blundertwink

lol this part is my favorite, indeed flooring is a basic feature!

I've said this before, but the biggest sink in any MMO is player churn. What percent of WoW items and gold are just sitting on inactive accounts collecting dust? Likely the vast majority of all the money and items ever "printed" into the game. Honestly, I'm not sure I much care about the "economy" of any MMO, overall...I'm just not the sort of player that cares to "play the markets" as a facet of gameplay. What matters to me is that earning money is fun and that it is motivating because there's stuff I want to buy. In games, that is the primary driver of a good economy in my opinion -- actual interest in wanting to earn and spend money because it drives engagement with the game, overall. Earning money just to pay taxes is an objectively stupid design idea that undermines the whole point of having a currency system in games to begin with! it isn't to create a fake economy just for the sake of having an economy. This isn't complicated stuff; it's like they put quanta into the game without understanding why currency exists in video games. Game economies are not at all like real world economies. NQ needs to step back and think about how to make their game fun; the state of the economy really doesn't matter if there's nothing fun to do with it.

A thicker collider reduces the chance that something will "fall through" because of how collision detections and physics collide. An object that's moving too quickly might pass right through a thinner collider if it travels "past" the collider in a single frame. A thicker collider increases the chance that the collider will be "hit" if an object is moving, especially if the object is moving at high speeds. This is why fast moving bullets or objects don't usually use colliders in this way, they use raycasts.

It's still there...but gaming in general isn't featured by Unigen very prominently. You can find it as an example under "Made by Unigen" after clicking on their "Community SDK" tier. It does show one DU screenshot, but that's it.

Those edge cases can be nasty Let's assume terrain data is streamed in chunks as it usually is in large open-world games. If you reset one chunk to a seed, that isn't good enough. You would need to also verify that each neighboring chunk still connects properly without holes. And if you don't reset an entire chunk to a seed, things again get complex and highly contextual in trying to reset part of a chunk to a seed. We also don't really know how terrain chunks relate to tiles. One tile could be multiple chunks...or one chunk might span many tiles. Not to mention NQ now has to track which chunks have been "seen" by users in the last X days under Y distance, which itself can have many performance implications depending on how they implement it. Point being: this isn't easy to do.

I mean, it's hard to expect robust collision detection from an engine no one really uses for games..... DU is the most complex game that's used Unigen by far. Unigen was picked because of inexperience; they believed they needed a 64-bit coordinate system (spoiler alert: they didn't) and that it was therefore the only option. Hell, Unigen doesn't even talk about games as a main use case on their homepage...gaming is an afterthought stuffed into their "Community SDK" section, which is either free or $150/month. This just isn't Unigen's main business at all. If you're going to "save time" by picking a game engine, it's common sense to pick an engine people actually use to make games. It's yet another choice driven from inexperience early on that made DU's development far more difficult long term...it fits their culture of rejecting norms in this industry because they believe they know better.

I don't disagree with the premise at all, but I believe this would take them a long time to develop. "Healing" a terrain back to its original seed isn't hard at all, but conditionally "filling holes" based on the proximity of player structures is much, much harder. Orders of magnitude harder. You'd need a fairly complex algorithm just to understand how to "fill holes" back to an original seed, but conditionally based on distance to player constructs, without creating an invalid mesh with holes. How do you avoid doing vertex-by-vertex checks to ensure you aren't too close to player crap? Granted, I haven't thought about the challenge for very long, but I just don't see any easy path to implement something like this. "Just fill the holes where players aren't around" sounds like a simple enough idea, but really...the implementation would be massively difficult. In other words, it isn't going to happen...if they tried, it'd probably create a huge mess.

It's kind of hard to blame them for nerfing capacity again, if that's what's happening. I'd probably do the same thing in their boat. Being realistic, why should they keep things scaled out...? Unfortunately, there's no avenue for growth, here. Not with platforms like Steam. Not with paid adverts. Not with organic growth driven from good content and high quality. NQ's opportunities to fix this game have come and gone, unfortunately. Yeah, server problems are a no-win situation, but let's be real...fixing their server problems wouldn't likely make a huge difference in the game's subs, anyway. To be clear, I don't think NQ has "given up" -- they're actively looking to fill roles still, including a backend dev with an emphasis on web dev and microservices (which makes me think it is micro-transaction related, but that's just a wild guess)...but until these (likely desperate) ideas materialize, I don't blame them for not wanting to pay for infra. Personally, I am not confident the CEO is grounded enough in reality against the ocean of web3 / blockchain nonsense to pull the game out of its oblivion-spiral, but who knows...? Weirder things have happened.

