Majestic

Pollution and destructive forces that we create ourselves on each planet would definitely be an interesting thing.
 
Maybe that could bring in the days of terraforming, where you need specific gases and things to run a giant orbital machine that re-structures the composition of an atmosphere and allows us to safely work there again.

Alternatively, maybe there should also be a preventative measure that you can place on the planet that runs in a similar fashion, uses far less of the gases and minerals but runs a balancing program to balance the planets ecosystem out. Eventually you could use this technology to make planets viable for us use (and abuse). 

Or as stated above:
 
We just save the planet by running preventative measures.

OK this will be where I have the most fun.
I have already proposed several overlapping compatible bits of lore. Here I list and integrate them.
This has several assumptions: they could not just go to mars or alpha centuri or tau ceti because the neutron star is huge and is cutting a swathe though space 40 to 100 light years across. Secondly the Arkship in the games back story is not going to the nearest target safe system others scored that one. Thirdly not all the starting game play technology: Safe star gates, probes, some force fields technology, is known to the people coming off the Arkship; some of it may have not been invented when the left Sol. Hence the need for training and discovery.  
Someone tried to leave early, jumping the gun with prototype FTL technology. It went wrong but they survived, damaged genetically but survived long enough, before dying out, to leave artefacts, technology, some enigmatic AI or strange uploaded version of themselves. Something with a memory of man and a desire to help but little understanding of the Arkship's occupants. They have 9000 years head start but this means they have 9000 years to fall into ruin and your as hard to understand as a Neanderthal. Many stayed and worked on projects to help the travellers. Doing vital research that could not be done on a ship and was not finished before departure. Some of their results were beamed to the arkships so they have technology that was not known when the pioneers went into cryo. These are long dead hero's who stayed and died so others would succeed.  Some of the solutions could not be sent to the cryoships in time, they were out of range, so they sent smaller faster relays to deliver the new solutions. The result is basically the same as 1 and 4 but with more AI in play.  One of the ships sent to the closest safe system to Sol arrived hundreds of years ago and survived long enough to buy time, a few hundred years before the neutron star caught them. They have FTL, gates and much better technology. They either used option 2 and 3 themselves before building a new faster arkship and heading off or They set out again by probes and gates to catch the Arkships. Because of the quirks of relativity they can not contact the Arkships directly or match velocity, but they can place things on various worlds to help and welcome them. Their chain of stargates have been destroyed behind them lest strange effects from the neutron star can propagate though them. 9000 years has distorted their mission a little or on some worlds shattered it in war and disaster. They are now space nomads leaving advanced tributes to their sleeping gods.  Not everyone slept on the Ark ships some continued working, living, dying, on the ship, but their children survived. Hence all the corridors. Some are helpful and part AI, some are still human. When the ship landed they slipped away or slipped into the embarking crowds. They have the same technology etc but have a few new technologies developed in transit. However these children of the ship see the earth as a distant legend. There is also a language gap for them, they have no word for tree. They are secretive, seeing the sleepers as alien and fragile. They have been warned not to reveal themselves for that may destroy the sleepers moral and sense of destiny. In this context the children are just Dev's and hand picked players not NPC's but never really seen. They conspire to help. Some may plot to hinder. 

This in SF parlance is the FTL greets STL conundrum. It is as old as the Traveller RPG way back in 1977 but no one has developed it fully. 

The universe of SF has enough ancient aliens and extra terrestrial gods.  Lets make the humanity both sides of the first contact equation. 9000 is a long time. 

I asked in another thread if our Solar system survived the Nova. The general theory on that is that it didn't but the conspiracies are simmering away, there is a possibility planets survived but were swept off their orbits and scattered.
 
Presumably if we had the technology to make the Arkships we would have had some experience at colonising planets alot closer to earth in order to experiment and develop the life-support/ propulsion tech the Arks would be using.
 
So you potentially have a colony of humans either adrift on a displaced planet or stranded on an Alien world as their homeworld is gone. 
 
After 10 thousand years, if this colony manages to survive it would have evolved and to us would probably appear to be Alien.  So I guess even if there aren't going to be any 'aliens' of a different species there could at least be a different type of humanoid.
 
Ofc watch Einstein get involved now and mess up the whole time/space part of this theory

/* Missive redacted to insure historical accuracy and prevent confusion.*/       --- Aphelia.

- Different types of teleporting pads/gateways with different visual effects and sounds.
- A music system that will play music from the players library.
- Battlescarred elements, or just the battle scars.
- Neon Signs.(or a neon paint for player created signs).
- Npc 'extras' as you would get in a film. Ability to give them basic pathing routes and animations/themes. (Beggar, drunk, security, shopper etc).
- Tv screens with various videos on, don't know if you could get them to show youtube vids.(on/off function).
- Roads/pathway surfaces.(thats probably just paint).
 
hehe.

A generic Sol unit per planet would do for the days. As for the year, I would say something like year 1 of the second age or as said a PA prefix.

I would like to see invisible(or small enough) and very elementary active elements such as:
- invisible hindges, rotation axes
- invisible translation rails
- invisible sensors
- invisible particules box
- ship piloting seat without cockpit
- engines reduced to mechanic parts without hull
- cockpit ui elements separatly
etc...
 
all those to be able to customize better the look of my creations, not be constrained into a variation of possibilities

This is a key feature of the technology and it is where landmarks microvoxels started but there is a catch. If you create a lot of these odd shapes it must record more data per voxel: orientation, smooth level, centre of smooth, off set if you use that. It turns into a lot of data per voxel and too many such odd voxels will load slower. Landmark solved this, I believe, by turning the most common microvoxels into independent meshes. 
 
