Violet

You break into Novaquark's headquarters in a daring overly complex and elaborate stun, like a combination from all the Mission Impossible movies, using a team of six highly trained professionals working outside the realms of any government. You then spend the next two months on the run from authorities, hard drive in hand, as a world-wide fugitive. Most of your team would likely be captured and/or killed during this time. Several cities would also suffer severe damages, with hundreds of thousands of innocent bystanders killed as collateral damage, throughout the climax of your many brushes with those seeking you out. 
 
After faking your own death while simultaneously assassinating the lead investigator who is absolutely psychotically obsessed with capturing you through any means possible, you will then finally be able to live out the rest of your days in hiding, but in relative freedom. Crouching over an old computer in a caravan that you move from place to place every night, parked in the middle of the desert and powered by a diesel generator that you have to constantly fix every half an hour, you can finally enjoy the fruits of your labour in what is currently the in-development version of the game.
 
Hope this helped shape your plans for the next immediate (and long term) future.

Making all of these plans and forming orgs/crews before alpha is fine and everything but it seems like nobody has heard the old saying "No plan survives contact with the enemy". 
 
I suspect what will happen is that there is going to be huge upheaval and change when people start playing the game as the material realities hit home. I always have to laugh when I look at orgs that have appointed admirals of the fleet, its amusing... I mean what fleet will you be commanding you have no ships yet!
 
A lot of of these larger orgs are going to loose members pretty quickly when people realize they are paying taxes for protection that has yet to exist.

Making all of these plans and forming orgs/crews before alpha is fine and everything but it seems like nobody has heard the old saying "No plan survives contact with the enemy". 
 
I suspect what will happen is that there is going to be huge upheaval and change when people start playing the game as the material realities hit home. I always have to laugh when I look at orgs that have appointed admirals of the fleet, its amusing... I mean what fleet will you be commanding you have no ships yet!
 
A lot of of these larger orgs are going to loose members pretty quickly when people realize they are paying taxes for protection that has yet to exist.

Making all of these plans and forming orgs/crews before alpha is fine and everything but it seems like nobody has heard the old saying "No plan survives contact with the enemy". 
 
I suspect what will happen is that there is going to be huge upheaval and change when people start playing the game as the material realities hit home. I always have to laugh when I look at orgs that have appointed admirals of the fleet, its amusing... I mean what fleet will you be commanding you have no ships yet!
 
A lot of of these larger orgs are going to loose members pretty quickly when people realize they are paying taxes for protection that has yet to exist.

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

I want a billboard element that you can upload an image into, animated would be nice but not critical.
 
Obviously this introduces some avenues for abuse/porn but its such a valuable idea that its worth the cost of having to moderate it a bit.

Setting up small land parcels, basically defining a volume that someone can build in is a a must otherwise its going to be really hard to have "cities" in any meaningful way.
 
You could even have a hierarchical system where owners of a building/ship/station could define spaces for individual room/apartments/warehouses that could be rented out.
 
I hope that NQ is thinking on the same wavelength here, it seems like something that would be coveded by the "Rights and duties managment system"
 
Everyone is going to want a apartment/house/warehouse in the ark zone so there is going to be a serious need to be able to efficiently subdivide and rent out areas

Newbro housing:
 

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

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.

Could we at least get a small safe inventory space on the ARK ship for storing stuff in the early game?
 
My concern is that as a kickstarter backer when the game goes live I will have a whole stack of DACs in my inventory and no safe way to store them. I wont want to leave the safe zone untill i have stashed my valuables somewhere safe,

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
 

 

 




 

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.

I'm thinking its just a construction demo.  The video wan't intended to show off the flight model, and I don't believe the FM has been implemented yet.

maybe someone pointed this out, but the constraint isn't collision detection but syncing the changes in real time to all the clients and calculating where the damage applies and deformation.
 
