LtKlap

On discord yesterday I asked where I can see center of lift/thrust, and learned something disappointing: it doesn't exist. Apparently all thrust and lift is generated, by default, at the center of mass and you can opt in to these elements producing torque. Essentially, by default you are opted out of basic physics in order to make ship building easier. This makes as much sense as allowing people to opt out of air resistance or gravity, but I do understand why it was done: making a workable ship should be somewhat simple, and these concepts can trip people up.
 
There are two issues with this however:
1. Why is torque disabled by default, but the inertial matrix is exposed and used for rotation commands? These mechanics are of a similar difficulty, so it does not make sense to me to have one and not the other. Especially with how strong adjustors are, forcing people to opt into torque should not be too arduous, considering the default lua can just balance the torque with adjustors, and if you have a massively unbalanced craft you can just paste adjustors everywhere.
2. There is no incentive for opting into physics, for people who want the added challenge. Deciding to opt into torque is all downsides with no benefit.
 
It's the second issue I want to focus on with this post. Assuming that torque will not be forced on by default in order to make naive ship building viable, there needs be a real incentive for ship designers to opt into torque. This can take the form of bonuses to thrust/lift, drag, and/or fuel efficiency when all engines/airfoils have torque enabled. This lets ship designers who want to sell ship designs to opt into the extra difficulty of designing a ship with these elements, and they are rewarded with a more effective design. I think this would be a reasonable compromise between allowing easy ship building, and allowing people who want to take on the extra difficulty a way to differentiate their designs.

NQ, Spanish speaking people are a huge language majority in the world, 580milion people speak it worldwide and probably you have 500-1000 players who have overtime checked out your game who either speak spanish and other languages but spanish is their main, or only speak Spanish, you also have other major languages not supported like Russian, probably japanese and there are others that speak XYZ that need a localization. 
 
thank you,
 
ELX, BOO guy

I suggest NQ to give us a way to contribute for the translations.

I am sure the player base would love to help them with that.
There is a ton of tools for that, I have been using Pootle in the past and it works perfect.
https://pootle.translatehouse.org/

Hello, we talk with us Org and another spanish ORGS, and it will be amazing to have the game in spanish, for first and fundamental idea, DU go have too many spanish players playing if the game have spanish Option!.
  If NQ needs help translating to spanish, we can help. Du have ingame 2 important gaming orgs (spanish) playing, and we are able to help with translating. Don't make the same mistake like CCP with EVE online, they negate us the game in spanish all time and that makes condition to us, always be a minority or very tiny Corps (orgs here).
 
Best Regards - Lt Klap - FWS ORG -
 
 

+1 up

it's a big barrier entry barrier and would love to help out! Like Klap we are also part of an all Spanish speaking org and would really want to help with this. It's a 400 Million people market, 2nd most spoken language in the world....that's a big chunk of a player base that could be added to the game. 
 
 

Hello, i was on one of the ships crashing the SW pvp event and generating content, was a lot of fun and i really hope that NQ brings more opportunity to do more pirate themed stuff
 
GF AC, and all who attended
 
see yall next time
 
-EL X
 
a statement from our leader:
"Hello everyone, Sylva, leader of Band Of Outlaws here.
 
This thread, the official DU discord and the Memeserver have all gotten a lot of traffic and I thought I would drop by and leave some of my thoughts here for you all. I acknowledge and understand that the Star Wars fans who created the event feel that we, BOO and some of our allies, when crashing their event yesterday, "ruined it." And yes, Skilo has it right when he says that we did it because we could. Those of you who are arguing against the Star Wars IP being in the game... well, tbh, I love Star Wars, it has inspired more than one generation of space dreamers, and hopefully, many more to come. That having been said, there is more to this story (and hopefully, for the story of Dual Universe). 
 
We originally had someone sign up for the Star Wars event who was building a legit PvP meta Star Wars ship. At the time, I was advised that we were also giving info to the Star Wars group on how to build PvP meta ships, and that advice was generally not followed/heeded. As the date loomed closer it became apparent that the ship, according to our standards, was only about 10% complete, and so our member withdrew from the Star Wars event. 
 
We then heard that ATOM was being paid to provide security for the event, and that was when we decided to party crash it. 
 
The thing is, when you look at what Dual Universe intends to be, a civilization building game - there should, in my opinion, player made safe zones in which events like this could be held in. This is an event that you would hold in the heart of an area that has an enforced edge of space, so pirate incursions would be few and far between (and not be without repercussions). We very much support this. We expect to be hunted down because of our actions. We will be disappointed if we aren't. 
 
We already don't hunt the small fries. We already do not pursue freighters and small ships. We have historically only hunted the larger org tagged ships. Our groups already PvP against each other. We haven't done a PvP event since the End of the World event in December. Since then we have only had solos and small groups go out for PvP, which has still been few and far between. Mostly we have been doing the same as everyone else, recovering from the .23 patch, mining, industry, and building more ships. We got bored. We crashed the party and ruined a lot of hard work, and for what? Some laughs... and hoping to fight some ATOM and some hopefully buffed Star Wars capital ships. 
 
As to the idea of waiting for DU to grow more... you may very well get what you request. BOO has diversified our gaming interests. We are playing Valheim, Starbase, and Last Oasis in addition to Dual Universe now. Don't worry though, we're still around and will still be active in Dual Universe. We will sporadically come out and throw down. So try to be prepared for us. Build meta ships. Bring your friends. You don't know when we will strike. 
 
Prepare for the changes that are coming. " - Sylva, on page 5 of this thread

There's are reason why meta is considered cheating in RP. This was intended as an RP combat event. Griefer orgs... whatcha gonna do?

