[Traveling cities?]

A floating city would be great, especially if it had guns on the underside and could destroy another city it floated over. But I guess cities will be safe zones. Maybe it can just sit down on top of it and crush it. That's not really an attack, is it?

[I LIKE TRAINS (no seriously)]

I am already planning a point-to-point transportation system. Since I will have storefronts in multiple places both planetside and spaceside, and since those storefronts will be in places near resources and in towns and stuff, a fast transport system between town and unique areas and resource areas will be essential, all for a very small fee.

[Skill trees]

well I mean, you can go to the store and buy a guitar, strum on it and make sounds without any training, but you actually need to learn the chords to find it useful, is my point

 

And that would be training a new skill. Being able to strum is not a skill. learning the chords and how to play is developing a skill.

[Did our Solar System survive the Nova?]

/* Conspiracy Theory */

 

That's just what they want us to believe. 

 

In truth the Neutron star was a giant Illuminati conspiracy perpetrated to get all the world governments to build massive Arkships for them to escape an overpopulated and polluted planet. 

 

All of the Arkship passengers had their memories wiped so they wouldn't remember the true reason for their departure, and so they might have the opportunity to rebuild civilization without bringing the weight of their past with them. It was also a safety guard against anyone who might be a traitor to the cause. In doing so they underestimated the true nature of man though.

 

Through playing the game and exploring we will discover ancient alien artifacts that point towards the existence of a massive alien civilization somewhere in the past. 

 

Eventually we'll all discover that the "Aliens" weren't alien at all, and that they were actually the last remnants of a long extinct human civilization that had gone into the stars in search of the Arkships. 

 

/* End Conspiracy Theory */ 

 

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

[Skill trees]

Skill trees have been used successfully in many games for a reason: They make sense and are effective. Plus, they mirror how we learn in real life. 

 

@Toecutter, I wouldn't want to have everything available at the beginning. It doesn't make logical sense, although I can see an arguement for it all being downloaded into our heads by out computer caretaker.

[Drugs, slave trade, and other fun things]

Just remember, any good white market has a good black market lying underneath. Come and see me once these contras start showing up.

[Abandoned]

I'm not above dealing in questionably acquired goods. Come see me after a, ahem, salvage.

[How will you prevent people from getting harassed, trolled and griefed?]

To quote the splash page:

 

WHAT IS DUAL UNIVERSE?

Dual Universe is a sandbox first-person MMORPG set within a seamless Sci-Fi universe made of millions of planets. The world is entirely editable, and the game focuses on massive scale emergent gameplay based around exploration, voxel building, trade, politics and warfare.

 

My read on this is that it is completely possible to play the game without PvP action, even in PvP zones. All it requires is that a player choose not to attack another player. That is the freedom of choice. That also means that it is possible for a player to venture into PvP territory and not have another player attack them. It doesn't mean that it is what would happen, only that it is possible. 

 

The fact that the devs are designing different ways to make an area a safe zone without it starting as such indicates they realize there will be a need for new safe zones, but making safe-zones means taking away from PvP territory which isn't fair to PvP players, but which does make sense as civilizations go in the real world. 

 

If you want to stay safe, the only way is not to venture into PvP territory. If we decide to do so, that is the risk we take as part of the game. But, being attacked isn't a guarantee.

[Agriculture,woodcutting etc in Dual Universe]

 

To me it basically boils down to this, the player should not be incentivized to log off. If a player feels they cannot sit around just chatting with their friends ingame, without interacting with the game in any other way, because doing so actually punishes them that would, in my opinion, be VERY bad for the game. The easy solution to this is making the food requirement low enough to be trivial, but then why have it in the first place.

 

As for the idea of having the player consume food even when they are logged off, that just punishes people who have to be away from the game for extended periods of time, which in my experience from games like this is going to be punishing enough anyway.

 

That being said food is a reasonably good way of going about an upkeep mechanic, making sure people need to bring supplies to support any effort they are undertaking. I think there are better ways to go about it though, that feels less punishing for the individual player. For example fuel, life support, ammo and many many more things and I expect there will be multiple such things in the game.

 

That said I am not against food as a thing, if for example we have npcs in the game I can see food being part of their upkeep mechanic, and I would love for agriculture and forestry to be in the game just like I want mining to be in the game. I'm just againt using it as a survival mechanic.

 

I think you have some key points here. 

