Atmosph3rik

(Posted Friday 19th of February 2016 on the DevBlog) 
 
      In the past few weeks Dual Universe has been on occasion described as being mainly a PvP MMO. However Dual Universe is so much more than this: it has a rich "Builder" gameplay at its core, which is rather new in the MMO genre (at least at this scale). Specifically, this gameplay is not just a kind of single player experience added on top of a MMO, but takes an entirely new dimension because of the fact that you are building within a MMO that takes the word "massive" seriously. This is a crucial aspect, and is central to the emergent gameplay experience.   We plan to implement the Builder gameplay in the Alpha version (not all tools might be ready though) before any PvP gameplay. We are doing this for 2 reasons: - We would like to send a message: our game is as much a Builder Game as a PvP Game. - In our game vision, building constructs will be the first brick of the gameplay cycle.     Warning: everything said in this blog post is still "work in progress". Development is an iterative process and the gameplay may evolve a lot between now and when the players will get their hands on the game.      Goals we have in mind for the Builder role:     Building as a meaningful activity:   Instead of just remaining an end in itself, we want to give to the Building activity a purpose to all the time invested in it. To build gigantic things and just stare at them once they are finished feels like something is missing. If you have played other Builder games, like some people in our team, you might have felt this way. That's why we plan to place the Builders at the heart of the Economy. We want to make them feel useful or even essential to other players. Builders will be able to sell, or buy their creations together with other players to increase their wealth for other purposes. Building activity will, along with the crafting activity, bootstrap the player-driven Economy. And a strong emergent Economy will be necessary to make PvP possible on a large scale. So even for PvP Players, Builders will matter.         Showing your art to an incredibly bigger audience:   You are an artist for the sake of Art, and you don't really care about making your creations profitable or being useful to anyone. That's fine and even in that case you could still have a solid reason to build in a single-shard game like Dual Universe. Why? If you want to show what you're capable of to the community, well, in the average Builder game, you will be able to show your work to 20, 50 or possibly a few hundred players if you are on a solid and very populated server, but this is still a small part of the game community. Of course, you have social media to enlarge your audience, but watching a video on YouTube is not comparable to seeing an impressive fortress in game, right? Imagine that in a single shard universe, your creations can become a tourist attraction similar to real life monuments (Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower), bringing thousands of in-game visitors just here to see your Art? Well, you get the picture.       The protection we plan for the Builders:   Building is a very time consuming activity to bear fruits, we are very well aware of this. It is also something many players practice as a relaxing activity. So if a builder wants to build without risking being attacked by a PvP player, he will have the opportunity to do it in non-PvP, secure areas. Right from the beginning, there will be a secure area of several kilometers around the Arkship (the in-game starting point). Beyond the safety of the Arkship, as players explore the universe, we are currently evaluating other possibilities for additional secure areas in the game to protect builders and their creations, as the number of players in game grows and they spread across the universe. We know that each possibility comes with Pros and Cons. Expect the final decision to be announced more or less at the same time we'll communicate in detail about the PvP gameplay. Here is a brief outline to some safe building zone ideas:   - Arkification Token: the ability to find tokens (alien relics?) for the players while exploring or mining. They could be used wherever the owner want, and will be destroyed upon use. This would then create an indestructible safe area and anything in it become untouchable by PvP Mechanisms.   - Alien Ruins: areas on planets containing lost, deactivated alien technology that could be rebuilt/reactivated by players. Once the area is rebuild/reactivated, the area becomes safe and anything in it becomes untouchable by PvP Mechanisms.   - Virtual Simulator: enabling player to enter a virtual world (call it "inception syndrome"!). While in that virtual space, the player would be able to design any construct, in a completely peaceful setting. This would help builders to design their construct and create their blueprints safely, without being interrupted by any PvP action. For ships, it will also be possible to test their flight mode, without risking a crash or wasting resources!   