How dare BOO PvP in the PvP zone. How rude of us to play the game according to the rules set forth by NQ.

BOO bois BOO bois whatcha gonna do when they come for you?
 

Nice DsyncWar, but very fun event, tons of shoots!! i love it! #GOBOO

Nice DsyncWar, but very fun event, tons of shoots!! i love it! #GOBOO

0.23 and What We Learned

In reading through the reactions from our community regarding the recent 0.23 update, we’ve gained some valuable insights. 

Before we talk about the changes we’ll make in our processes going forward, let’s get back to the fundamental reason behind the update itself. What we did in 0.23 is at the heart of the vision for a game where a society of players is interacting directly or indirectly with each other through an elaborate network of exchanges, cooperation, competition and markets.
 
As it was, the current state of the game consisted mostly of isolated islands of players playing in almost full autonomy. A single-player game where players happened to share the same game world but with little interactions.
 
It’s hard to imagine how the appeal could last for more than several months for most players once they feel they have “finished” the game. It is also a missed opportunity to try something of larger proportion, a society of players growing in a fully persistent virtual world. For this to work, you need more than isolated gameplay. Players need to have viable reasons to interact and need each other.
 
In many single-player space games, you have ways to make money, and the game then offers you ways to convert this money into whatever you need in the game to progress, mostly via markets. This is the state in which we should end up for Dual Universe once all the necessary ingredients are in place, You get into the game, you farm a bit of money in fun ways, and you buy more and more powerful ships, equipment, weapons, etc., to help your character grow. The difference is that here, the ships or equipment you buy have been made by other players, instead of the game company. On the surface and during the first hours of gameplay, to a new player it would look similar to any of those other space games, but it would in fact reveal itself to be much deeper once you spend a bit of time in the game. Everything you would do would be part of another player’s or organization’s plan, everything would have a meaning. And soon you would realize that you too could be part of the content creation and, somehow, drive the game in the direction you want.
 
In its current beta stage, DU doesn’t have enough ways for people to make money because we haven’t yet had the opportunity to implement all of the necessary features. There’s mining, of course. Trading is not as good as it will eventually be because markets are not really used to their full potential. As a consequence, players rightfully turned to a solo or small org autonomous game mode. 
 
We tried to nudge people out of this with the changes introduced in 0.23. While necessary, many players expressed that the changes of 0.23 came too soon because it lacked a variety of lucrative ways for people to make money outside of mining.

What We’ll Do Now
 
The vision expressed above still holds. We want people to consider going through the industry specialization only if they intend to become industrialists and not necessarily to sustain their individual needs; however, we understand that it’s too soon to press for intense specialized gameplay considering the lack of sources to earn money. 
 
Here’s our plan for now. We will modify the formula of the schematic prices to make it considerably more affordable for Tier 1 and still challenging and worth a commitment but less intense for anything Tier 2 or above. 
 
This will allow most factories focused on T1 to resume their activities rapidly while keeping an interesting challenge for higher tiers, spawning dedicated industrial facilities aiming at producing to sell on the markets. We will also reimburse players who have bought high-priced schematics since the launch of 0.23 (please give us some time since it may take a few days as we go through the logs).
 
We will keep monitoring the price of schematics to see if it makes sense to increase or decrease the costs. The right approach to set such a price would be to evaluate how much time it takes to recoup your investment by selling the products that the schematics allow to produce. It should be a few months so that the investment is a real commitment and it makes sense to plan for it.  We currently lack the metrics to properly assess this return on investment time. We need a player-driven market price for the components and a market price for the products to assess the profit made by each run of a schematic. This will come when the markets start to work as intended, and we can gather more data about them. 
 
Feedback and Testing

The release of 0.23 also taught us that we need improved ways to test new features, both internally and with community participation. The Upvote feature on the website was a good start, but it’s not enough. 
 
To address this, we have two courses of action that will be taken. The first will be to set up an open public test server, hopefully with shorter release cycles, for players to try out new features. This will also allow us to explore ideas and be more iterative. If all goes according to plan, this test server should be introduced for 0.24, the next release. It will mirror the content of the production server with regular updates to sync it. 
 
The second important initiative is to revise the role of the Alpha Team Vanguard (ATV), getting them more involved in early discussions about new features and the evolution of the game. We are still defining the framework, so more information will be released as available. 

What is to Come
 
In the short term, we will push a few corrections to improve 0.23, which include:
 
Ships will now stop (be frozen) when their core is destroyed in PvP, making them easier to catch. Element destruction will impact the restoration count only when it occurs through PvP, at least for now (not when the ship is colliding/falling as we want to avoid having players penalized simply for crashing their ships because they’re learning how to maneuver them, for example). Recycling of un-restorable elements through a recycler that will take an element as input and grant a small amount of the schematics required components as output.
The next major release is already in the making and will be about the mission system, a first step toward giving players more fun ways to earn quantas. We will reveal about it shortly so that we can get as much feedback as possible.
 
We also want to reassure you that the mission system is not the only answer to offering more varied ways to earn revenue in Dual Universe. Things like asteroid mining and mining units will be introduced in the next few months. 

This list is by no means complete, but should be a good jumping off point that gives players reasons to fight and to explore, opportunities for pirates, new ways of making money, and a plethora of other activities our creative community will think of even if we didn’t. 

That’s it for now! We want to thank you again for your support and patience as we progress along this beta road! See you soon in Dual Universe!

Want to discuss this announcement? Visit the thread linked below:
 
 

FWS will be there...