Violet

I love it !

I'm worried that this game will be a grind fest if NQ don't get the game loop right. I hated EVE because 80% of the time I was pod mining with a corp which was really dull. I really like the idea of prospector specialization it mixed up the dynamic.

This is great, I think a "creative mode" pre-alpha test is a smart move for NQ. Scaling and performance have been my greatest concern so testing that and getting a load of people to build a bunch of stuff lets them stress test the game engine and their server architecture. If they waited to get the mining done it may take a long time to find any show stopper performance bottle necks due to the need to build up inventories and production chains.

Good to hear. I've always been concerned that this project was too ambitious and they would run out of money before reaching enough subscribers to make it viable. Got really burned with Starforge back in 2014 Really hope that we are still on for September!!! The waiting and the slow drip feed of 5-minute videos every month is killing me.

Context is everything It's basically a give and takes, depending on how people play it will dictate how hard NQ will bring down the law. Obviously, there is a minimum legal requirement put on them by the law in France, child porn and death/gore is definitely going to be a bannable offence. If a bunch of players decide to be provocative and push the limits there will be a push back, if players are more chill and create some risqué content but keep it to themselves in their own bases then It will be fine, but the same content erected at the ark ship might be breaking the rules. NQ has been very clear, this is a game for adults, children are not allowed.

I think it's kind of badass that there are going to be areas that are just utterly wrecked. My experience with games like this is that there will be utter devastation at first as every player digs up the area around the safe zone to get started and bootstrap the economy. After a couple of weeks, there will emerge some sort of group either a specific org or a loose alliance that will start to manage the land usage of "ark city" even before anyone gets a TU. New players are a valuable commodity, I see the ark city zone emerging as a recruitment hub for the major org's. These players will be very keen to present an air of professionalism so they will probably go around and tear down any low effort builds as it reflects badly and generally make the starting zone a nice area. That said, immediately out of sight (over the relatively close horizon) I imagine there will be a belt of abandoned and devastated structures as those "solo players" who either didn't want to get recruited or just want to feel out the game solo set up their first structures. This will be prime griefing turf for bandits predating on newbies. Really it comes down to how much people care about their views of the scenery, which in my experiences is a lot. Expect wars to get started over people obstructing others peoples vistas!

Can we get bigger versions of the screens and perhaps make the background transparent so I can basically have flat holograms floating in space? You know this is going to be used for billboards, people are going to have these everywhere advertising their shop or org or whatever. Limiting displays to SVG is smart move, it's still immensely powerful but it makes a bit harder to put porn into the game

Will Dual Universe have gravity in space? Will I be able to orbit and navigate the curvature of spacetime like kerbal space program? Will planets rotate and have orbits? or will they be static? I remember last year in one of the dev diaries they said they were looking into this but weren't sure if it would be possible. Has there been any update or could some from NQ fill us in?

Can you find out how many of those have pledged? That might be closer to the real number of players

Almost certainly yes, more likely you will have to pay though to get the good stuff

Not "space bucks" then?

I don't buy this argument that we don't need roads because we have hovercraft, I've been playing the latest NMS updated and just because you can hover doesn't make it that much easier to get from A to B when you have trees, rock, ravines and mountains in the way. If you have 2 places that people will regularly want to go between people will start clearing a path, building bridges over ravines and digging tunnels to make that journey easier and faster. Building a road then is the next logical step even if it's just a cosmetic thing to indicate that "yes, this is the way to San Jose" you are not lost. I don't know how the hover engines we have seen will work but its safe to assume your fuel efficiency will be better going along a nice flat road than up and down and dodging trees all the time

I am now very interested!

Will be pretty funny when you in a crowded area and everyones shopping trolly bots keep crashing into each other :D

If you look into the real world processes required for turning raw ores into usable metals it's of course really complicated with different processes like calcination and electrolysis. Not just heating things up in a furnace and melting it. Given NQs focus on taking mining mechanics and making them into an interesting gameplay I hope NQ do something similar with refining. Of course any player should be able to build a simple low tier "smelter" and get usable goods but there should be a mechanic where an org or individual investing time and skill points can build larger more complicated refineries to get greater efficiencies, higher grade metal's and all the advantages of economies of scale. To get decent results from refining people should have to specialize and trade, having to build refineries are going to be the core of the first settlements. Perhaps you general purpose smelter that anyone can build will only give you a 40% efficiency and produce a lot of waste "slag" You would have to build dedicated blast furnaces for each ore and then put it through another refining process to get a pure metal

Going to assume they are embedding an existing web engine like WebKit rather than writing their own. If @NQ-Nyzaltar could confirm that, that would be a great start.

Yes.

I think everyone needs to remember that they are not going to be throwing open the doors to a whole galaxy of planets on day 1, they are making the deliberate decision to slowly drip feed new planets by having this stargate system. It's not like NMS where there are quintillions of planets that all feel the same. From what I have seen so far the starting planet Alioth seems pretty interesting with a bunch of different biomes and I heard it's going to be 200km in diameter which is a lot of area to explore so I think people are going to be pretty happy and find the terrain that they want. As for the future, I think that they are going to put a lot of effort into making sure that new planets opened up for exploration are interesting and unique, tweaking the generation algorithm based on player feedback.

This is fantastic, really interesting this visualization works really well and you can quickly make some clear judgments about the state of the community. 1. There is a "Neutral Zone" at the center, people here are affiliated with Cinterfall, the Alpha Academy and Silver Light but also with lots of other orgs which means they have diverse loyalty. 2. There are a whole bunch of isolated communities out on the fringes that very insular the most insular being Frogswarm, which makes sense being a french language org 3. There is a huge "belt of loners" around the Neutral Zone that consist of Orgs with just one person. 4. The TU is a huge monster that looks like it's going to a dominate force in the game It will be interesting to see how this changes, I suspect that we will see a lot of convergence as the game starts as org's either succeed or fail people. Please Void as a next step can you keep a snapshot for each version you create so we can observe how things change over time Also could we get an option to exclude 1 person org's? I think it distorts the data because people are creating orgs as a joke

I think Arker is the best demonym, colonist or pilot are to loaded with meaning and assumptions to be useful. As much as I am disappointed about having to wait I think it's probably a good thing that they are feeling comfortable enough to take the time and get a better version going into alpha. Consider the opposite situation, if they felt like they had to rush and get something else that would be terrible for the game. Between this, R&M and my holiday in April all I seem to be doing right now is waiting for cool stuff to happen.

Is anyone watching the expanse? It's a hard SciFi tv series on Syfy right now in its second season, its based on a series of novels. What I really love about it is that all the technology is realistic, they don't have artificial gravity, shields or FTL. It's all set in our solar system some 200 years in the future where there are three factions, Earth and Mars are in a sort of cold war like America and Russia and then there are the Belters which are people who live in space in the asteroid belts but they seem to get the hard end of the deal in terms of being exploited by earth and mars. I first found out about this last year when I came across the show on Netflix and I thought this is how I would love dual universe to be like. This space battle is pretty much everything I've wanted from a space show forever: Should be spoiler free, but they reference a couple of things in passing so be warned

I think building vaults for players to keep their stuff (for a fee) will be a common thing that organizations do once they have established territory

This sound like you are overthinking it, if there is a race and its a reasonably serious thing you have a race martial supervising, you don't always need a technological solution to everything. If its a casual thing then you use the honor system