Wolfram

That's a hack but well, it's an option nonetheless. I still think that NQ should provide players with ways on doing things correctly instead of just retreating because a few will use for exploiting. Lua should NOT be able to write to log when not run directly, but it should be an option anyways. And yes I have to agree with that. Also, people extracting data from DU (including with malicious intents) will find a way or another, maybe using SVG to render quares on the screen and export data using that? It's possible. What NQ gonna do, remove SVG and Render Scripts altogether? Also, I still think the biggest issue isn't even being able to write logs, but actually send input to the game, be it using AutoHotKey or Lua require (both of which seem to be allowed, as stated here). If NQ can't detect and fix that sort of thing, they are pretty much ignoring the big issue of botting and just removing something that had a ton of use cases and actually depends on the former to be useful to bot.

Though I understand why the logging info issue had to be fixed, as someone constantly working with Lua and even building tools for it, I agree with the other players who requested some way to copy data from the game, be it JSON or anything. Even something as simple as being able to copy things from the Lua chat or to show a message box with a button to copy to clipboard would be enough. This isn't just because of exporting things, but even for bug or error reporting, an user being able to copy a message from the Lua chat or some message box and send it to the developer would help a lot when debugging things.

I know the "unlimited" building is far from reality, but the way things are currently limited and the plans for even more limitations compared to what they sold to everyone is just really making me lose my hopes for this game. Like sure, I still have some stuff I own that I'm not fond of leaving behind, but the moment NQ decides to wipe a game with so many restrictions I'll simply just give up on my subscription and go back into Space Engineers. Arguing that the game is an MMO doesn't change much to be honest, since most of the time I don't see anyone around, except when I go to markets and stuff, the game feels really dead and empty.

I really would like a better explaination of the construct slots thing. As far I understand, players will need to explicitly "give" their orgs part of their construct "budget", right? If so, can we see a raise on the number of constructs we can own? The current limit is very low, and that's why so many people create the so-called "personal orgs". This will hurt A LOT in the building aspect of the game, not only because large structures are composed of multiple cores and we don't have any XL cores, but also in more in-depth for people designing ships or even people who place down voxel libraries. Other potential issues I can see are for mining, since we can't place down cores on tri-hex, we're forced to put down a core per hex we're mining. For a single flower that goes to 7 hexes already. Ship shops also gonna get hurt since in most I know they display their dynamic cores, which again, would count towards the limit. In the end, the only "positive" thing I can see of this change is that people would have yet another reason to alt, which honestly at this point seems to be intentional by NQ's part as it's more money into their pockets.

Every time I see this video pop up I think more and more NQ should add a cooldown on weapons when they are placed down. Have it be like 5 minutes before the weapon can be fired. Anyone going with the desire of engaging in PVP should have their ships already armed well before getting into the combat area anyways... At least whoever is watching on the other ship has the time to react if some joker decides to place down a XS core, a weapon and core their ship, which is more like griefing than actual PVPing.

This is the sort of gameplay I would love to have but all I can do is dream of until some other company comes and makes it. I'd love it in DU, for real, but I can't see it coming to life in the near future, specially when stuff such as element talents exist.

I really have to agree with that. Not necessarily remove the background talent point generation, but have real activity to earn points for players. For example, have players chose a profession that they can only have one at a time, which gives bonus points as they do actions on that. Example: a person working as a hauler gets bonus talent points every X km or su they travel, a mining specialist gets talent points for scanning and calibrating mining units, industrialists get talent points per batch produced on their selected industry type, etc. You can even go deeper on that and allow like two or three specialization levels, which allow higher tiers of talents to be learned: - Level 1 - General Industrialist, can learn up to Tier 2 of industry-related talents. Gets X amount of talent points when a batch is produced - Level 2 - Fuel Producer, can learn up to Tier 4 of that specific "general" talent area, so for example a Fuel Producer would be allowed to learn up to Tier 4 on fuel production talents but only Tier 2 of refining. Gets X + 25% of talent points when a batch of their speciality is produced (fuel), none for the other areas - Level 3 - Specialist, can learn Tier 5 talent on a very specific area or product (only Space Fuel, Atmo Fuel or Rocket Fuel), Tier 4 on their area's products (other fuel types) and only Tier 2 on the other areas. Gets X + 50% of talent points when a batch of their speciality is produced (space fuel), none for the other areas With that the game would pretty much enforce players to chose a specific area. Even basic stuff such as refining ore would only be efficient if the person doing it was a specialist, otherwise the way would be going for the market (which is really bad for pures, currently). Other intermediate product types could also start seeing more trading too. You don't even need to lock someone to that specific profession forever, maybe limit it to changing once every 30 days, but the moment they do that any bonus they get from the higher tiers is disabled, so one must really think about what they want to do, how they want to progress, etc.

