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RealRhyus

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  1. Hello everybody. I have been playing this game for a couple of months now. It is a pretty good game, however, since it is still in beta, not far out of alpha, there are some things that, since it is still in the early phases, could possibly be changed. I have been playing games since Pong. I have tested, both professionally and freelancing (like here in Dual Universe) several dozen of games. These are solely my opinions that I think would make this game much better. First off is mining. The current state of mining is an eye sore. I have -wasted- days digging. Not necessarily mining, but just digging. This game is not about digging, it is about building. Yes, granted, to get the material to build things, you need to mine. But, mining and digging are two way different things. Mining is when you are actually at a location of ore and using the Mining Tool to grab the ore. Digging is when you are using the Scanning Tool and mudding your way through the ground to find said ores. I have spent, at times, an hour just digging to find ore to only spend five minutes of mining it out. This is a game. Games are supposed to be fun. This digging, after the initial hour or so of doing so, is NOT fun. I have literally fallen asleep running around in circles trying to find a specific ore and this is after I’ve gotten up from a good night’s sleep. How is that fun? A way to improve this is what I’m here to suggest. I played a game, a LONG time ago called Star Wars: Galaxies (SWG). It was a great game. I spent a lot of time testing it (freelancing) and a lot more time playing it. They had crafting of items as well as ships and weapons. However, you could only build specific ships and weapons and items. Nothing like the free building of DU. But, back then, games were limited. But, their mining on planets was great. You had a scanner that would scan the area you were in and told you the type of ore that was present and the density of said ore (it has been about 15 years or so since I played, so my memory might be a little rusty). When you found a place that you could get the ore you would drop one of three different types of mining installations (personal, medium and heavy). Many times this was easy because there would be fields of heavy installations across the land. These installations would then start extracting the ore that it was set down, as long as they had power (this is another subject that would be moot if the game doesn’t have any kind of power other than fuel, but the power needs could be dealt with through fuel). The extractor would run until one of three things happened, one, the power runs out, two, the extractor gets full or three, the mineral shifted out from underneath (which would happen about once a week or so). Ore would not necessarily run out, as it shifted around on the planet and could possibly be found on different planets, depending on the ore. So, you would come, grab what was extracted, pick up your installation and go about rescanning the area to find a new or same ore to extract. Very simple and allowed you to actually PLAY the game more than you spent mining. This could easily be implemented into DU. It would put the fun back into the game. But, if DU thinks this is too drastic of a change and insists on continuing to use this method, there here are some improvements for it. First off, the rocks on the surface. There are multiple different sizes of rocks, but they all give the same amount, 20 L. Why? This is just bad programming. I’m sure there are already different sizes programmed into the system, so, each size needs to have a different volume. Maybe start with the smallest at 20 L (really should be 10 L, but whatever) and go up 10 L for each size category. This will make things so much easier on the surface on being able to get a decent amount with the larger rocks. Second. The rocks on the surface have a specific color scheme. Why are the pockets of ore under the ground different colors?? This is so confusing when you are digging and see a dark ore pocket, which normally represents coal, only to find out it is hematite. Even sometimes the same ore under the ground is different at a different pocket of the same ore. Why? The ore under the ground should be the same color schematic as those on the surface because they should NOT be different, especially since the ore on the surface seems to be glowing and those under the ground do not, for one. Third. The Long/Short Range scanner is so confusing. First off with this, I have ore that is in tier 1 have the same color as those in tier 2 and tier 3 and so forth. This is REALLY bad programming. Each ore should have its own unique color scheme. How about this for doing the color scheme. The ores seem to have two different colors. What this should translate into with the scanner is that the main color of the ore should be the dot and the secondary color should be the line that comes from this dot. This is very unique and can easily be seen as different ores. If, for some reason, two ores use the same color scheme, then just switch the colors around for the second one (a higher tier ore, since they are not as abundant as lower tier ores). This should also translate into the Directional scanner as well, for their colors. Keeping with the scanners in point three, they really need to be improved. This is hard to say how, because they are just crappy at this point. I have dug, at times, a dozen tunnels just to not see the dot go down for the ore I’m looking for (generally closest ore, other times specific ones). Eventually I’ve gone back in a very similar direction to one of the tunnels I’ve already dug and then it finally starts to drop. This, again is poor programming. If this scanner has the ability to detect