 

If the need for food / water were low enough, then it shouldn't be a great sacrifice to every few hours have your character stop and grab a ration or meal to refuel. Meanwhile the player can get up and take a bio-break and get some food or something themselves. The in-game mechanic wouldn't take more than a minute or two, if even a minute. If they allow the hunger to build, the character starts moving slower and becomes less effective in their skill and combat use. But by every few hours, I mean something like four-to-six hours.

 

This would be minimally invasive to players who want to log on and chat with their friends without actually doing anything else in the game and minimally invasive to people who have to be away from the game for a long period. But to this last statement, it depends on how the devs want to deal with off-line time and hunger mechanics.  IMO, it is best to simply suspend it while a player is off-line. Hunger / Thirst would be a measure of in-game time and not real-world time.

 

To make it more meaningful, tie the decay ratio to exertion so that the more a character does that requires movement and energy expenditure (or would in real life), the faster the decay. But we are still not talking about immediate death by starvation. It becomes a preset gradient of penalties regarding decreased movement, skill efficacy, fighting ability, etc based on in-game hours and each level would be based on the normal decay rate times the exertion decay rate. A character that experiences minimal exertion would be able to go say 48 in-game hours before passing out from hunger / thirst. The momentary passing out would be a final game warning mechanic to get food in the next couple of hours. Each "meal" would reduce the hunger / thirst level by one so if there were five levels, a player could spend up to five minutes game time having their avatar eat five meals to get back up to normal, though perhaps with some bloating. If the player has the character full-out active, then the numbers drop in half and the 4 - 6 hours become 2 - 3 because of the exertion (the exertion multiplier would be set so it could not more than double the normal decay metric) and the 48 hours becomes 24. But then again, these are in-game hours.

 

This also creates a meaningful economy for players who want a character participating in the agriculture / food processing / food trade mechanic chain.

[Solo ... Team ... how much of both?]

 

Though to be fair, I would far rather have ten or so people who have similar play-schedule to myself, who are competent and whom we can do stuff with, over massive thousand player alliance where few people know each other and trying to organise or "command" any group is a major head-ache. 

 

I agree. The more people involved, the more complicated an organization gets. However, it does allow for their to be more members on at any given time with which you can "team up." However, this kind of team up might be with people you don't know and hence you do not know how they are going to react or act in a given situation as well as people who you play with regularly. I like smaller groups of consistent members just as you suggest.

[A New Life - Part Five]

Aphelia finally let me out of the freezer. She had slowly warmed me up while she trained me and pumped nutrients into my body, a frail shell of what I had once been. But then we all looked like that, barely human, mentally vacant, and emotionally spent. Huddled together, our bodies thawed out, we were raw, and scared.

 

The ark was relatively warm compared to the freezer, more of which were opening every minute spilling out the human meat cargo they carried and had kept alive for thousands of years only to deliver them to an empty planet with only the words of a computer for safety. Yeah, welcome to Utopia.

 

I looked at the other meat skeletons. I didn’t know any of their faces. If I had, I wouldn’t have recognized them. I sure as hell that none of them recognized me. Ten thousand years is a long time to hold a grudge, but there were those that might. My dealings had not always been on the up and up.

 

When you owe money and you know how to circumnavigate security systems, you start taking jobs that you might previously have considered morally objectionable. But you justify it to yourself: Just this once; Just until I get out of debt; just until I have a little extra—then you stop questioning it because the truth is, we’re all going to die and it’s not going to matter who has what or how they got it. What is it the saying: Possession is nine-tenths of the law?

 

But who was the law here?

 

We had no possessions, only ourselves. I was sure the first murder would happen that first week. Maybe not murder, but the first death from fighting over possessions. You really can’t have law without government and there was no government nor would there be for some time to come. Government requires reason and people operating on basic fight or flight rarely use reason. I saw that before we left Earth. And why we waited for that first fight, the first death came within the first hour as someone decided to just walk off the top of the ship.

[Hiya folks! :)]

Nice to see another Scot. I'm from Inverness.

 

Welcome

[How do you plan your ships?]

Spit, Bailing WIre, Duct Tape.

[Item Degradation]

Sometimes I post things even though I know they are going to be an unpopular topic because I still think they are interesting to think about. 

 

Item Degradation is one of those topics.

 

 

I wonder if items in DU will decay over time, perhaps requiring repairs by using elements (repair machines) that could only be operated by someone with the appropriate skills. 