In space engineers, it is as cost prohibitive as it comes. You have to not only detect the collision, but how it deforms the voxels that collide then all the subsequent collisions as the voxels continue to collide since you don't want a collision where a small voxel completely stops the ship and bounces them off, you want it to deform and become destroyed until the inertia is halted. This is an immense amount of data to try and keep real time. So basically a single collision is like 1 calculation. a space engineers collision is like a thousand separate calculations due to deformation as you calculate the effects of voxels on other voxels independently for each voxel.
 
Depending on how they are coding the game, from what I understand floating point calculations are not predictive between different hardware so they can't just sync the player input on each client and have each client reach the same result, different hardware will reach different results so they have to continuously update clients for anything that requires those type of operations to stay in sync with the server.
 
I'd want a balance if possible, I can handle not having deformation from collisions but I still want collision damage of some sort. I don't know if their "constructs" support deformation or partial destruction outside of build mode and I suspect they don't as a performance saving measure.
 
My idea would be to figure out a way to calculate partial construct states, basically have a system that after finishing a build calculates a model for partial collision damage on lets say from 18 or so different directions, or 6 different directions with 3 levels of damage. so basically the model automatically degrades based on precalculated models that can be generated based on the voxels you made the construct out of.
expanding on that, have precalculated deformation states to mix between the damage states. So basically where there is "bend" between each damage state so it gives the appearance of some basic level of deformation and is easily calculated in real time by the clients and synced.
 
All you need is both the constructs locations relative to each other and come up with as efficient a solution as possible to determine which of the 6 angles is closest.

Dunning-Kruger was inspired by a study about a bank robber who thought that lemon juice would make his face invisible to security cameras because it's used as invisible ink.  To go straight to the Dunning-Kruger effect is to assume that this guy is in the bottom quarter of the general population IQ-wise, which seems a bit much.  It is true that nobody here knows your education and experience in gaming and game development.  Would you care to provide us with your credentials?  
 
I'm a software engineer with 17 years on the job and in my opinion, while realistic collisions would certainly make for better cinematics, there's a lot more to calculate than a simple bounce when two collision meshes intersect, and based on my experience in big data cloud environments (medical IT, not gaming), nobody can know what the server load would be unless we actually simulated 100,000 simultaneous collisions.  And the amount of coding to get there would delay a lot of other deliverables, so it would be a considerable risk.
 
The developers also said they don't want people creating ramming ships that are kamikaze'd into exquisitely engineered, well designed constructs because they think that would make the game a lot less fun, and that would make people stop paying for subscriptions, so in that regard, this is as much a business decision as it is a matter of judgement in design.  Even if characters didn't resurrect, there would still be a problem where players would create new characters who's reason for existence is to drive an iron brick with an engine and a cockpit into another ship while yelling "Leroy Jenkins!"  
 
This is a management-level decision as much as a design decision, and I really don't think this hill is worth dying on.  Collision damage would be fun, but so would weather, planetary rotation, agriculture, animals, alien biospheres, a survival system, a FPS aimed combat system and a hell of a lot of other things we're probably not going to get until later, if at all.  I'm not saying collision damage would be bad, or it couldn't be made to work, but computer science is partly the art of giving up something you want in order to get something else you want more.  Is collision damage the most important thing to you?

My feelings? Not really. I'm just saying that if you want to be taken seriously, you need to structure your input in a different way, that's all.
 
I don't care if you have a piece of paper that says you're qualified or not, I care about whether or not a proposed model or criticisms of that proposal make sense and are logical, or not.
 
Oh and griefing will happen in a sandbox game, just about any mechanic can be used in that way so that's kind of a moot point, isn't it?
 
 
To bring us back on topic, here's my take on actual implementation:
 
So we know they must have some form of collision detection in place regardless. Why? Because if you don't detect when objects collide and take away their velocity or whatever your intended behavior is -- the objects will simply pass right through eachother.
 
We also know the bounding boxes used will have to be at least somewhat sophisticated(read: concave hull of some kind encompassing the voxels belonging to the construct), since the devs have said they're planning on having ships be able to enter things like bays in other ships, which won't be possible if you use a concave hull type of bounding volume.
 