I appreciate your optimism, but unfortunately, I'm not convinced they will fix it. They've struggled with performance and stability issues since the start...even if they do fix these specific problems eventually, the fix is too slow and any stability has proven to be ephemeral. Future updates just create new crops of issues because the underlying flaws with the production process (bad QA / bug-prune codebase) don't get fixed. Maybe I'm overly pessimistic, but DU's stability has never been especially robust and I'm not expecting their post-release "focus" on bugs will actually bring the game enough stability.

You can see that in this forum, too -- when you go back to the start of time here, there's a lot optimism and activity. The forums became less popular, regular posters vanish, and the tone changes. You can see posts in 2016 talking about what will happen to the balance of power or control of cities after big organizational wars or how important politics and intrigue will be...things that never materialized as concepts and never will. It's actually a bit tragic to see how people talked about things six years ago where even some of the basic ideas they had about how things will work never became real features.

I think it's funny that people paying for 10-20 accounts are considered whales... Yeah, paying NQ $300+ per month is a lot...but I remember a story from an executive that managed a large mobile gaming company. One of their whales bought so much stuff, they had their servant spamming the 'buy' button because even clicking the button was too much work. We're talking about millions of dollars. It was one of the most disgusting stories I've heard of laziness, excess, and stupidity....but that's what a real whale is. That's the sort of stupid rich person these people more or less designed entire games around. This doesn't work for a subscription MMO, because $300/month is nothing...if NQ wants to design around "whales", having a sub makes no sense and a free to play model loaded with micro-transactions is really the only avenue. That could be why they have a job posting looking for a backend engineer with an emphasis on microservices, web apps, and web integrations... 🤔 Even NQ has to see that there's no way a sub model can work for DU anymore, no matter what they change in the next few months.

I get what you're saying, but it's hard to take any conversation "seriously" when the chance of NQ engagement is near-zero. If people honestly believed their feedback might be seen by devs, the tone of this forum would likely be very different. There's thousands of posts that go into pages and pages and pages of detail, but communication has never been bi-directional. There's no reason to believe this will change after so many years. You might say that devs would come around more often if the tone was more serious and productive....but that's not how these things work. You need to have a presence in the conversation if you want to control its tone and direction... It isn't our job to make these forums a serious place for productive, detailed topics -- and there's no reason to assume that's NQ's goal, either. If it were, they should do the work to change the tone by showing people that they are in fact engaged, they are human beings trying their best, and they do indeed have a plan for the game. What doesn't feel helpful in my opinion is the "cop" attitude where things must go in the proper threads and must stay on topic because "we have to be helpful for NQ". If NQ valued this as a channel for comms, they'd spend even 10 minutes a day on posting or cleanup. I appreciate that you want polite, focused topics that are grouped into common threads, but to be blunt...I don't see how it's really any of your business how people use this forum, or if they don't put things into the threads you'd like, or don't adopt the tone or level of detail that you think would help NQ best. The issue with the community being heard is not the tone or content! It's that NQ hasn't shown any shred of ability or interest in engagement. It's their job to be professionals, engage their customers, and control the tone and content of their own forum. Not mine. Not other players. Not yours, either.

