NQ-Deckard

Hello Noveans, We have deployed a number of hot fixes this morning, Dual Universe is now in Version 1.0.3. The change log can be found here: https://www.dualuniverse.game/launcher/patch/release-103 Thank you all for your support!

Hello Noveans, We have deployed a number of hot fixes this morning, Dual Universe is now in Version 1.0.2. The change log can be found here: https://www.dualuniverse.game/launcher/patch/release-102 Thank you all for your support!

Hello Noveans, We have deployed a number of hot fixes this morning, Dual Universe is now in Version 1.0.1. The change log can be found here: https://www.dualuniverse.game/launcher/patch/release-101 Thank you all for your support!

Hello Noveans, Dual Universe version 1.0.0 has finally come, we're very excited to present you with the change log which can be found here: Release 1.0.0 - Change Log Thank you all for your support!

I will attempt to give a better picture regarding blueprints, what I can confirm is that in the event of a reset you will keep: Any Core Blueprints in your Nanopack. Any Core Blueprints inside Packages in your Nanopack. Any Core Blueprints inside Containers on constructs in your personal ownership. Any Core Blueprints inside Packages inside Containers on constructs in your personal ownership. If you're the Super Legate of an organization you will also receive: Any Core Blueprints inside Containers on constructs in the organizations ownership. Any Core Blueprints inside Packages inside Containers on constructs in the organizations ownership. I hope this clarifies it a little bit.

We hope everyone who attended our Fools Defense event held on our PTS on April 1st had fun. We especially did, and thanks to our fellow Noveans, we had a ‘blast’! As some of you might remember in our previous announcement for the Fool’s Defense event, there were some prizes to be had. We are pleased to announce that the winners have been chosen and the Wheel of Foolish Fortune is ready to start spinning! Which prizes will our foolish actions provide those that dare take a spin? Find out on the PTS on Saturday April 9th, 14:00 UTC for all the wheel spinning action. After combing through our logs with a fine tooth comb, we have chosen six participants whose bravery, dedication and foolishness left the server room sizzling. We are now inviting them to prove their luck and talent once again by taking the Wheel for a spin! Walter - For landing the final blow causing the destruction of the defenders station, many developers were harmed in the process. (Yes, we checked the logs thoroughly.) Copperlein - For being so good to us on the PTS, yet destroying Nautilus A’s Core, and breaking our heart. Dronko - For destroying Nautilus B’s Core, and again breaking our heart. (Et tu, Brute?) Wolfram - For being devs’ best friend by reporting bugs on our forum. Mastuga - For being such a Trooper with the amount of ammo (pew, pew, pew) they used during the event. Honvik - For forcing so many players to return to the resurrection pod. Skyreaper - For coming back to life so many times we thought they were a cat! Winners please present yourself on the PTS on Saturday, April 9th at 14:00 UTC for your chance to spin the Wheel! If you are unable to attend, a Novaquark representative will spin the Wheel in your place. Prizes will be given out shortly after the spinning of the Wheel has concluded. Please note: All players will need to go through the new FTUE on the PTS in order to participate in this event, please allow yourself enough time to go through it. Players who wish to join in the fun on the PTS are welcome, teleport over to PVP Platform 2 (::pos{0,0,2729026.2814,-98851321.2156,-1455512.2758}) where you can witness first hand the spoils of war!

Our PTS was originally scheduled to be online for Thursday March 31st. Due to some stability issues, we have decided to postpone it for an extra day. The PTS is now scheduled to open on April 1st at 9:00 UTC. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Don’t forget our PTS event, A Fool’s Defense will also be held on the PTS, Friday, April 1st at 14:00 UTC. We hope to see you there!

A new 4 hour maintenance has been planned for Monday, March 7th. From 09:00 UTC, until 13:00 UTC. During this maintenance we will be working on several back end systems during which all our services will be offline for maintenance and inaccessible: The game server The website The forums The customer support website The community portal Customer support can still be reached via email, and our Discord will remain accessible. We thank you for your patience and support!

This is indeed the current design, after spending multiple hours testing with both approaches we decided that keeping the last recorded position offers far more utility to be able to apply the same change over and over again. That utility is essentially gone and very painful compared to just hitting the home key to send the cursor back to the currently selected vertex position. As such we included keys for doing all 3 actions, returning to last confirmed coordinate, returning to currently selected vertex coordinate, and centring to 0, 0, 0. We may look into a toggle setting for this in the future and the feedback is much appreciated. You are actually able to move the selection with the arrow keys and page up and down, exactly like the place voxel tools. Similarly to the above mentioned control option to jump 4 steps in one go. You are able to mouse over a neighbouring voxel and use the arrow keys to maneuver to the vertex you want to edit before clicking to open editing mode. Sorry to say this is not something I have a magical solution for that's feasible. I'll share the zoom idea with the team. This is something we will be discussing internally. They are not permanent, if not claimed they will eventually be replaced with a new one in a new location, they do respawn at regular intervals and you can indeed replace their core and repair them before flying them away in the sunset! Not currently, but it may be implemented in a future update, as was stated to the same question during the Demeter release.