 

I should specify that this idea is specifically about items that your character carries; armor, guns, tools, etc. 

 

It's pretty much a given that we'd expect ships to take damage and require repairs over time. 

 

 

Would using an item cause it to decay in quality over time, or would it have to take damage to decay over time? Would dying possibly cause it to take damage? 

 

This fits well into my thoughts on quality and efficiency. A component or object can be as efficient as any other that serves the function, but the rate of failure or degradation lowers the quality. When making or purchasing an object or component, you get to make the choice of purchasing a higher quality unit for a higher price, or a lower one. Same with efficiency.

[Food and Water]

I plan on setting up a canteen where people can sell what they have killed or have grown at a rate higher that the ark-rate and buy processed and consumable food and drink for less than the ark-price. That will provide income for me and will provide a higher income for the hunters / farmers and lower the amount it costs them to eat. It will also allow me to gather information about good hunting grounds, geography and topography do I might be able to trade or sell maps. 

[Signature Blocking]

Look better, this is an Invision Power Board forum, and you can disable ALL signature as wanted.

 

 

Major thanks. Been trying to find that myself

[Inventory, Cargo and Storage.]

"It's called hauling and for large amounts or long distances, freight hauling. While I do support finding something for new people in Dual Universe to do, I wouldn't trust a new person to haul my precious cargo. How many people value their integrity in the real world, talk less of inside a game. For small amounts, where there's little to lose: sure, help them out and give them a job. But whether it's ships or food, I don't play nice with people that steal my goods."

 

I trust people until the give me a reason not to. Then I hunt them down and take back my goods, my money, their ship, their clothes, and strand them on Ceti Alpha V.

[A New Life - Part Four]

I spent a week listening to Aphelia speaking in my head telling me about psych profiles and aptitudes. She said I was appropriate for ground or ship maintenance. Just what I went to school to do. But she was looking at aptitude and not reality.

 

Interesting that I started thinking of the voice in my head as a she. Can a metallic voice have a sex? Can a computer be one or the other? I think it is natural to think of inanimates as the opposite sex. It was a comfort and an affirmation of the self. At least it was for me.

 

Aphelia told me about Kyrium and the things I could build with it. Of the tool I would wear and use to manipulate the miracle substance. She showed me a utopia. That was a mistake I think. It was going to be a struggle. We would be protected close to the ship, now useless for flight but still useful as a base and provider, for a time. It’d be a miracle if most of us survived the first year. Hell, we didn’t know how long a year would be. But Aphelia told us that too.

 

Homesteading would be hell, not utopia. At least that I believed at the time. Experience has proven I was right. Too many refugees trying to eek out enough food and water on a planet we didn’t know, a planet with its own dangers, its own predators—which included us. Earth showed humans destroyed whatever we touched. Funny, we thought destroying our eco-system would be our end. It wasn’t.

 

When I was a kid, I learned about nomadic tribes and the migratory cultures that existed before man learned agriculture. We’d have to do that. I learned about the wheel and the lever, Galileo, gravity, the solar system, all things we’d have to do again. But Aphelia was guiding us, at least for now. I thought that would make us week. We needed to learn from ourselves to make our mistakes and find new ways to do old things, and new things that neither we nor Aphelia could have thought of. But then what of man?

 

Even at the end, Winston had fallen to our predatory nature. Even after our destruction was known, we still gave in to greed and violence, natural states for some. There would be no room for avarice in utopia. We would have to work together for the common good. But could we? Could mankind put aside basic genetics? Could we contain our instincts that told us to fight or flight? In the end, it had still come to fight. So many wars. So many lives. Would we do better? Utopia? I doubt it. More like Purgatory.

[Greetings from Germany]

welcome

[A New Life - Part Three]

If we were supposed to dream during the Long Night, I don’t know, nor do I remember any dreams I might have had. But the week thawing out gave me plenty of time to dream, to consider my past and to consider the future. Considering the present didn’t matter. We were all human popsicles thawing in the freezer.

 

My life was neither blessed nor privileged. And I didn’t live the best of lives. Gambling and speculation left me needing cash too often and the banks had standards I couldn’t live up to. They called me a high risk. My mother died my first year of university. My father followed a couple of years later. The money left from their life savings and life insurance paid off my last year of school and set me up for a meager living. Work would supply my livelihood.

 

I didn’t enjoy university. The deaths of my parents left me in a depression and although my then girlfriend tried, but I pushed her away. By the time I realized, it was too late.