the ore, then it should be able to place it on my HUD and show me the size of it as well as the area it is located in, very similar to the scanning device I talked about in SWG. This would eliminate a lot of hours in trying to search for that “roaming” node. Again, if this isn’t something they will bother to do, then the last point in the mining category is the Directional Scanner. This is a horrible mess. You have all these lines and reticles for it, but, the only thing that is really used is the dot in the middle to show us the direction it is pointing and the line at the bottom of the scanning device where the intensity of the ore is displayed. Why do you have all this useless art? And then the direction of the ore can be misleading at times. By this I mean that I’ve did the search of the ore with it and gotten a strong signal. I move in that direction and move and move and find out I’ve passed it. Why is that? If I had a strong, solid signal, why would I pass it?? And it is too short a range, even with talent upgrades. So, first, get rid of all the unused lines on this reticle. Move the scanning intensity line up to just under the dot in the center so that it is easier to see and understand. Then, of course, as I mentioned above, change the color coding to what the colors of the ore actually is, not four colors that are repeated from tier 1 and 2 and so forth. Then, extend the original range of the scanner to at least 50 meters to start out and then with talent upgrades should be able to extend that range well past 100 meters, probably 150 or 200 meters. By doing this, it will help to reduce the time it takes to actually find the ore. Another thing is the re-spawn of the ore. The way they currently seem to have it is that the ore will not re-spawn, at least not the underground nodes. This is pretty poor, as you will constantly have new people coming into the game and if the initial players mine out all of the “Safe Zone” ore, then any new player, who first doesn’t have a space worthy ship, nor one that could warp between planets, nor one that is armed to deal with player ganking, nor any kind of money to do anything with, would not be able to play this game the way it was meant to be played because they do not have the ability to mine ore to start making a “living” in the game world. Granted, the way they have it with taking over a territory, they are basically only limiting this game to several thousand players because of how many territories there are on Sanctuary, but, that is a topic for another discussion. So, back to the re-spawn of ore. The current way is inefficient. With the way I stated that the mining should be changed to, you will not have to worry about this every happening. This could still happen with the way mining currently happens, it would just be a lot more coding going on because they would have to institute a complete planet “shift” to have all the dirt fill back in and nodes reappearing in different locations, but this could take a good period of downtime for the server. It could happen if they have weekly server downtime, which is possible, but it could take the downtime much more time than just regular maintenance cycles. But, then again, this could also cause bases and buildings under or in the ground to be filled in with dirt again, so, this would be major issue. With their current method of mining ore, I don’t believe there is a sufficient way of making the replacement of ore happen, which is really a game breaking issue, especially if they expect this game to last decades. Now onto other things. Markets. They are what they are. However, they are markets for the market machines. Not markets for people dropping their vehicles on the landing pad or the ground and throwing a big, flashing sign advertising it for sale. Nor is it a place to throw down a big flashing sign, in a foreign language, and expect everybody in the game to understand what you are trying to say. This needs to stop and stop now. NQ needs to set a limit on how long a vehicle, and ONLY a vehicle can stay on the Market hex. No static cores can be placed for any limit of time, 5 minutes at max. There is to be no building on a Market hex. There is to be no dispensers on Market hex other than those inside the Market hub that is put in place by NQ. All Markets outside the main Districts on Alioth, needs to have the surrounding hexes taken over by NQ and made purple and no building or leaving of any structure should not be allowed. Then, outside this no build zone, there needs to be restrictions on what can be built for the next five hexes or so. There should not be allowed any 1000+ meter towers that just constitute one voxel in width/length. A building or tower that is at least 40 voxel by 40 voxels would be ideal, but nothing smaller. This is to help prevent two things, one, mid-air collisions of vehicles and towers/buildings and two, scavengers. By this I mean that NQ is eventually going to turn back on non-PvP damage to cores that will destroy them. Someone builds a two thousand single voxel tower(s) on their land to get unsuspecting pilots to crash into them and destroy their ship’s core. They come along and replace the destroyed core with one of their own before the real owner, who has died and re-spawned back at their base, which is several kilometers from where they crashed has a chance to get back to their ship to fix it their selves, only to find they no longer have said vehicle. Next thing is the lag. There is a ton of lag, mostly because of two things. First is what I described above about the markets. Players have over flooded the markets with voxels and cores and many other things owned by many different people. I’ve already described what needs to be done to fix this issue. The second is memory leaks. You really can’t do much about this on the player side. This is all on NQ’s