This is what territory upkeep is for. The video content was created quite some time before the change was implemented, as such the video might be slightly out of alignment. But yes, it does now require core elements to replace core units. Could you be a little bit more specific?

Yes the slots can exceed the capacity limit, in practice an organization can only have 1625 constructs due to the limit. It can however have say 10000 slots, this allows for an organization to have some buffer for gains and loses over time. We are not telling you to tear down your builds, not at all. Quite the opposite, we love seeing players buildings in the game. What we are saying is that we need you to find a way to support your builds that exceed what we can grant and support you with as a single contributing member of our community. I wish you all a wonderful weekend, and look forward to reading more feedback on monday. Sincerely, - Deckard

Following some research we found that a lot of smaller organizations tend to assign legates quite liberally. We believe that could be in part due to the inability to deploy constructs in name of an organization directly. However we found there are some inconsistencies and a new right dedicated to the allocation of constructs to organizations seemed to be the right choice. So with that, you are correct, this is a new RDMS right we will be implementing. That gives organizations the ability to grant construct assignment capability to members. This will cover both tokenization and deployment of new cores in the name of the organization. This is indeed currently the case, with the ability to create sub orgs branching from the primary orgs to extend beyond that. And thus this was also part of the problem we faced. As such we are still reviewing this at this time, and will likely monitor the impact of construct slots before any changes to the maximum player org membership are considered. Things can always change in the future. However currently, for Panacea, these numbers won't change. As I've heard some confusion about this in a few places, I'd like to take a moment to reiterate that the old organization talents that we will be refunding, do not grant you slots. They simply act as an overarching limit to the absolute maximum amount of constructs permitted inside a single organization. These talents will remain the same in terms of talent point investment cost, however the bonus they apply has been scaled up significantly. Only the legate with the highest talent benefit apply, and the organization starts with a limit of 0 constructs. The first tier of talents awards an increase of the organizations limit by 25 per level, brining the maximum up to 125 at 5 talent levels invested. The second tier of talents awards an increase of the organizations limit by 75 per level, brining the maximum up to 500 at 5 talent levels invested. The third tier of talents awards an increase of the organizations limit by 225 per level, bringing the maximum up to 1625 at 5 talent levels invested. So bringing your second tier talent to level 2, will effectively set your organizations limit up to the pre-Panacea maximum limit. I hope this answers most of your questions about the upcoming changes and brings you all more understanding. - Deckard

This would be a mixture following essentially the optimal spending of talents between your personal and organization.

It would require a legate inside the organization to have trained the above mentioned talents all the way back to the maximum. And it would also require sufficient slots from players (Members of the org or not, that doesn't matter) to be assigned to that organization. Which would mean that if every slot provider of the org had fully talented into their slot capactity, and dedicated all their slots to that organization. 17 large slot contributions could bring you above a construct capacity of 1625. Which is the hard limit beyond which a single organization cannot own more constructs. Yes Actually its 30 days. This is the case already, take a close look at the screen shots in the first devblog and you'll see what information is available there. You can even extract a JSON from the UI and develop your own tools to keep track of these things for you if you wish.

Hello Noveans, as yesterday's discussion thread was so lively, we would like to open a new thread to hear your feedback on our planned revisions.