It was NQ's choice to attach specific deadlines and dates to the roadmap. A roadmap isn't a schedule or a delivery plan -- granted, many use it like that, but the actual goal of a roadmap is to focus on goals and outcomes, not deadlines or schedules. A roadmap is meant to be strategic, not about specific implementations or schedules. That's why having a roadmap is so nice for customers...it isn't about promising changes at specific dates, it's about showing they even have a strategy and communicating it to customers so they can remain engaged with the product knowing that NQ has an exciting long-term vision. Yeah, people have been asking basic questions like "How will PvP actually work?" for years and years and years. I don't really understand those wishing for the "JC days" because he never had anything close to a real plan for DU. That he's now working for a blockchain startup called "Massa Labs"...to me reiterates that he's someone that doesn't really understand the nuts and bolts of tech and isn't interested in doing the actual work to make it successful. Frankly, I get the feeling that he's an entrepreneur more than a scientist and has little issue lending his PhD out for money. 🤷‍♂️ The pitch behind Massa Labs is basically the same strategy as the pitch with DU. They claim to have (unproven) cutting-edge tech that erases all the scalability issues of blockchain. The focus is on this one "cutting-edge" technological component that makes their product viable while others aren't. That pitch sounds familiar to me... 🤨 This whole persona of people that pitch smoke and mirrors over and over again sounds familiar, too. So yeah...JC and his "ideas" aren't going to save anything.

Yeah, negative feedback can be hard...but this is also part of being an adult. Being challenged and negated is what makes people grow. If you want to be a high level professional in any field, this is something you have to learn. Fleeing from criticism because it makes you feel bad is the best way to ensure you never improve. There's a reason mature, successful organizations not only value negative feedback, they go out of their way and pay a ton of money to collect and analyze it. Being killed in a video game is a form of negation. It can be frustrating, too -- but to gamers, it teaches them how not to do something. Failure leads to improvement. It might not always lead to success, but it teaches you a lesson. It isn't personal, it doesn't mean you're a bad person or that you don't have the proper skills. It just means you aren't perfect. Only narcissists think they need to be perfect; the rest of us know that this cycle of failure is something we'll experience many times in many forms. Hiding from it is like Oedipus fleeing his fate -- it will only cause the failure they are trying to run from. NQ hasn't shown the maturity to handle this cycle of feedback and improvement, which isn't just an issue for building an MMO...it's an issue for running any business in a professional way. They went out of their way to say that they will only engage with feedback that is "balanced" with positive things too, which beyond being fragile and immature is just plain, vanilla stupid as a strategy for improvement. The generally poor sentiment among players across all of NQ's comms doesn't happen because internet people are bored and evil...this was the communication NQ decided to foster, while whining about how people are mean and unfair. If you want to control how people talk about your product, control it. Don't sit around doing nothing, yet demanding people see things from your perspective...that's something I'd expect from a teenage stereotype, not a company full of professional adults.

This idea comes up a lot, but I don't really understand it. You don't spend 8 years just to create an elaborate, secretive demo of technology that doesn't even scale or perform well. If this was the plan, they would spend a lot less time and effort creating a demo that showcases the tech in a positive light. DU isn't even close to that. Creating a game like this is absurdly difficult -- yes, made 10x more difficult by a lack of design clarity and technical due-diligence early on, but still...making any modern MMO for ~$22 million is not going to be easy. I can't buy into the conspiracy that NQ has been secretly trying to sell technology this whole time. I believe they spent the last 8 years trying to make a game and a lot of mistakes have coalesced into an unsustainable product. That's the most likely situation in my mind. It happens all the time, even with experienced studios...but especially for new studios trying to do something extremely, extremely ambitious. It might seem like they have made so many obvious mistakes or simply "don't care"...but all I know for a fact is that they've spent many, many years working on DU as a game. If they really only cared about the tech, why pay for forums and customer service at all? Why market to gamers or put it on Steam? Why spend so long on such an immensely counter-productive "demo" in general? Who is the market for this tech and can you really expect them to pay enough to sustain NQ as a company? Skilled devs can certainly implement voxel-to-mesh (a fundamental concept in all voxel-based implementations, hardly unique to NQ) and NQ's "server tech" is hardly proven to be scalable or robust (besides the likely vendor locking with AWS)...so what's this "tech" even worth...? I do think NQ might try to sell their their company in general now that it seems so impossible for DU to scale...but I don't believe this was their plan all along, and if they did sell...it'd probably be for a loss compared to the ~$22 million invested.

Funny how when I said this I was just talking about the multiplayer aspect thinking that was snarky enough....but the only letter people haven't contested is the "O" for being online, lol! So at least everyone agrees that DU is at least an "O" game. Finally we have reached consensus!

