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And there will be organizations that will provide new players the information needed to make those first tough choices and to teach the basics with player made tutorials. This will happen. It won't happen immediately (sorry new players at launch) but it will happen as soon as possible.
 
Kurock
CSYN Chief of Development

Still, adding in a way to create/access external databases and services would be a great supplement to the ingame economy. Players could then create things like zkillboard or eve-central.com, services which pull data from the game to help everyone function more efficiently.

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

The complexity and expense of TU's will basically limit their use to large-ish organizations which will lead to political borders as in RL. But will there be some mechanicism that allows "private ownership" of land? That is, if an organization wants to rent out smaller parcels of its 1km TU to individuals or companies (e.g. a government allowing private land ownership within it's borders), what might that look like in-game? It seems like there should be some kind of mechanism that facilitates that, right?

With craft being such a huge part of the game, are there any thoughts on things like animated signs as elements, that you could edit to show different vehicles/wares your selling.  Or will this purely be done in a standard market interface and a big list of items/prices?

I'm not prone to blindly drink Kool-aid offered by people I don't know personally. I am simply asking for an official (read: from NovaQuark) statement on whether or not alpha/beta will indeed be subscription-free or not.  That is not an unreasonable expectation, considering they are asking (and I have pledged) 100 Euro for said alpha access to the game. Just because the alpha/beta standard in other games is free does not mean it is the same for DU, which will have *significant* server-side cost overhead compared to most games.
 
Please forgive me if blind chants of "It is known. It is known." by community fans isn't enough for me, I mean no offense.
 
$150k of $500k from kickstarter blown on always-on servers over two years only leaves a healthy $7,000 annual salary for each of the 25 employees, not including any of the other expenses. Yes, the point of the kickstarter is to generate klout for loans/investments from other sources.  But even 2.5 million additional funding only barely covers a modest salary (if they average at 57k) for each of the current NQ team. Again, that doesn't even cover other expenses, such as office leasing.
 
Without an additional source of revenue, the business model doesn't hold up very well over the course of 2+ years of additional development. That might get them to launch, but not if there are delays as there always are in development.  Even developers have to feed their families. 
 
I would be ok with a partial monthly fee during alpha/beta, but only if they are up front about it.  Again, this is not an unreasonable request from someone pledging financial support.

@johan26:
To make a few things clear (before closing this topic that was ongoing for too long):
 
1) Arguing the fact that the limited success is just due to the monetization model is a very very biased statement to justify a point view.
True, it had an impact, without a doubt. But if there was a calculated factor to reduce the amount of players interested, it was this one. We don't want to publish a "mass market" game to apply to any kind of player. And it's also just a matter of financial viability: Dual Universe might the first MMORPG to use cloud technology to host the game universe and it will have a cost per player. Yes, Dual Universe will be a niche game, but with a community probably much bigger than all those against the subscription model can imagine: Free to Play and Buy to Play have shown they weren't perfect models or the ideal solution for every game. In short, there are not the prophetized evolution as they were presented. There are just alternatives, and alternatives that make sense in specific cases. As it is now, they're are not the models that make the most sense for Dual Universe. Plain and simple.
 
2) If you don't see other reason for the slow progress of the kickstarter, here are a few that are quite obvious:
- Dual Universe was nearly unknown 3-4 months ago. Visibility takes time. A lot of players that can be potentially interested are not even aware yet of the game existence.
- There have been a few recent events (notably one very ambitious Sci-Fi game made by an indie studio that promises a lot more than what has been really delivered) that generated - understandably - a lot of distrust to the genre and we happen to have started the Kickstarter campaign in the middle of that. This is very unfortunate, but we couldn't reschedule the kickstarter campaign for later. So we have to deal with it.
- There have been several kickstarter projects that have disappointed recently, generating - again understandably - some distrust to the crowdfunding model.  This didn't help to promote the game either. We still think that Kickstarter is a powerful way for indie developers to finance their game, even if there are projects failing. It's not a perfect model (no one is), it's true it can be improved, but it's a model that need to exist, just because it's a relevant model in many cases.
 