side and it because of poorly optimized coding. I’ve played many different games and some very intense action and I don’t get any lag in those games. NQ needs to set this as one of their major problems and work on it with all hands on deck to get it fixed. Sending a few people to do this just will not cut it or fix it. Another improvement is in voxels. They have done a great initial job on this. However, there are still many inconsistencies with the voxels. An improvement could be adding more shapes that can easily be produced. A major improvement would be in the color choice. You could just produce the voxels in the material that you want (plastic, concrete, wood, etc.) in just a base color like white, and then if you want a different color, you throw it into a different machine that you can just choose the color(s) of said voxel. This would be a great improvement in that you can take ones that have already been made into one color and re-color them to suit another purpose instead of having them waste space in storage because you will never use that color again, or, just like it happened to me already, I see the color in a voxel library and like it, only to make a lot of it and go to use it and it is not what it appeared in the library, so now I have 500+ m3 of a material that I will probably not use again. But, if I had a coloring unit, I could have thrown the wasted voxels into it and have it colored to something that I would like better. This would not change the material of the honeycomb, but it will give us the ability to change coloring on the fly and get even more colorful projects done. Maybe throw in some hydrogen or oxygen into the process to have some “waste” of materials to make the process “work”, as you don’t want to put in 500 m3 of material only to get out less than that just because you changed the color would just anger many people. The coloring choice process would be very simple. It could be accomplished one of two ways. One would have you enter in the RGB color through its corresponding numbering system (000 – 255) or its corresponding hex code (00000 – fffff). The other would be to have the color “wheel” or “square” that would be one that is used in Paint 3D or Photoshop. (They already have this system in place for the color scheme of the player’s avatar, so it would not be that hard to incorporate into the honeycomb system.) The honeycomb could have two aspects of it, a foreground and background color. You could even allow for the re-coloring of elements like engines, weapons, lights, etc. This could easily make for very unique color schemes for each player, vehicle and building. This kind of improvement would greatly increase the playability of the game. I don’t know if this is implemented in the game or not, but I have tried using the “fill” option for dirt. It puts the ground into a ball shape. I’m not sure if there is an option to make it look “natural” when doing this, but the ball option can be a little too much when you are trying to fill a gap between a building and a hill or the bottom of a lake with the bottom of your core. Maybe there should be a separate tool that allows you to choose a different shape or something that allows you to drop dirt/sand/tundra into an area that will fill between a construct and other ground. This tool could also allow us to create some interesting art with the ground terrain that is otherwise just thrown away.
  2. I've been playing games, both single player and MMOs for a few decades now. I haven't played them all, but I have played a decent amount of them. The only time I have played an MMO that I was part of a clan/organization that built a "city" was in Star Wars Galaxies(SWG). They had no effect on the players or crafting or mining (mining was not allowed in the city limits). About the only real thing it accomplished was allowing for PvP matches to be setup between organizations as well as a "treasury" for the members to store items and money and such (it has been a while since I played the game, go my memory might be a little foggy on other options). But, there really was not much that making the city did for the players individually. I think Eve Online did do something for organization stations, but I never got that far into the game to know what they provided (I think they provided a bonus to industry type stuff). So, they are probably just following the models of all the previous MMOs that did allow players to build things from the ground up. Otherwise, it would take up too much more time and programming to make things work correctly, which will provide many many more bugs and errors. As for mining, yea, this game has a very boring mining process, especially on land. The best experience I've had with mining is on SWG. You had a scanner that, from ground level, gave you read outs of what ores were present. You could move in a direction and it would change on how much was or wasn't there. When you find the best spot you drop down an ore extraction device. It would then start extracting the ore it was placed above. You can come back in hours/days/weeks and pick up what it extracted. The ore had a time limit on how long it would be there (generally a week) and then it would disappear and "shift" to another planet or location on same planet (all planets had this happening, rarer ores might have only appeared on a specific planet(s)). There was fields of ore extraction machines. If you did not get there early, you would not get the best spot or might not get any of that specific ore. In "cities"/"towns" you could not drop these devices, even if it was your own city. The mining for this game has me wondering how the land above your tunnels/caverns actually stays in place. If I were to dig out an entire hex, say 300 m below the surface, it would still "magically" be suspended and not fall/collapse down upon itself.