I'd also assume that they'll implement collision physics of some kind, regardless of whether they have damage or not, since without collision physics, the whole "passing right through everything" thing still happens. The simplest model (barely even counts as physics) is that when two moving constructs intersect, you just zero the components of their respective velocities that point towards the other construct. In this model, objects that come in contact would sort of just slide off of eachother, or if they were moving directly towards one another, they'd simply stop. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that that would be ridiculous. A more sophisticated model involving forces, torques, momenta, angular momenta, friction and so on, would be required to have something that resembles real life. So if you want a ship to settle down flat on its feet when you land it, or if you want to bounce off of the surface you fly into too fast, you need physics simulated as well.
 
Given those two things, all you need is a damage model, which can range from very simple to very complex, with corresponding increase in computational cost.
 
A model on the simple end would do something like take the intersection point (already calculated) and apply damage in a sphere with radius proportional to velocity (maybe the square or sqrt, doesn't have to be linear, can have low/high cutoffs etc.) centered on that point. This would require very little calculation, but things like reads and writes to datastructures corresponding to the voxels and what have you would depend entirely on their implementation. Overall, if they do things "right" this model wouldn't have much larger impact than anything else in the game.
 
A step up from that would be to have falloff in the sphere based on distance from the center. This is not a big increase in complexity (I think it'd be O(n)).
 
To give an example of the extreme of the spectrum, you'd have things like material strength properties (tensile, shear, compression, all of that), you'd maybe have springs to simulate stiffness of the construct. Pieces could break off if they have enough force/torque exerted on them, you could have collisions within the different pieces. You'd also simulate tension in a rotating construct, where the tensile strength of the voxels and the angular momentum of the construct would determine whether it holds together or breaks apart. In terms of complexity and computational costs, this model is off the charts. It's almost certainly impossible, unless you make an MMO that's all about breaking things in realistic ways.
 
Between those two extremes exists a continuum of possibilities, each of which would have to have its viability assessed on a case-by-case basis. So unless you're refering to a specific model, don't come here and say "that's not possible" without even defining what you're talking about, you only demonstrate how poorly you understand the topic. Thanks.

Actually it would be nice if there was a movement bonus for traveling over roads.
 
That would add incentive to connect settlements, would make navigation easy and it would look super cool.

Maybe if NQ claimed some space around the ARK, they could showcase some community voted buildings from alpha or beta.

You really can't compare the DU economy (or government) with the real world economy, they have different goals.  The real world economy involves real people and the goal should be to most efficiently allocate resources justly among those people.
 
DU is a different story; the end goal of the economy should be to create the most enjoyable time for all players (regardless of how much time they can devote).  It's a game.  The point is to be a game.
 
The only way to balance gameplay to allow new players to join is if they are able to gather resources at a fairly comparable rate to all veteran players.  Otherwise, the game will shrivel and die because new players will not be able to compete; they would be at the mercy of the players who control the resource gathering.  
 
While it is very true that the DU economy will be very inefficient; the goal isn't efficiency; the goal is balanced gameplay.  Futhermore, an efficient economy that allows maximum resource gathering would eventually allow organizations to build a nearly limitless fleet of ships and cities.
 
I would like to see a distant expansion allow some mining elements to give a slight advantage at resource mining; but this should not be in the game initially.  Also, elements shouldn't allow a player to mine when the character is loggen in but inactive.

Welp, simple, you attack a player without having a bounty on them, get a red-name indication. Players may have rulesets in their organisations for defenses to auto-target PK-red people. Who knows.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1949863330/dual-universe-civilization-building-sci-fi-mmorpg/posts/1705499
 
WOOT!  

I trust that alliances who coordinate these larger efforts (there is at least one major alliance planning a larger city) are capable enough to handle that all with minimum standards and quality assurance - at least.
 
E: There's plenty of tools that help with planning the layout and whatnot. You don't even have to be specifically invested - if nothing else helps, go play a bit of Simcity or Cities: Skylines to get inspiration.

Yeah I think this is a good idea, there is precedent for it with star citizen. The majority of pledges to them came after their kick-starter finished, selling access to the beta or allowing people to fund the extra stretch goals is basically zero risk to NQ