What about the constructs built in non-secure areas? These will be destructible. We assume what take the most time in the building activity is to design a construct the first time and tweak all the small details on it. Once you have the Blueprint, or a Construct Snapshot with a Repair Unit, it's only a matter of gathering resources to repair it or reproduce it an infinite number of times. This is the best way to make the PvP destruction acceptable in our opinion, but we remain open to community suggestions!       The Tools available for the Builders:   We have taken some time to analyze and gather information about what are the strengths and weaknesses of already released builder games. It seems they all fall into two main categories:   Those who have predefined blocks which are easy to take in hand gameplay wise, enabling players to build nice designs quickly but where the creativity is limited, due to the number of different preset blocks you can choose from to build with. Those who have voxel tools enabling players to manipulate the world to reach maximum creativity freedom. The drawback is generally that this ability to manipulate voxels is incredibly intimidating and difficult to take in hand for a beginner. While a few experienced players can build wondrous things, the vast majority of players are overwhelmed and discouraged. In order to avoid the pitfall from the two genres, we've come to the conclusion to get the best of both worlds to appeal to both experienced and novice builders. So yes, in the Alpha, you can expect to have "Voxel Tools" as well as what we call "Voxel Elements". So, what exactly are Voxel Tools & Voxel Elements?   Voxel Tools:   1) Deploy/Remove Shape Tool:      In a nutshell this tool enables the builder to deploy (or remove) a primitive shape, a bit like a 3D brush. Right now it can be a cube, a sphere or a triangular prism. The size of the shape can be resized and rotated. It can be used for deploying/extracting large shapes or for fine tuning those intricate details.     However it will grow in versatility as time passes: we plan to include cylinders, cones, tetrahedrons (triangle-based pyramid), square-based pyramids and many more!      2) Line Tool: this enables the builder to create a plain linear connection between two rectangular surfaces that you are free to define. Both the starting rectangular surface and the ending rectangular surface of the volume are defined before deployment: the size of the rectangular base at each extremity is decided by the player with a simple drag&drop movement.       3) Smoothing Tool (work in progress): this enables the builder to smooth sharp edges and corners progressively enabling more organic and streamlined shapes to be made. The smoothing action can be triggered either by a click or by maintaining the mouse button to have a continuous smoothing action.    4) Select Tool (work in progress): this enables the builder to select a precise group of voxels and save it temporarily (like in a clipboard) or permanently in their Voxel Element Library. The selection can then be reproduced (copy/paste) in the world (assuming the builder has the necessary quantity of material to reproduce it). Note that it only stores the voxel content and not other game Elements (eg Engines).   5) Paint Tool (scheduled): this enables the builder to "paint" any surface of a construct. In fact, it's material swapping: one voxel of a specific material is replaced by one voxel of another material. The removed quantity of material is put in the player inventory while the quantity of material used to replace it is taken from the player inventory. We will try to have two painting modes: sharp painting (similar to hard edge painting) and smooth painting (where the material recently deployed is slightly propagating to adjacent voxels, creating a blending effect).   Voxel Elements (or Voxel-based Elements):   Put simply, a Voxel Element is a complex, predefined voxel-based shape constituted of one (or more) material(s). A spiral staircase is a good example of a Voxel Element. Voxel Elements will be gathered in a library. We plan to include more and more complex shapes in this library. The feedback from the community will be essential to know which complex shapes will be the most useful to builders. In the long term, builders will also have the ability to create Voxel Elements themselves, and to save them to their Voxel Element Library. They will also be able to modify the materials used by the Voxel Elements, so if you want a metal stair with a wooden handrail, or vice versa, you will have to simply update the materials attached to the Voxel Element.   Mesh-based Elements (or "Elements"):   As well as Voxel Tools and Voxel Elements there are also predefined game Elements like Cockpits, Engines, Boosters, etc... They bring functionalities to your Construct, and can be attached to your voxel-based creations, setting up their anchor point and orientation. Some Elements will be required to build certain things. A basic flying craft will require a Core Unit, a Control Unit, a Gyroscope, and a few propulsors (adjustors to orient, rockets to fly), but the voxel-made chassis, hull and design of the craft is entirely left to the builder.   Well, that's all for now. We hope this gives you a better idea about the plans we have for all the Builders in Dual Universe. Don't hesitate to give your feedback on the forum, if you have any suggestion or comments to make: we really want to have your opinion on this!   The Novaquark Team.