 

I had studied mechanical engineering at university, minoring in electrical. I had always been good at taking thing apart. Sometimes I could put them back together. That was the unfortunate part. I had great theory, but I couldn’t make them work. There was something missing. No one keeps you long if you can’t fix what you broke. And my side jobs couldn’t keep up with my growing gambling debts.

 

Banks wouldn’t talk to me. My savings were more than gone. I owed money to all the wrong people and they were coming to collect, only their type of collections didn’t always require money. With hell raining down on us any minute, people still worried about getting what they were owed. They weren’t going on an ark. Why did they care? That’s when I ran across Winston. For all I knew, it could have been the collectors that left him there. I wasn’t going to be Winston. I wouldn’t be a nameless victim. A little blood. An eye. A chip. I would go where they couldn’t find me.

[How are you going to play the game?]

lol. The 30 jump flight from point a to point b?

[Mapping, Cartography and sharing a location]

 

JC:

Unlikely, because that would divide the community, so, so far the plan is we give them one."

 

I know, but it would still be cool.

[DevBlog: Builder gameplay, Voxel Tools & Elements]

This will be the challenge. In order to mine enough resources for the game to be viable you will need to be able to go out into the big bad world and get back to the safe zone with your ore. Getting owned on the way home is why minecraft anarchy servers look dead with everyone hiding under ground. Not everyone can afford to hire an escort cruiser; though that is part of the end game logic of the games organisations. 

1. Camouflageable or stealth mining ships. Slower with less combat capacity but hard to see and easy to hide when landed. 
2. Including the basic world textures as textures for voxels in buildings and craft so you can pretend to be a lump on the terrain. No one here but us asteroids. 
3. Ensuring that a hidden craft can't simply be tab locked on at random by spamming tab in an area. IE. Planetside 2 times out such spamming, q key.  Those name tags need to toggled on and off at the owners end at least as they leave the safe zones.  
4. Mock lootable inventories are also a possibility. IE the looting player gets generated loot (just as the miner gets ores from his ore seam ) but not the contents of your ship. They can hold you up and loot you without actually stealing your stuff or significantly damaging your ship. However is that really PvP or even really PvE? 
5. Valuable debris (the s is silent in that word) Shooting a  PvE  ship blows off fake bits that are lootable, valuable and needs to be chased. The ship is damaged but not destroyed. It may go "stealth" for a while so it can get away. This may bust immersion. Subs in WW2 used the fake debris trick to play dead. It worked often. 
6. Decoys. All ships are just meshes in a server why not pop a decoy on a low load server section? Now the hunter has two identical targets to chase. Both seem to take damage. Some decoys may be even able to fire back. Which do you chase?
7. Giving mining vehicles the ability Warp or jump at a lower altitude in a gravity well than combat craft so they are not ambushed in orbit easily. This would need some interesting lore. 
8. The miners may need remote transfer systems; like an ender chest. If you break the thing you loose access to the contents but you don't destroy the owners access to the contents. I would restrict the range of this but at least Continental or perhaps planetary. This may bust immersion.

I'm sorry I can't write the software for these features, a dyslexic programmer is a bad idea, but once in game I could make some nice decoy craft. 

 

Really good ideas here. I like it.

[DevBlog: Builder gameplay, Voxel Tools & Elements]

 

Builders air. I'm an advocate of adding different kinds of "air" to a voxel game to simplify the code: Breathable, toxic, vacuum, smoke, lit, etc.  

 

I like this idea, although not the starter planets. But once we start to explore, one gets to decide after all this travel whether to start settling a planet with a corrosive atmosphere and be forced to wear hazmat suits or whether to move on. Or, what if it had a corrosive atmosphere, but with atmo-scrubbers to provide breathable air, building underground or underwater would allow a suit-free area. 

[How are you going to play the game?]

 

As much as I'd like to be part of large organizations, I tend to get frustrated by all the rules and bureaucracy. So I'll probably end up being a vagabond, taking up jobs here and there travelling as a crewmember on whoever will hire me going out into the stars.

 

Either that, or I'll be a space trucker. 

 

Space Trucking was the best time I ever had in Eve Online, despite how boring it seemed on the surface, I rather enjoyed kicking back and just quietly flying towards my destination 20-30 jumps away. 

 

That sounds like a mix of group and solo play, especially the last as solo.