Violet

I think once people are actually playing and generating content to look at rather than a few example ships and a fake ass looking city it will get more traction. I see this as a bit of a slow burner like minecraft was, I remember minecraft back in 2009 when it was still this niche crazy idea with hardly anything just infinite blocks and a few simple game mechanics and I instantly knew it was revolutionary. Back then the community was maybe a few hundred people, it took like 3 years before it really broke the mainstream and then practically every 10 year old kid was wearing a minecraft t-shirt in 2015. Its like the ultimate viral marketing, your players are so proud of their own game creations they go on to evangelize to potential new players. I doubt DU will ever be as popular as MC but I think it has some obvious similarities, its all about creating the platform that players need to create great things, those great things then get talked about on blogs and youtube which then in turns brings more people into the fold and you get this snowball effect. Of course there are a lot of risks that could go wrong, having it be a multiplayer only game and subscription based makes it have higher barrier to entry but NQ does have the advantage of being a larger dedicated team than Mojang was for its early history. My main concern is that NQ will run out of money before they implement enough features to draw people in

From your subjective point of view it would seem like you are going faster than light, but to everyone else your acceleration would level of at 99.9% of the speed of light. You never actually reach the speed of light but your perception of the rate that time passes has changed so it seems so.

If you accelerate to light speed, you will undergo massive time dilation so it may seem like 24 years have passed on the ship but 100,000 years would have passed to a stationary observer. Physics is weird https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_using_constant_acceleration

Sounds fun! Sure I suspect smaller orgs will get steam rollered under the oppression of another organisation My point in my post is there is no way to make players work for you in the mines and the factories by force like north korea or something. You can't stop people leaving like you can in real life. This necessarily means organisations have to follow either a consensus view or have a strong leadership who is good to the members. The whole political/social aspect of this game is as exciting as the building and fighting.

For democracy to work you need a healthily civil society with buy in from citizens and open discussions of ideas. I think it will happen after a few months or a year of play time but trying to run an org as a democracy on day one would be a disaster with it boiling down to a popularity contests with the loosing factions quiting and going and doing there own thing. Unlike real life there is no way to be truely authoritarian as people can always leave and go back to the arkship, what will bind people together is a sense of a "shared investment" in the things they have built as an org and that will take time.

I really hope they go with the realistic, 6DoF with no friction but a maximum speed limit like Space Engineers does. Inertial dampening becomes a function of your flight software that you can turn off when making a long trip. I really hate the idea of planes in space behaving like they are in an atmosphere. I want to build a ship with one big engine only and flip over every time I need to make a corrective burn

No, organisations and alliances should set out there own rules and enforce them as they see fit. The way I see this working is that it will be like the naval wars of the 18th century, you might be privateer in good standing to the British but the Spanish would consider you a pirate and an outlaw. Some sort of agreement not to shoot people leaving the safe zone and "rules of war" might be welcome but that's up to organizations to decide for there members but thats more to prevent unwanted escalations.

Yes, a naive implementation would be impossible for a planet of 100km, assuming a generous 1 byte per meter cubed you would need to enclose an area of 200,000 meters on a side giving you about 200,000 ^ 3 bytes or about 8 petabytes not including all the overheads involving chunking and hermite data. You could never store that. What they are doing as far as I understand, is a combination of procedural generation and oct-tree compression. Chunks of planets/asteroid are are generated proceduraly and then only modifications are stored, so that when a player removes a bit of the terrain only the fact that a sphere at x,y,z was removed, the voxel is only "materialized" and stored on the server as "voxel data proper" when the size of the log of changes is greater than storing the voxel data if that makes sense. As for large constructs, this is where oct-tree based compression techniques come into play, you don't need to store a 3 dimensional array for every when lots of areas will have the same material or dead space, you store the data in a tree structure where each node has 8 descendant children. You only need leaf nodes when you have individual changes at the lowest resolution. This is great as it gives you LOD by only sending the top levels of the tree when the construct is far away. A good way of visualizing this is by looking at the equivalent quad-tree in 2D space, each box is a leaf in the tree, areas where it is all the same material type. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadtree

We should probably have a designated combat zone if everyone agrees to this, the mechanics of combat are going to need to be tested

Well okay, guess its been a long time since high school physics. I think my idea still stands though