Excellent post! Got my jimmies all rustled, but in a good way.

Just curious will there be a version of the line tool that can cut through material?

The team hasn't made the final decision on this subject yet.
But I will bring this topic to the Devs' attention
 
Sidenote: if we succeed in avoiding to have activies usually boring and nearly automated in MMO (like mining, for example ) not boring in Dual Universe, this should naturally limit Multiboxing.
 
Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.

Good evening everybody.
I have just joined the forum to get a grip on things. Been playing ED for over a year now. Have triple elite and don't care about the game any more.
I am interested to see how this develops as I look for new entertainment. Eve has no interest for me, and although I backed Star Citizen, I am starting to think that each time Derek Smart throws a lawsuit at them it could be the last.
 
So, my fingers are crossed for this.
 
Be safe

Ok so NovaQuark mentioned a few things that I would like to talk about. First of is the AI's that you will be able to write yourself in code. Me being a programmer myself was very excited by this and i started thinking about all the amazing things I could do. As I was thinking about it I wondered two things. How much will you be able to code in?, and two will it extend beyond the basic ship functions. What I mean by the second one is will I be able to sit down and write a code that would allow me to fly instead of a regular space ship a giant robot that I built using the voxels. So basically to sum it up will I be able to build other constructs such as giant mechs that I can fight in or will I be limited to only building space ships.                      Thanks, Jared
 

i'm looking forward to botswarm ai tournaments

As Comrademoco stated, technically, nothing will prevent you to build giant mechs
About the limits of ingame programming, I can just tell you for now that all the coding allowed will be in LUA and should limited to automatize some basic things (like elementary AIs for droids, autopilots for spaceships, automatized defense systems and such things). More on this matter will be revealed in the future

Well that article is what brought me here.
I had never heard of this game before.

http://massivelyop.com/2016/02/01/dual-universe-promises-a-seamless-galaxy-on-a-single-shard/?platform=hootsuite
 
I see DU is starting to get some more "publicity".
 
Very brief article, but boy is that comment section busy!

Call me simple but one of my favourite things in games is sitting my character on chairs/furniture. Landmark has a way of doing it that involves placing the character near an object and typing /sit. The character then sits down on the object.

In SWTOR it's similar but you type /chair. There is a chair that you simply click on and the character automatically sits down (in the player ships). That's probably my favourite approach.

I know it's not a priority, and would definitely expect it to be a last minute feature, but will there be sitting on chairs/furniture in DU? If so, what will the approach be, /emote or click?

I hope it's not too basic a question. I know I will have more useful ones closer to play testing.

Another just in case you missed it post. 
 
Dual tweeted a link to a 3D printer to be used in game. Very cool unit. The blueprint on the top is super cool!

https://twitter.com/dualthegame/status/690612201296642048

Dual tweeted out a gif of a Mini Rocket Propulsor firing. Can't wait to attach one of these to a construct

https://twitter.com/dualthegame/status/689154627120558080

I think Atmospheric captures what I mean. That voxelmancy refers to what was originally unintended. All of the clever things we can do now with voxels in the other game was an accident. Even the dev's had no idea these various new tricks could be used to manipulate voxels. That is good in a way because everyone can see what is possible but for usability for the average player the tools themselves are more user friendly.
 
That said, for all we know we may discover unintended voxels techniques in DU as well. Voxels seem to have a mind of their own, not the big unchangeable ones like Mine craft obviously, but smaller more manipulatable ones like Space Engineers, Landmark and perhaps many others. It could just be the nature of the beast that voxels are unpredictable in unforeseen ways.
 
I know I've personally made things I like by taking advantage of the unpredictability and experimenting in different ways.

VooDoo, that is a perfect word to describe how I felt about it as well. The namesake feels mystical, magical, but not necessarily technical (and the connotations that go with magical, mystical, or voodoo seemed to embody the art of "voxelmancy")
 
I agree that people should not have to use any outlet outside of the game to find all this stuff. Had all the voxelmancy been under a single website umbrella like Wowhead is to wow, then it would not be so bad. When the sources of the tutorials span 6-10 social media outlets it becomes intimidating, which is a turn off to new players and even some veterans. I don't want to see people turned off in Dual. 
 
 

Sorry for late reply, did not see your post till now. 
 
I hope I did not come across as argumentative or being adamant about superimposing my opinion on the topic. I have been told by someone close to me that my posting often comes across as stern, forceful, harsh, rigid. I believe honesty is the best policy and my approach to any given topic is generally to impress the observed and documented facts surrounding the topic that I have witnessed. I have to make sure all my bases are covered with the work I do, this mindset often finds its way into my everyday routine....I guess I like to make sure all the options are on the table to help ensure clear and concise decisions can be made. I often ramble on as well....

