar Secure, I wish you good luck and hope you have learned from your mistakes.

That's funny because there's spam in my forum mailbox with your organizations name on it.  

That's funny because there's spam in my forum mailbox with your organizations name on it.  

That's funny because there's spam in my forum mailbox with your organizations name on it.  

NQ said they don't mind us taking inspiration from star wars.
@Lethys do you have any completely original ship designs? 

What the heck? So I create a model on my own and I still get called a copier? Have you seen the other images of my ship? The only similarities are the control bridge with the little ball like generators on top. I also had to design some kind of turrets to put on there. Because I don't know how exactly the DU guns look so I tried to create some simple basic military designs for turrets. On the ship you can see flat 6 barreled capital gun turrets. You will also find singular anti-ship fighter ship fighter turrets. Then you will also find spherical turrets with a long barrel. I feel like it looks much different from a star destroyer but it keeps that similarity.
 
I think my design is pretty creative. I guess I achieved my goal of making you feel like it was a star destroyer without actually being a star destroyer. I have created my own designs for all our ships this far, minus the aurora class, I think they are pretty creative designs.

I guess one big question is how will constructs interact with each other?
 
Hopefully there will be some way for smaller constructs to overlap and attach to or dock with larger construct.  So a moving door made out of voxels could be programmed to open and close.  But maybe more importantly that would also allow for smaller ships to dock inside of larger ships which i'm pretty sure we all want.
 
I think it'll be a lot easier for most doors to be elements.  But i definitely hope that we can build our own doors and elevators and whatever out of voxels too.
 
I really want a underground base with a huge hidden door that opens just below the surface of the water in the middle of a lake or something awesome like that. 

I guess one big question is how will constructs interact with each other?
 
Hopefully there will be some way for smaller constructs to overlap and attach to or dock with larger construct.  So a moving door made out of voxels could be programmed to open and close.  But maybe more importantly that would also allow for smaller ships to dock inside of larger ships which i'm pretty sure we all want.
 
I think it'll be a lot easier for most doors to be elements.  But i definitely hope that we can build our own doors and elevators and whatever out of voxels too.
 
I really want a underground base with a huge hidden door that opens just below the surface of the water in the middle of a lake or something awesome like that. 

That's funny because there's spam in my forum mailbox with your organizations name on it.  

Check out the lore.
 
We're still asleep on the Arcship during Alpha and Beta.  It's just a simulation.
 
https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/10414-official-dual-universe-lore-bible/
 
I'm glad we get to keep Blueprints though.  It would just be depressing to loose creative ideas like that.

Yeah the whole point of the safezone is to allow people to build and play without any interruption or risk from other players.
 
There's not much point in speculating on whether the devs might leave a huge loophole in an important mechanic.
 
It could happen sure.  But if it does it will be fixed before launch.

Safezones are called safezones for a reason, let the devs solve this kind of problems. There'll likely be some kind of landing gear that can anchor your construct to the ground.

I'm sure there will end up being some conflict and some war in Dual Universe.
 
But it's important to remember that Dual will definitely not be the kind of game where Nova Quark divides us up into teams and pits us against each other.  It's going to be up to us to come up with reasons to go to war.  Which i'm sure won't be a problem.
 
But the consequences are really important too.
 
I doubt there will be anything like a "world reset" other then for technical reasons maybe.
 
I think there are plenty of other games out there that are about dropping you into the middle of a war at just the right moment to see some action.
 
Dual is about the whole experience not just the conflict.

I'm sure there will end up being some conflict and some war in Dual Universe.
 
But it's important to remember that Dual will definitely not be the kind of game where Nova Quark divides us up into teams and pits us against each other.  It's going to be up to us to come up with reasons to go to war.  Which i'm sure won't be a problem.
 
But the consequences are really important too.
 
I doubt there will be anything like a "world reset" other then for technical reasons maybe.
 
I think there are plenty of other games out there that are about dropping you into the middle of a war at just the right moment to see some action.
 
Dual is about the whole experience not just the conflict.

Just thought of another thing that might be interesting with scripting as well. The ability to install cameras and link them to those big data monitors they showcased in the videos. It would allow the creation of remote security monitoring. 

Hi everyone,
 
It seems the basic rules of this thread have been vastly ignored.
In return, all posts who weren't following these rules have been archived.
 