Failure shouldn't make loose faith in a model or a genre, especially when there have been also many success, but this is something only players can decide on a personal level and the mood nowadays tends - unfortunately - to see the bad without seeing the good.
 
We hope this will have answered most of the questions on the topic.
 
Best regards,
Nyzaltar.

You have this problem in minecraft because inventories are incredibly unrealistic and you can also destroy matter by dropping it in a fire or lava. So people tend to strip mine because there is no penalty for having tons of cobble stone in the inventory.
 
I hope they go for the more space engineers type system, that you cant really destroy matter so you either have to build warehouses full of rock or dump it back into the world, people will still trash areas but having areas that are that "mined down the bedrock" would not happen because people would need to fill in the hole with waste material because otherwise they would have to take it with them.

Oh man, I didn't mean to start a flame war here. If you were going to do an air simulation I would do it as a on/off type deal an area is either pressurized or hard vacuum, actually simulating air flows and such would be crazy!!
 
If you wanted to know how I would implement it it would be by calculating "regions" of null space on a vessel that are enclosed and are constrained on macro grid of say 50 by 50 voxels. Each region would maintain links to all of its neighboring regions and a link would be dependent on say a door open/closed state. Each region would have a binary air flag, operating on this to determine if an area is enclosed would be simple enough and does not have to be update every single tick.
 
Of course actually implementing all this would take a long time and to be honest considering how honest Nova quark are about even basic features not being in the initial release I think I would like to bump this waaaay down the priority list

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,

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,

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,

I want to build a frontier trade outpost and saloon.  It would be cool to bring people together in game and start a township on the edge of explored territories and watch it grown and progress overtime, fighting off bandits and eventually developing our own customs and politics.
 
The way I see it, without NPCs or fast travel the only place to get equipment will be the ark and the only place to get resources will be the frontier, people will be forced to work together or spend hours and hour hauling inventories of unrefined ore back to the auction houses at the ARK.

Oh man, I didn't mean to start a flame war here. If you were going to do an air simulation I would do it as a on/off type deal an area is either pressurized or hard vacuum, actually simulating air flows and such would be crazy!!
 
If you wanted to know how I would implement it it would be by calculating "regions" of null space on a vessel that are enclosed and are constrained on macro grid of say 50 by 50 voxels. Each region would maintain links to all of its neighboring regions and a link would be dependent on say a door open/closed state. Each region would have a binary air flag, operating on this to determine if an area is enclosed would be simple enough and does not have to be update every single tick.
 
Of course actually implementing all this would take a long time and to be honest considering how honest Nova quark are about even basic features not being in the initial release I think I would like to bump this waaaay down the priority list

Oh man, I didn't mean to start a flame war here. If you were going to do an air simulation I would do it as a on/off type deal an area is either pressurized or hard vacuum, actually simulating air flows and such would be crazy!!
 
If you wanted to know how I would implement it it would be by calculating "regions" of null space on a vessel that are enclosed and are constrained on macro grid of say 50 by 50 voxels. Each region would maintain links to all of its neighboring regions and a link would be dependent on say a door open/closed state. Each region would have a binary air flag, operating on this to determine if an area is enclosed would be simple enough and does not have to be update every single tick.
 
Of course actually implementing all this would take a long time and to be honest considering how honest Nova quark are about even basic features not being in the initial release I think I would like to bump this waaaay down the priority list

Uuuhhhhhhh huh
 
In the same post you stated that this specific mechanic needs to be complex, while also aknowledging that you don't know how hard it will be to implement and for the server to track.
 
If there is enough depth with other mechanics, there doesn't need to be a complex pressurization mechanic. Space Engineers has complex mechanics, and no more than 4 people can play on a server without it being basically unplayable (in before "its cuz of bad netcode"). The more needlessly complex mechanica a game has, the more it detracts from the primary gameplay mechanics.
 