Hi Kiklix and Lady_Astrum !
 
You made some very valid points there.
Indeed, "Voxelmancy" is a word that could interpreted negatively, or at least seen as intimidating, discouraging.
As we try to promote an easier way to promote voxel manipulation, well, it makes sense to find another word defining it.
 
Thanks a lot for your feedback!  "voxelmorph" and "voxelmorphing" have been noted.
We will discuss about it in the team
 
Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.

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    

Voxelmancy was the term used inside another game. Here in Dual we call it "voxelmorph".
 
Seriously though, I would like to lose the term voxelmancy and not carry it over to this game. 

Sounds great Nyzaltar, looking forward to hearing more about the voxel tools, especially the Voxel Elements presentation, sounds fascinating.

Hi there,
 
We have taken into account:
- The interest to have a voxel editor, to manipulate directly data defining the shape of voxels (also called Hermite Data Field, for those interested )
- The fact that voxel boards can be immersion-breaking in a consistent open world and the need of having a more user-friendly and accessible approach for a majority of builders.
 
There will be soon an update on several topics regarding the voxel tools.
It will cover: 
- The voxel tools operational so far (and those still under development).
- The possibility to have a Voxel Editor: Pros & Cons.
- Voxel Elements presentation: an alternative to Voxel Boards.
- Our stance on "Voxelmancy" (microvoxels, antivoxels and such).
 
We might make this update through a blog post, depending of the update size. If not, it will be posted piece by piece in this thread.
If you think something is missing on the topic, just let me know  
 
Best regards,
Nyzaltar.

I think that would depend on how the "mesh" utility was approached. Less publicized and used more as a "for advanced users" it should not affect the publics perception. That being said, the other game just uses a smoothing tool, there is no mesh adjustment tool...its all trial and error and critical thinking about how the voxels work. Oddly, this technique that stems from a "simple build tool" is much more difficult to understand and use than a mesh converter would be.
 
If we are able to move the verticies in Dual through creative use of the smoothing tool and other tools, the price of admission for "good builds" will be much much more intimidating than a  mesh tool would ever be. 
 
Lastly though, I am not really asking for a mesh tool or anything like it. I just hope I can make stellar looking stuff regardless of how it happens. 

I agree and understand the premise but I will say that I am currently making ships in another voxel game that completely outshine anything I have seen in space engineers (I also play Space Engineers), of course those ships cant fly but this is in part due to being able to manipulate the voxels. It does take longer to build, but the build (in looks) is more rewarding. 
 
I like things to be simple as well, but at the same time there is something to say about  being able to refine ones skill and continue growth in a voxel build due to being able to manipulate the vertices (I know the corners are technically "voxels" but most think of a voxel as the cube, not the corners). In the other game I play this alone has kept some of us to continue building (admittedly not that many) with very little development seen over the past year. 
 
I am less concerned about players finding new ways to make shapes with voxels and more concerned about the large workstations this often requires that ugly up the environment. 

So I got Elite Dangerous recently and at first i was considering buying a HOTUS setup, but it turned out i actually really like the flight controls with a mouse and keyboard.  Luckily someone told me to try switching Yaw to the X axis on my mouse, Roll to the A and D keys and throttle to the mouse wheel and that helped a lot.
 
I never played EVE, so i'm not sure how the controls work differently, but the flight controls in Elite Dangerous seem great to me so i hope we end up with something similar in DU.
 
I realized that i have more then 30 years of experience with a mouse and keyboard and none at all flying an actual jet or using a HOTUS so i should probably just stick with the mouse and keyboard.
 
Learning to orient yourself in 3d space is rough,  i was spinning around drunkenly and crashing into stuff for hours in the tutorial before i got the hang of it. 

I feel like a team as ambitious as Novaquark and a game as advanced as DU would doubtlessly create a beautiful and intuitive, not to mention very hands-on, flying system. Unfortunately, this also probably means that along with a Rift, a Virtuix Omni, surround speakers, and a bunch of geeky DU stuff, I'll probably also have to go find a better HOTAS as well. I really, really dislike this game's uncanny ability to cause personal bankrupticies.