Following the discussion around yesterday’s devblog, the community asked us to look over our figures to see what we can reliably sustain in terms of construct limits. In this communication we want to take the opportunity to outline what we have decided to change from the previous devblog as well as to explain some decisions such as the mechanics of construct abandonment and our reasons for arriving at our previous figures. These proposed changes are still being developed by our design team and we welcome your continued feedback on this major update. Organization Constructs Slots versus Personal Construct Slots There appeared to be some confusion in yesterday’s devblog between organization and personal construct slots. Personal construct slots are always independent of organization construct slots. Before outlining the details of the construct slots, it’s important to note that our position on excess construct abandoning mechanics. For the avoidance of doubt, when this change is implemented in the Panacea release. No construct will be subject to abandonment through the following mechanics for at least the first month after release. This is to ensure as smooth a release as possible, and to allow our players who want to specialize in the architectural gameplay loop or the collecting of wonderful constructs, some time to accrue talent points and to adapt. Personal construct slots: Can only be used for constructs in the player’s ownership. Can not be assigned to organizations. Are non-transferable to other players. Are gained through talents independently of organization construct slots. Organization construct slots: Can be assigned to any organization, regardless of membership. Can not be assigned to players. Once assigned to an organization, can not be repealed from that organization for 30 days. Once repealed, the organization will have until the next bi-weekly construct check to ensure that it meets its construct slot requirements. If that bi-weekly construct check determines that the organization has more constructs than it has slots, the organization will receive a warning and be required to ensure the constructs count is brought down to its capacity. If the next bi-weekly construct check following that warning determines that the organization still has more constructs than it has slots, random constructs from that organization will be abandoned until the organization is back in compliance with its slot capacity. All this means that even if you go over the available slot count, you have at the very minimum 14 days to correct it. We are keeping the random nature of selection for construct abandonment. This is because as game developers we know that if there exists a way for a game system to be broken, our players will find it. In this particular instance, given the gravity of the impact, we feel that it’s important to protect the game and our community from abuse, and the randomization is an effort to do that. We hope this clears up some of the lingering questions that were remaining yesterday. Player allocated slot amounts, why so low? Following internal research, we determined that currently per active player there are approximately 25 constructs in the game at the present time. Therefore we believed that having a total of 42 slots per player would have been enough to provide an overhead for the community to be able to distribute the available slots amongst each other and support each other's projects. We do value our players and recognise that some of you own considerably more constructs than that average, and though we want to encourage collaboration and community, we don’t want to constrain those players that prefer to go it alone. And, we’ve heard you. We are looking into an alternative approach that we feel will meet the majority of the community needs while also meeting our requirements for the long term sustainability and balancing of Dual Universe. Talent Changes We are going to increase the core allowances. In yesterday's devblog we proposed a figure of 42 total constructs. We are going to increase that through the introduction of talent changes that will require considerable time investment but keep the door open to players that wish to own many constructs. The new talents are separated into three tiers, increasing in expense significantly per tier. The new figures are (subject to change) For personal construct slots: The base personal construct slots will be increased from 2 to 10 slots without any talents. The first tier personal construct talent will grant 3 slots per level (up from 2), for a total of 15. The second tier personal construct talent will grant 5 slots per level (up from 1), for a total of 25. The new third tier personal construct talent will grant 10 slots per level, for a total of 50. This will allow for a maximum personal construct limit of 100, once all the talents are fully acquired. For organization construct slots: The base organization construct slots will grant 10 slots without any talents. The new first tier organization construct talent will grant 3 slots per level, for a total of 15. The new second tier organization construct talent will grant 5 slots per level, for a total of 25. The new third tier organization construct talent will grant 10 slots per level, for a total of 50. This will allow for a maximum organization construct limit of 100, once all the talents are fully acquired. The combination of the two will allow a determined player to reach the maximum number of construct slots that we can reasonably maintain. This will take substantial time investment in order to be a specialization within the game. We will still be refunding the following Legate based talents: Organization Construct Management Organization Construct Management Specialization Advanced Organization Construct Management Specialization These talents will be buffed to collectively increase the maximum ceiling for the organization's construct limit to 1625. If you have already trained Advanced Organization Construct Management Specialization to level 5, by reinvesting the refunded talent points, we estimate that you will be able to reach at least a construct slot capacity total of 80. Further, given the grace period of at least 1 month following the Panacea release, we hope that those amongst our players who value their construct capacity can increase it to a comfortable level of approximately 125 construct slots before needing to make decisions on which constructs to keep. We want to thank you all for your feedback and take this opportunity to recognize the passion you our community have for the future of this game. We would love to hear how you feel about the new changes outlined above in this forum.

Hello everyone, thank you for all the feedback so far. We will be reviewing the feedback tomorrow and there will likely be some adjustments. However that will have to be seen tomorrow. Keep it constructive so its useful to us and it will be seen. We will have more news on todays article for you soon.

A few clarifications: Your personal slots have nothing to do with this. Each player gets a base amount of 15 organization construct slots assigned to their account. Plus a new talent that can add 10 more organization construct slots to reach a total of 25. Any amount of these slots can be assigned to any organization of your choosing.