  3. Yea, I was hoping one of them would say something in here so I would know who to contact in game.
  4. If someone would "sponsor" me, as in provide access to all the different ship components, I would gladly put this together. But, because I'm poor, I can't just do it all on my own.
  5. Hello out there all my fellow gamers. I was looking to build a new ship. I have a rough drawn design of it, like the shape and where major guns would go. However, I don't know how wide or tall or deep the ship should be because I don't know the sizes of weapons, engines, tanks, and many other things to design it correctly. I'm new to the game, so I don't have millions and millions of money to just go out and purchase one of everything to then do a count of how many voxel squares they take up. So, I was wondering, for those that have been in the game for a long time and have built big ships, have you made a size chart or has Novaquark made one that is for public use? I don't like going into making a design this intricate without being able to plan it ahead of time and I don't have the money to go buy everything on the market for ships and make the size chart myself. I have started one, but it only includes so far containers and cores, but I need everything to be able to build it. Thank you.
  6. When I play the game, I have horrible issues with lag it would seem. Not really sure it is because of all the graphics in the game or my connection, but, I really doubt it is my connection, as I play many other online games and have no issues with them, like Destiny 2 and World of Tanks, so, it has to be on the game side of things. Here are some things that I see should definitely be addressed: 1. There are WAY too many player constructs just sitting around at Markets. These need to be returned to the player's inventory if they are gone after so many hours. These things have caused WAY too many lag issues in other games that has construction like this game does and that was their method of keeping the chaos tamed. 2. Allow for much finer graphic settings. What you have currently is a joke. You should be able to set the details of your graphics to as low as you want or to as high as you want. There should be buttons to click on to remove vegetation, rocks, minerals, clouds, etc. This can greatly decrease a player's lag when there is too much happening and especially when on your own land, getting rid of the stupid grass can make mining and building a hell of a lot easier. Other things that I have had issues with is vehicles. I was using one of the basic hover cars and from time to time, while driving, the car would just start rolling and turning and would just end up what would seem like crashing into the ground multiple times before it would stop moving. This might also be caused by the lag I mentioned above, and if so, using my suggestions would definitely help in this matter. Just recently I picked up one of the basic atmo ships, the Mule. Every time I enter the ship, this is when I was at a Plaza, the ship would take forever to load in and I would go sit in the pilot seat and then when it finally becomes un-lagged, I am tumbling around in the middle of the air and cannot seem to stop until I come crashing down to the ground. One time I did this, my ship was upside down. I could not pilot it out of that location and then went to exit from the vehicle and it seems to put me underneath the ship (which would have been on top of the ship, but it was upside down) and I could not move out from under it, as it had me partially in the ground. I was eventually able to activate the object move tool and get myself out from under it, but the game should never dump you into a situation like that, it should exit your out from the vehicle at least 5 m away from the construct and not into any other construct or the ground. I was playing the tutorial for the hovercraft training. Several times the car would act similar to what I mentioned above and just go into a horizontal spin and would not come out of it. One time it would not let me steer right, only left, so I could not stop the spin. What I eventually found out, after getting out of the craft, is that several thrusters had gotten damaged (because of the lag I mentioned) and were not working. I eventually repaired them, but, in a tutorial, that should NOT happen. The items in any tutorial should be indestructible and not have to cause anybody to exit their vehicle and use their own material to repair a vehicle that isn't theirs. That is what I have so far. Oh, not sure if this is possible or not, but when it comes to training talents, if you have multiple ones queued up, you should be able to move them up and down the list, because if I have one that is going to take 14 days to complete and the next one on the list only takes an hour, I'd rather get the one that only takes an hour to complete instead of having it being delayed weeks just to get it finished and what time was already done on the 14 day would be kept and would just pick back up where it left off when it enters the main learning spot.
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