Having the voxels go transparent would help A LOT with construction. The dismantle thing I imagine could be done in a single request to the server, then instead of doing item by item it "batches" everything in a single transaction. Could be much more efficient compared to manually removing each piece, actually

Here's some ideas that could improve a lot the experience in DU, based on what I usually do (building, prospecting, selling): - Add way to dismantle a construct in one click, making all elements and honeycomb go back to your inventory. If possible, add option to when doing this any custom properties are removed (such as screen contents). This would be extremely useful not only for ship builders but for anyone who wants to dismantle a large construct they own, would also help when voxels get bugged or buried. - Add way to highlight specific elements and possibly honeycomb too in build mode, as an overlay on the HUD or maybe just a ping/coordinate. Would help a lot for smaller elements that sometimes get lost or stuck. - Add sorting by type of element on the inventory screen and allow sortings to persist too, would make organization much easier in larger inventories. - Show the name of the planet or celestial body a territory scan belongs to, maybe make it sortable too.

I think the staggering is a good fix, both for technical server load issues and also to the side of people who were looking at tiles to claim, down to the exact minute. Now to the elephant in the room, what about the HQ changes? Pretty much every player who is currently active and invested in the game got excited for the territory abandonment, with most of complaints coming from inactive players (such that Reddit post yesterday), and yet, NQ backed off and sided with the inactives. Why that change in stance? Honestly it feels like being an active PAYING player in this game is bad, as the developers keep punishing you for that.

Today I Learned.

I think the title itself explains a lot but the idea is having a second type of Landing Gear elements that have wheels and are more geared towards gravity landing and takeoff. Their main use would be to keep the ship at some height from the ground while still moving forward but without enough lift to keep it flying, which would be useful when taking off or landing with large amounts of cargo, and would require a landing strip to properly land, similar to real planes. In terms of implementation, the retractable part of it could be borrowed from existing landing gears and the physics part could be similar to these of a hover engine, the wheels would not provide any thrust, just maybe a very small braking force, but mainly sustentation/suspension for the ship when they are in contact with the ground, so the ship would still need to brake by itself.

As someone who played a lot with screens (even made a UI library around that), I understand the issues with updating them all the time, but I also feel the new tech is not the way to go and is definitely a step backwards instead. What I honestly think could be done is understand WHY people keep spamming the setHTML method instead: Currently, whenever we need to update any information on the screen, the only option we have is to update the entire thing, which indeed, costs lots of bandwidth and overhead, specially since sometimes all we need is to update one or other information. Some ideas that could improve on the way things work today: Use templates to decouple the screen's SVG/HTML from data: Introduces two new functions: screen.setTemplateCode(template_code) and screen.setTemplateData(variable, value) It would work similar to how web templates/frameworks work, the first function would be an HTML/SVG template in syntax similar to Twig/Handlebars where we would set the heavier part of things, while the second function would be passing the variable data to that template, which would be combined and rendered as HTML on the client. So, for example, let's say we have this template code: <p>Hello, {{name}}!</p> We would only call the setTemplateCode function once with this content and then call setTemplateData('name', 'Wolfram') to set the variable values, which in that case would be rendered on the client as: <p>Hello, Wolfram!</p> With that we wouldn't need to keep sending over the HTML all the time, since we could only update a single value instead, this would be extremely helpful with larger HTML or SVG pieces. Note that the setTemplateCode function should have some sort of limit, maybe running once every 15s, so that people look for smarter ways of updating stuff, by using the setTemplateData function instead.

I don't even know if you still have this issue, but well leaving here as may be useful for someone else: you can't do it with a Programming Board nor a Remote Control. You MUST use an PVP-capable controller, even a Hovercraft seat will work.

BREAKING: Towers are annoying, but this one new business trick has gone too far

Just made this topic to post The Howl so I don't make a ton of other posts ?‍♂️ BREAKING: Non-profit declares war against advertisers at Aitoth 6th

I really can't understand the point of you guys on botting. In the current state, everyone is a bot, since they still get skill points without any effort, not even being online. Even botting still requires the person to actually run the bot. Also, botting is against the EULA and can result in bans, while having multiple accounts just to get an advantage on other players seems to be completely ignored by NQ, maybe because that's literally paying to win, I guess? The proposal I gave on this post was meant giving new players a chance to actually do something in the game beyond being mining slaves for weeks until they get enough skill points and quanta to start doing anything else, plus, actually reward active players, as I really don't see the point of selling Dual Universe as an MMO when a good part of the accounts are owned by the same people and are only there to farm skill points. It's pretty interesting that most reactions I've seen on this matter going against were from already stablished Alpha/Patron players, while the few ones who seemed to agree with it were all new players. Maybe there's interests here regarding not letting new players compete in certain areas of the game, I guess? Combine these all these factors and at some point it will simply be pointless to play the game as a newcomer, no matter it being a Beta or even released. The advertised "The role you play in the shared universe only depends on your actions and your choices. Be a space pirate. A galactic trader. A cargo hauler. An interstellar industrialist. And everything in-between." in the game homepage becomes completely false the moment you realize your actions pretty much don't matter, as skills are only earned with your subscription time. Even if you get the basic skills for industry, you still have to completely master all the required resources for your chosen product just to make it barely profitable. Have an org of 10 people with no skills, where their only profitable activity is to mine and sell at markets for low prices because they have no talents and try to make them compete with someone with 10 accounts, each specialized in something. Even for mining, if the person with alt accounts have two computers it becomes easy to keep one account mining while other is hauling stuff around. Have one account with Industry skills and you basically have a machine of making money where you buy cheap ore and profit on it with manufacture. Please, enlighten my ignorance and show me how orgs are P2W, because I really don't see your logic here.