So as a reminder, I repost it there:
 
 
If you want to present cases that illustrate your point of view, do it in your post.
If you think a case raised by another player is not relevant, you can do it, but do it in your post by explaining why as shortly and clearly as possible.
Don't reply to each other each time someone says something, this inflates the topic, making the task to keep in check what are the most important points difficult.
 
Thanks in advance for your cooperation.
Best regards,
Nyzaltar.

(Posted Friday 4th of November 2016 on the DevBlog)
 
 

 
Some progress on the mining game mechanics
 
 
In this Devblog, we aim to shed some light on a very important part of the future gameplay of Dual Universe: scanning & mining. What follows is our current thinking on these features, as we are currently implementing them. This may still evolve in the future, in particular thanks to your feedback! So, let’s have a look.   Scanning is the activity of prospecting to find new resources in the ground on planets. Resources are physically geographically located, they have a span and a size, and they are generated via our procedural algorithms together with the planet as voxel blobs. They will be spread on the planets based on rarity and how important they actually are in crafting recipes. Some rare resources will not be found on Alioth, the starting planet, so you will have to journey out into the universe to locate them.. Each biome will have a set of typical resources associated with it, so prospecting starts by “knowing your biomes” The table below presents a simple rough description of how we plan to stage the levels of difficulty for materials:           Our current plans for prospecting are focused on two scanning techniques: radial scanning and directional scanning.   Radial scanning will allow you to probe for a given class of material in a given radius: the scanner will be able to show you what percentage of the area you’re scanning is made up of the class of material you are seeking. It’s only partial information. You won’t know where it is exactly, just that 1.6% of the volume of your scanning sphere is filled with metal, for example. A scan “operation” will take some time. Longer scans will yield more precise measurements. There will be a level of imprecision in the exact size of the radius, which you will be able to improve via skills.   How does it work? Well, most of the time, the thing you are looking for will not be in the sphere you are probing. So, you’ll see a 0% signal reading. You will then move and suddenly, a signal will show up. You know that your sphere has just “hit” a vein of what you are searching for. At this moment, you will be able to deploy a sphere marker, that will basically help you to visualize the volume where your target material is likely located.. The marker will stay there while you move to another location and start again. By intersecting markers you will start to be able to pinpoint more precisely where your precious material is located. This is the general idea.   Now, the exact technique you will use will also depend on the type of veins that correspond to the material you are looking for and what kind scanner you have. Consider these two schema that illustrate different strategies depending on the relative size of the average vein compared to the radius of the scanner (the double circling of the spheres illustrate the imprecision on the radius):                 These strategies will be important to master, because mining randomly will just exhaust your time and resources and will usually return only very common and not very worthwhile materials. Mining gear will have fixed scanning ranges that correspond to their levels. You won’t be able to adjust these ranges or change the scanning radius. They’re fixed. So, no choice: you need to move!   Now, once you start to have a better idea where you material is, you might start to use the directional scanner. This is much more straightforward. The directional scanner will give you the amount of the 4 or 5  most significant materials within a cone of a few degrees in the direction you’ve pointed your scanner.. The max distance will be a level dependent parameter, but will remain relatively small so you need to use radial scanning first to narrow your search area. The signal received for a given piece of material will decrease with distance, which should give you precious “gradient” information to follow. This is roughly how this could look:           In some future expansion we will probably add some more advanced tools for prospectors as well as planetary scale global information to help you judge the potential of newly discovered planets.   Our vision for this gameplay (as well as most of the gameplay of Dual) is to make it deep. We want players to be able to develop their own very real expertise on best practice, specializations, etc. We want the activity of prospectors to remain challenging even when you master it, so that a good prospector will have a very high value as part of a team. Now, for easy and abundant materials, it will be possible to find resources much more easily (we are considering a simple local highlight of what is there, so you just “see” it). But for the more rare and uncommon materials, we want it to be rewarding and feel like a real achievement. We provide the tools, but players will have to come up with the best strategies to get to the most precious material. The way you dig for gold as a beginner, and the way you will approach it after 100 hours of being a prospector are totally different. Sure there is a skill tree, but the actual trial and error experience also makes a difference. For a MMO game that is supposed to be played for hundreds of hours, anything not challenging quickly becomes a chore. We want to prevent that.   Now, about mining: it will be done via your Nanoformer. The harder the material and the larger the volume collected, the longer it will take. We have chosen an energy-based model where each material is capable of absorbing a certain level of energy before being “mined”. So, you will be able to upgrade your Nanoformer energy throughput to improve your mining as well as various mining skills. For more advanced mining, and possibly some rare materials, dedicated tools will enter the scene, but this might not be available at release, but rather in a future expansion. We are considering the possibility of Mining Units inside your constructs, but this will be in an expansion after release and it will require some careful balancing to make sure standard mining is still an option, in particular for beginners.   Interestingly, we imagine that the “profession” of prospector/scanner and the “profession” of miner could very well be separate. Some people will specialize in finding large veins of important materials (and possibly sell the intel about the location), while some others will specialize in mining it, focusing on a mining site for several weeks or months. When you exploit a deep vein, you will need to install things like lifts, vehicles, containers, and clean wide shafts to ease material and dirt evacuation. Maybe even factories close to the vein to transform the ore into pure material. This differs from most other games where scanning and mining are usually very similar and the activity of mining and scanning alternate frequently as you jump from one asteroid to another, or one mining spot to the other.   We hope you enjoyed this short intro and, as usual, we are very excited to hear your feedback and ideas! We are developing this at the moment, so it’s a good time for the community to share your thoughts and influence what is going on!     JC Baillie, Project Lead.  