I have a couple of thoughts on this topic, I agree creating a system where ramming is a valid tactic is a terrible idea but arguably having no collision damage is going to lead to stupid immersion breaking behavior like people flying into the hanger at top speed and stopping dead when they hit the back wall without any consequences. At its simplest the the equation for kinetic energy is E = M x A, this is real world physics. My suggestion would be to generate collision damage purely on mass and decreases in velocity when a collision occurs. I'm assuming that mass is something that will have to be calculated for the flight model and we would know the velocity before and after the collision. There would be two parts: 1. A G-Force threshold that would "gib" any players in the construct. An instantaneous change in velocity of more than 25m/s would be fatal to most people this equivalent to driving into a concrete wall at 60mph without any breaking. Something like 40g, at 100m/s you are unlikely to find any bones, just a red paste 2. Damage that is distributed to the hull and elements: Using E = M x A, calculate damage energy to be dissipated in the construct. You could have a offset that removes a certain amount damage energy so that you can land without damaging your ship and perhaps the presence of shock absorbing landing feet could increase this offset (so long as contact point is on the foot element) The rest of the energy would be converted into hit point damage and applied by removing voxels expanding out from the area until all the energy is absorbed, different materials can absorb different amounts of energy. If this was still too complicated you could just have a simple HP bar for ships but that's kind of lame. In this scheme, stationary "static" constructs are totally invulnerable to collision damage this could have some weird consequences but I would argue its an acceptable trade off. I'm not sure what would happen if you tried to "push" another players ship using yours, potentially you could limit damage to deceleration so the pushed ship would accelerate a bit from the collision and take no damage whilst your ship would decelerate slightly to conserve momentum thus taking damage. This could potentially be devastating if you trying to push at high speed. I think this is pretty do able, it is based on very simple variables, I'm just not sure if there are any gaping holes in the idea that I cant see.

Should be something that's controlled by your flight software with a sensible default. Didn't put forward thruster's on your ship? good luck stopping without atmospheric drag hehehe. For really long journeys you are probably going to want to have some sort of auto pilot so you can get out of you seat and do stuff in your ship while you wait. As for logging off in a moving ship, I think its obvious that your position should be recorded relative to the current construct you would have too many issues with having multi crewed ships to have it any other way. What I'm worried about is velocity caps, I hate games where you are limited in space to something pitiful, it feels so cheap, makes sense on a planet, you have air drag to contend with but in space I want to be able to accelerate indefinitely or at least ludicrous speeds.

Latest news was Alpha would be "first half" 2017 meaning march time at the earliest

As far as I understand the TU disables the hand manipulator tool, you can still "dig" by using explosives, although thats going to be pretty resource intensive.

Having no claims around the ark means the area is going to become a mess of low quality buildings that nobody can remove or destroy. Having it reserved by Nova quark is probably the best idea, then they can put whatever things they want in place to welcome new players

Oh defiantly, I think locating and gaining access to a large deposit is going to be quite a feat so people are going to want to protect their investments by building an outpost around the mining site and doing all the refining there.

My thought's on the corpse runner scenario: Sure you can try and suicide run my town to run down the ammo in the turrets but after the first time you damage my property you are going to be flagged as hostile and "kill on sight" to the turrets and everyone in the town militia. Good luck, my ammo and fuel stock piles are a lot bigger and automatically replenished by the friendly traders and miners who come visiting to trade and the resources it takes to kill you are certainly a lot less than the cost of the respawn and your discarded equipment that is now scattered across the no mans land where you dropped it on your many deaths. You won't make it closer than 100m to the town perimeter, before you are perforated meat

And I will be there with a warehouse full of stockpiled resources in the safe zone ready to capitalize on the inevitable spike in demands for goods

Mining is certainly going to be the bottom of the pyramid in terms of the structure of the economy but there will always be money in trading and providing security against bandits. Replace services with security, and banking and finance with org administration.

Emergent gameplay: You now need to take your org leader to court to sue for damages when they decide to demolish your house to build a missile defense turret.

Well alrighty then!

Except when you decide to bulldoze jimmies house you have to deal with a real life human that is now pissed off and making a fuss ...... ah politics

1. CvC obviously 2. Expanded range of building materials (variety of woods, metals, stone) and associated rare gather-able materials like marble being a rarer luxury building material. 3. Waypoint system, let us create waypoints and then be able to give them or sell them to other people 4. Player customisation, let us take of the space suits and wear "normal" clothes for RP purposes and emersion. 5. More survival aspects, food gathering and cooking mechanics 6. Player "graphic" elements, let us upload images and put them on the side of constructs as logos or to make signage to direcrt other players

I think this is the most interesting question that's left outstanding by NQ, I don't think any other game has ever had a fully player run economy before. Personally I like the idea of having no "official" currency and having players get by with barter and then let organisations issue currency later on. Would certainly be interesting to see what happens. Another idea is you could have "literal" money faucets that give you a small amount of money when you click on them with a cooldown, it would help keep deflation under control as as people have more money there will be a break even point at which its not worth the time to sit there clicking on them anymore and then as the economy grows and deflation kicks in it will become appealing again. It doesn't help if inflation happens but that's not such a problem.