So this is an interesting question which I will attempt to answer to the best of my ability... I'm really fighting the urge to make the "It never was" meme here, but I'm sure one of you will do that for me soon enough. The reality here is that you never actually were making 1/8th or 1/16th slopes, you've been creating what is the closest approximation of that. In the old system, we used 253 points. In the new system, we use 252 points. This means that in the old system, a single voxel was: 84.3333333333333 (recurring) points. 84.333 also does not divide by 8, 16, 32, or 64. In fact, in the old system you couldn't really reliably cut a voxel in half to an exact precision, and even a single voxel was not precise. As for example: 84.333 / 2 = 42.166 (in reality this would have been 42 because we don't store decimals) 84.333 / 4 = 21.083 (in reality this would have been 21 because we don't store decimals) 84.333 / 8 = 10.541 (in reality this would have been 11 because we don't store decimals) 84.333 / 16 = 5.270 (in reality this would have been 5 because we don't store decimals) 84.333 / 32 = 2.635 (in reality this would have been 3 because we don't store decimals) 84.333 / 64 = 1.317 (in reality this would have been 1 because we don't store decimals) Sure, the difference is so negligible that you can't see it by eye. But that's essentially the same in the new system as the new pattern looks like this: 84 / 2 = 42 exactly 84 / 4 = 21 exactly 84 / 8 = 10.5 (in reality this would be either 10 or 11 again because we don't store decimals) 84 / 16 = 5.25 (in reality this would be 5 again because we don't store decimals) 84 / 32 = 2.625 (in reality this would be 3 again because we don't store decimals) 84 / 64 = 1.315 (in reality this would be 1 again because we don't store decimals) Now, if we had changed the division to 64 instead of 84.333 you could expect the following to happen to all currently existing constructs: A loss of precision around 25% Every existing voxel would have lost around 25% of its available detail. You would see huge changes in your designs and most existing designs would likely loose a lot of their detail. Curves would be less curvy, more blocky. But you would have access to a 1/8 slope. With the new division of 84 instead of 84.333, you can expect the following: The precision loss is only 0.395% Every voxel will look near enough exactly the same, except for a few edge case ones. You likely not see any noticeable change in your existing designs. Curves are still curvy. But your 1/8 slope might be a bit wonky, and its probably better to adjust to 1/7. In short, the precision cost of changing to 1/64 is not worth it. It really isn't. Trust me, we've looked. It's ugly. I can already see the new question brewing in your minds: Why didn't you increase it to 128 per voxel? Sure, this could increase the detail and be more divisible, however it also doesn't fit inside a single byte. So now we are talking about every single construct in the game taking up twice as much in terms of data. And if you feel your cache is big now, you really don't want to know what its like with double the resolution of voxels. We could perhaps consider introducing a pseudo 1/64 grid mode further down the road, which would give you a 1/64 grid. However it will still not actually place a vertex at a 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, 1/64 position. It would place it at its closest available position. Also, to answer the question about the scale at which the tool works. No, it will always be 1.5vx in each direction from the vertices point of origin. I thought maximum adjustment range on this image made that quite clear, but perhaps that was an error on my part: I highly recommend you try it before you cast to much judgement on it, as someone who's tinkered with voxels for a long time. I absolutely love using the tool. I find myself mostly using Grid 2 and Grid 7, using the control key to make bigger jumps. I hope this answers some of the burning questions you all have. I wish you all a wonderful day, and look forward to seeing what you will all create with it. - Deckard

But let's face it, there would just be 17 XL cores instead of the 17 L cores that are there currently with an even larger multi-core build placed there. And in the process your performance would be worse off. I'm sorry to say we unfortunately won't be introducing larger cores any time soon. For a number of reasons, most of which are technical related to performance and data. Multiple smaller cores actually have a number of performance benefits as the load limits apply better that way. - Deckard

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

Let's let this one slide back down in the pile.

I do understand your concerns, but I'd like to reaffirm that we've been very clear about the logs not being a feature and these options potentially being removed at a later date. We are not opposed to players creating wonderful digital creations that work wonders with the game, however backchanneling that data through the games logs using in some cases closed source third party created software to then transfer that to databases stored online with who-knows-what data its collecting is not the right way to create this and that concerns us. None of this means that we don't see the use cases of an API or similar data export options, and we don't know when or how yet. But it's something we can look into in the future. For now however, data exportation will in most cases need to be done via screen units on demand if desired. - Deckard

We are never out to hurt anyone, however we do have to protect the security of the game. On top of which, what you're describing above is very much not in accordance with the EULA and will see you get into trouble for it. Reading the log files alone however, does not. There are a number of other concerns, such as the ability to write directly to a players hard drive through the logs. Which is one of the primary concerns about the logging functions. We have also been very clear about this from day one when players found this function. We were not enforcing it, but it was never a "feature", and never included in the codex. I have mentioned on multiple occasions in multiple locations that the logging functions would likely one day be redacted but we would observe what came from them in the meantime. As such, the audio feature is being developed to provide a suitable replacement for the community created audio framework. To be clear, this was also very clearly stated in the patch notes. If you read them carefully you'll notice that the VR capable talents that are mentioned are the ones that count towards the generation of Calibrations. Not the ones that consume them. The camera Lua feature set does not permit a Lua script to take control of your camera. It grants the Lua the ability to read orientation of the camera. Allowing for such things as accurate "Alternate reality" HUD designs, that move with the background and allow you to have virtual "panels" around you. It does not however allow a Lua script to force your camera to look at something.

Actually, a multitude of causes and edge cases leading to this have been fixed. But clearly there may be a few more, will look into it again.