Like "sorry the contract and economy systems don't work at all, but this air pressure mechanic is great right" is not what we want to hear.
 
This is an MMO not a survival game, and air pressure sounds like a survival game mechanic. It would be a really neat survival game mechanic, which is why its complex in Space Engineers, because that is a survival game.

The way I see it happening is that there are likely going to be specialist markets based around the types of goods looking to be brought and sold.
 
Someone might operate a refinery with an attached market unit buying ores at one price and selling refined metals at another with no fees
 
There will be specialist metal exchanges where people buy and sell moderately refined metals that take a lot of space but aren't really much of a target for pirates, who steals a ton of nickel?? These will be fairly common.
 
Then there will be high security, high value commodity markets with thick as hell walls that sell the sort of low volume high value items that pirates love and they will have top of the line defenses and well paid 24/7 police patrols watching them, these are likely to be super rare.

The way I see it happening is that there are likely going to be specialist markets based around the types of goods looking to be brought and sold.
 
Someone might operate a refinery with an attached market unit buying ores at one price and selling refined metals at another with no fees
 
There will be specialist metal exchanges where people buy and sell moderately refined metals that take a lot of space but aren't really much of a target for pirates, who steals a ton of nickel?? These will be fairly common.
 
Then there will be high security, high value commodity markets with thick as hell walls that sell the sort of low volume high value items that pirates love and they will have top of the line defenses and well paid 24/7 police patrols watching them, these are likely to be super rare.

If I remember correctly, JC said if they did do it would be something really simple like having an atmosphere generator element that projects a sphere of air around it at a fixed distance.
 
Doing the checks to see if a given point is within an enclosed hull is really tricky, although of the bat I can think of some optimization strategies that could make it possible its a really complicated system that does not add much value to the game.

What's stopping people from building a competing marketplace next door?

Well, a wheeled vehicle can be implemented by attaching non-physical wheels to a hover vehicle constrained to the height of the wheel. They'll have them if they want to and it won't lag anything.

An MMORPG is different than an MMOFPS.
"Traditional" isn't necessarily a factor.
But, the primary difference between an RPG and an FPS is that an RPG focuses on the skills of the character while an FPS focuses on the skills of the player.
 
In an RPG, my character skills can compensate for my lack or precise aiming in an FPS. That could be via more skills that rely on AoEs or skills that provide Stealth or Roots or Snares, etc.
In No Man's Sky, I think Phase Cannon upgrades provide soft-locks that aren't available without the upgrades. I like the various upgrades I can add to my multi-tool for greater combat efficiency with the Mining Beam and especially the variety of ways I can alter the speed or impact or field of damage with the Bolt Caster.
 
Dual Universe will have a "lock and fire" system.
I haven't heard the devs discuss how we will aim to achieve that lock.
They haven't mentioned tabbing through nearby enemies to lock a target.
 
These days, many people prefer action combat aiming like that in NWO or even Wildstar over tab-targeting.

You can resolve this very quickly by having any purchased DACs not exist in the game until the player goes to an ark ship terminal or uses the game menus to "release" them, it could be as simple as "You have 20 DAC on your account would you like to activate one now or transfer them to your inventory?"
 
Obviously if you are going to sell them on in game market you need to release them to become an ingame item with all the risks that are involved with that but if a player is purchasing DACs for themselves from NQ for personal use there should be no risks, its to important

You can resolve this very quickly by having any purchased DACs not exist in the game until the player goes to an ark ship terminal or uses the game menus to "release" them, it could be as simple as "You have 20 DAC on your account would you like to activate one now or transfer them to your inventory?"
 
Obviously if you are going to sell them on in game market you need to release them to become an ingame item with all the risks that are involved with that but if a player is purchasing DACs for themselves from NQ for personal use there should be no risks, its to important