For those that don't know how these non minecraft voxels work read these wikipedia pages. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_cubes and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_tetrahedra 
Someone has maliciously deleted a key paragraph and pictures from the Marching tetrahedra wikipage degrading it badly. 
 
Many people use the Marching tetrahedra now because marching cubes has a hole but that hole should not be a problem in a 25 cm voxel system. The hole would be 12 cm, too small for a player or anything with a bounding box greater than 12 cm to fall or glitch though. It would be visible though. It is easily fixed if you are using the right lookup table. http://i.stack.imgur.com/i4Yyt.jpg
It is caused by the 3 to 6 ambiguity. 
http://users.polytech.unice.fr/~lingrand/MarchingCubes/algo.html
Minecraft builds a mesh over the voxel but the mesh is centred on the voxel. For the smooth voxels we see in this game and a dozen others the voxels appear to be at the cubes corners.  
So when you place a cube of material you are defining all 8 corners to be that voxel material when you place a wedge, two are defined as air (orientation says which two).
In the kind of complex shape fragments Majestic is talking about, only three or four voxels are set to polymer and the rest set to air. It can be simplified by referencing two materials and the cube configuration, one of 12 orientations and a smooth curvature +/-. If it's marching cubes you also need a test to look for the hole and add 6 more cube configurations to plug it.  
What JC is doing looks simple but there are pages on code under the hood. In every game memory is always lacking and bandwidth always limiting. 

A generic Sol unit per planet would do for the days. As for the year, I would say something like year 1 of the second age or as said a PA prefix.

Spacebook and Emitter social media sites in game

If a player makes a ship and kills X amount of other players in that ship, there must be some automated way of keeping track of your kill count. Once that number is reach you get the option to rename your ship 'millenium falcon or enterprise' whatever, makes it unique.  you get 1% off repair cost/resource gain etc,  per player killed after reaching the kill count up to a maximum to keep it sane.
 
If you don't want to take part in it then don't rename your ship, once its renamed that specific ship will always be known as that until it's destroyed. Once that ships destroyed the ship is gone along with the title.  The player that killed you, gets a perk to his own kill count because he killed a named ship, even if they didnt know it was a named ship, just get an alert on the kill saying it was.
 
Someone trying to max out their bonus or gain a title maybe more careful with their ship in combat as a result and combat wouldn't just be a flat out deathmatch.
Or even mingle these reknown ships with the game lore. Whatevers the most fun.

It's not for the player its for their ship, once the ships destroyed its back to square one no title, bonus repair/reward reset, new ship new kill count.

MMM,  power to exile a player from a territory, thats a good idea. Piss too many players off and you get blacklisted by several Orgs and can't go to them either. Yes in a way that would relieve some of the stress.  Still...

As Einstein said, and this is true story : "Pay-to-Play is the only thing keeping the Universe together ~ George Washington"


Please don't make the game Free-to-Play, because as the industry has proven, every game going free-to-play ends up being ignored after 3 months of its release because it's consider another rip-off "generic koean MMO big-boobs female models" MMO that came out Korea's MMO factory-assembly machine.


As we are lucky, their crank on that machine has broken as of late and the flow has halted. Thank you Black Desert for that, perhaps you put the nail to the Korean MMO genre coffin. Lineage 2 kept you one foot out of the grave for all those years.


So, make the game Pay-to-Play.  Why? Because, as our adversaries on the Free-to-Play front have done, I'm going to providei inaccurate statements that may seem legit.


a ) Pay-to-Play helps NASA : Have you ever looked into NASA's budget? Neither have I, but I can tell with certainty, that they have aliens found and locked up in Area 51.


b )Lizard poople ruling the world . Have you seen one? EXACTLY, they hide very well.


c ) Who let the dogs out? UH?! Woof, woof-woof woof-woof!


d) The fact 15 USD is a researched price of subscription that in 2004 seemed affordable and on this day, with all the inflation goin g on, is actually costing more like 8 dollars in 2004 money. But hey, don't stop economics science stop you.

As you can see, my years in drinking beer over my blood-alcohol level capacities, lead to some pretty constructive criticism of the Fre-to-Play model.


In all seriousness though, we need access to Area 51.




If any Free-2-Play people has anything to say, see this video first. Spoiler alert, I'm a Honey Badger.

Whatever communication method is used, please for the love of Ice Cream put in some kind of spam block function from the word go, one that preferably is editable so you can block phrases, words, account age etc. This is always left out in games releases.

I liked the idea of Ultima Onlines PvP.  2 Identical universes, one PvP(with an eerie atmosphere) the other PvE,  You would freely travel between the 2 realities using portals. That way you could keep the non pvp side for trading and knowing you were stepping into the pvp side wouldn't ruin the thrill as the world is just as big and full pvp ruleset.
 
You could also have some sort of Pirate/Bounty rewards on either side, if someone with a murderous past goes to the PVE side then he would be fair game to be attacked by anyone but couldn't attack anyone without incurring the wrath of local peace keepers.  Achievements etc for getting a kill on both sides maybe, something fun.
 
Feats performed in the PVP reality as with all games would offer slightly improved rewards for higher risks.
 
We could have full pvp and pve. Blackholes as the portals?