Been forming conspiracies. Nothing new.
 
Wait, shit.

Hi everyone!   @ghoster:   Despite how you might feel, we are not going in radio silence mode.   A few points that we want to clarify here:   - We never expected either to have a success as large as Star Citizen for many obvious reasons: we started to really communicate about the game a few months ago, we had no celebrity in our team and no big brand to put in front. That alone were legitimate reasons to keep our expectations realistic. We are already amazed to see how far we went in a such short amount of time and we are not going to stop there! - As Pang_Dread mentioned it, we communicated in the last Kickstarter update that the communication now won't be as intense as it was during the Kickstarter.  - A few things are coming soon:
1) new forum sections will be opened on Wednesday 2nd of November 2) a newsletter for the end of the week (with some stuff that might interest more than one ) 3) a fan fiction contest that will take place from Tuesday 15th November to Thursday 15th of December! (more info very soon!)   @Anonymous:   We can understand that you are concerned about our current lack of presence. However, you should understand in return that you can't expect the same presence from a Community Manager in a big company or being a part of a big structure than one in a small company. Why? Because in small companies (like indie studios), people are generally brought to do more than the exact job written on their contract. If not, then the company might quickly run into some problems to work properly.    Just a few examples: - Apart the communication from JC, all the comm from the devs is handled by the CMs (who are doing the link between devs and the community). - Managing discussions on Facebook and Twitter is totally within the job of the CMs (it's really disturbing to say the contrary). - This might be shocking but yes, Customer Support can be something a CM has to do (and right now, this is also part of our job). - Internal, invisible tasks related to Kickstarter and hugely time consuming are also among the things we currently have to do. - Despite what you're saying, Reddit can also be an appropriate place where a CM might have to interact with people interested in the game.   All in all, we would love to interact a lot more with you guys than what we are currently doing. We will do our best to increase our presence in the coming months. A few replies are coming soon to some important topics.   Best regards, Nyzaltar.

I wouldn't say your hypothesis is entirely correct. If I were running a business, and random strangers were willing to throw even more money at my business just because they want to, then why the hell not give them the option to do so. It only gives NQ more leverage in the long run with future investors etc. it doesn't mean they are short on money. But we can jump to conclusions all day if we wanted, except I really don't want to.
 
Patience, just have some patience. 

DU already has quite a few of the skilled Landmark voxelmancers on the Alpha Team.

They have already answered really, not much more they can do right now besides releasing the source code, it's just a question of believing it. And if you don't all you can do is wait until you can see it for yourself.
 
The way I see it, there are no issues with massive universes and procedural voxel planets in other games. The issue is scaling the number of clients in a single shard. NQ have focused on those issues and come up with their dynamic space splitting for the server side, and what I call "Network LOD" for the client side. In theory it makes sense.