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Violet

Alpha Tester
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Posts posted by Violet

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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  :D

  5. Very cool, I never thought mining would ever be this involved! This is a good thing, most mining in games is very grindy the scanning mechanics give it a refreshing twist.

     

    On question how big are the biggest ore veins going to be? I heard some really big numbers suggested that would mean that it could take many weeks to fully mine the largest veins, I think this is great as it add a requirement for organisations to build mining outposts and defend them against people who are looking to take advantage of the effort they expended prospecting and digging down to the vein.

  6. 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. 

  7. 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

     

    image002.gif

     

    quadtree.gif

     





     

  8. 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 :D

     

    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.
     

  9. 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.

  10. Quite possibly there will be ways to set up infrastructure to support large mining operations. Like transport and containers to store the ore and so on.

     

    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.

  11. 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

  12. I think it's fine, ofc I'd love to have CvC from the beginning, but is not a big deal. There's no risk it would break the game as op says, for various reasons. The game after CvC will be quite different to the one we will play before, i like that, a gameplay that changes over time. I can already imagine that people will stack materials in order to build the new elements for CvC the days before, people with fighters ready to mount weapons on and maybe the first real war that someone will try to surprise their enemy. I usually focus on the economy and character progression when a MMO starts (while I PVP only after that), doesn't really matter to me much if I have to wait a few months. 

     

    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 

  13. 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

  14. 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.

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