Well, if you have one account/character you'd probably take like 45-60 days just to max out the skills. If you break it down across 3 accounts/characters, you can get it all done in 15-20 days by queueing up talents in all of them, all you gotta do is pay for the extra subscriptions (or buy an beta code from anyone, which will pretty much let you play free for the entire Beta). Basically, you're paying RL money to get IG advantage, also known as pay to win. And regarding the second point, people who don't have a lot of time to play and also have one account get an even worse advantage in the current system. In the end, their only options is to either pay for many accounts and try to make a profit in-game or just slave all their time as they don't have skills for Industry or Piloting. Letting people level up by actively playing and doing activities in-game allows them to be rewarded progress in their skill tree for their play time. You don't need to completely get rid of the passive skill earning, it's still useful as something extra to learn in background, just won't be as "profitable" than actually playing the game, which will allow people to actually grind and compete with long-time players who just afk many alts most of time.

Having people getting accounts and actively farming skills in background without even being logged-in is already a form of botting, which aggravates as P2W since the person is literally getting benefits by doing so... In terms of having the skills, a single player could easily be ahead of an entire org if he have enough accounts. The same goes for orgs too, they can get extremely powerful by having many people do this, which is literally mass-botting. Also, having players actively play the game to gather skill points not only would would give them a chance to play, but also would balance orgs in general, as giving players specific roles would make them specialize, otherwise everyone would be a "jack of all trades, master of none" in the org.

Currently, the skill points are generated in background with the queue, which leads people to having alt accounts trained to specialize in one thing in background, which is not optimal and ends up being P2W, as this clearly gives them advantage over players with only one account, specially players starting out. The proposal here is to complement the current system with skill-specific points, which are earned by doing these activities - being active in the game. This could apply to all skills or, at least, the most basic ones, such as Mining and Piloting. Firstly, let's do some math. I'll take as reference the skill "Advanced Mining". In terms of skill points, each level costs, respectively: 2400, 12000, 60000, 300000 and 1500000 points, giving a total of 1874400 points to complete all 5 levels. With a full queue, we currently get 90 skill points per minute, which means it would take around 20827 minutes to complete the queue, which translates to 347 hours or 14.5 days. All of this is passive, so one owning multiple accounts would be able to queue many large skill trees to specialize in these same 15 days, which for a normal account could take 15, 30, 45 or even 60 days to complete. Not really fair, right? Now, with the proposal, let's say for every 25L of ore extracted, one would get 1 skill point. With a scoop size of 250L, one would get 10 skill points per scoop while actively mining. With an average time of 10 seconds to get 4 scoops (1000L, or 40 skill points), one would get an equivalent rate of 240 skill points per minute by actively mining, which would take the queue time from 14.5 days to around 5.4 days of actively mining, not considering the points still being generated in background, which would bump this to 330 points per minute and lower the queue time to just under 4 days, but the catch is: the player would need to be actively mining to achieve that. The same could be applied for Piloting skills, with some adjustments to consider whether we're flying atmo or space. Currently, the maximum speeds are around 1000km/h in atmo and 30000km/h (150su/h) in space, so let's say we want to match the same 240 points rate of mining, then one would need to fly either 16.5km in atmo or 500km (2.5su) in space, at full speed, to match these rates. Anything slower would still be accounted for, but since your speed is slower and the points are earned per distance, you would make less points flying slower, the only thing not being accounted for is warps, as that would be way too easy In the end, if this works, the passive rate could even be lowered, as anyone being actually active would still be earning their points and the passive generation would be more towards when the player is offline (like doing IRL stuff such as sleeping) instead of being a complete benefit to players with many accounts farming points in background Hope this helps somehow!

BREAKING: Alioth declares war on Madis! You saw it first here, on The Howl!

Currently that option is under the Graphics settings on the menu, which doesn't make any sense and is actually harder to toggle on and off, maybe move it directly into the map screen, so we can toggle it on/off when we're seeing the map, as there are moments (like prospecting) where having the frontiers off is better but other moments where having it on is also better. Upvote link: https://upvote.dualuniverse.game/suggestions/157302/move-hightlight-frontiers-on-the-map-option-to-map-screen

I agree with @Arctic_fox on the idea of reducing Schematic prices, maybe for like 3 days or a week, just so it can be fair with other players and they can also get them for cheap... Less chance of a monopoly happening, no needs for rollback or doing stuff like bans or anything either

I'm completely against rolling back, as people who actually played honestly would be losing their stuff, now it shouldn't be hard to track down people who bought like thousands of similar Schematics and/or resold them, in that case they deserve at least a warning and maybe to be charged the difference in Quanta from their own pockets