As I mentioned before, NovaQuark's CEO is speaking at a metaverse conference. I personally think the CEO's posts and opinions are very, very relevant to the future of DU. Again, I don't want to upset any mods for posting information from a public LinkedIn post -- I post this because I genuinely believe it is highly relevant to DU's future and direction. If this isn't something that's allowed, please let me know. What's telling to me is the last paragraph where Abboud talks about "online noise fueled by a simple lack of information"...this is exactly the attitude that typifies web3 and crypto enthusiasts and that same attitude is highly visible in how DU refuses to engage with the community or process feedback in general. People that actually work in tech and understand what blockchain is ask enthusiasts "why is blockchain superior to centralized systems? why do you keep insisting it is the best tech for every possible use case...?" and they don't have any cogent answer because they don't actually understand the technology. DU will never fix itself so long as NQ's leadership insists on truly being "the Metaverse Company" -- just wake up and face the music. The metaverse as a concept is a silly fantasy and that online "noise" is not a "lack of information", its a wake up call. For what it's worth, these are the topics Abboud himself will be giving a presentation on. He wouldn't know a thing about "how to develop a sustainable metaverse environment", but whatever. To be honest, I can't think of a better word to describe this other than "Carnival"...the Metaverse is silly and web3 has few viable use cases...get over it and focus on the one product your company has, the one product people have spent the last 8 years working on. This is just my opinion of course...but in my view, NQ's leadership has done an immensely, immensely poor job at being engaged in the development of their own game. From my (admittedly limited) perspective...it seems like the leadership is more interested in concepts with no proven viability in business simply because of their personal passions instead of developing a game. If I were an employee at NQ, I'd be extremely annoyed that leadership keeps pursuing an idea with no proven business viability simply because of their personal beliefs. If this is the company they want to be, they should be that company...stop stringing people along with DU and figure out what the heck NQ is actually going to do for revenue...because this "we're a game company but not really" idea is not working.

Quickly, though...? It's been 71 days since release, almost 3 billing cycles...yes, it's a given they will focus on bugs and performance in the first cycles, but this hasn't been fast or effective enough. The game still suffers from far too many obvious bugs and performance issues. NQ decided to monetize the game with a sub...they should have done even a little bit of homework about what a sub-based monetization actually means, because their update cadence is about the same as a single player game. With this current pace and their history of glacial dev, there's no feasible way they can actually maintain DU. It just isn't possible. There's no realistic way they can grow the game faster than churn rates. Even if they had the most brilliant marketing campaign in the world, success would be short-lived because they can't retain players and there's no evidence to suggest this will magically change. It's easy to see this unfold on Steam, the world's largest PC gaming market, with active player maximums barely even breaking 200 concurrent players anymore (just 25% of its "peak" of only ~800 2 months ago). There's now more people playing 2017's "Pinball FX3" than Dual Universe on Steam right now. A Pinball game from 2017 has more popularity than a brand new MMO. More people are playing Star Trek Online right now than have ever played DU on Steam concurrently -- STO also has its own launcher; this idea that everyone plays outside of Steam and that Steam stats therefore don't matter is hopelessly unfounded and absurd. Steam users are the most qualified potential customers NQ will find anywhere. Valve pushes at least 1 million unique impressions to your product -- their conversion rate was just as abysmal as their retention. If NQ can't convert these users even at the level of ancient MMOs like STO, the game just doesn't work.

I'm not so sure it's so simple...it's one thing to "heal" vertex data back to an original seed -- doing it conditionally is very different. That's far more difficult than healing terrain data to a seed because you need to delete a large amount of vertices without breaking the terrain. They would need to algorithmically "fill" terrain tunnels, constantly checking to be sure there's no player bases in range and that they haven't created holes in the terrain. Those checks aren't cheap, and filling terrain to delete vertices without breaking it can become complex. There's probably some smart ways to do something sort of like this efficiently, but I wouldn't classify it as being especially simple.

I don't think this will ever be completely fixed. IMO, massive battles in this game will never be possible...it struggles to scale even with a low player count on a platform famous for on demand hardware -- if they can't make the stack work even with so few players, it doesn't work. Unfortunately, very early on they believed they had invented groundbreaking tech that would make the game scale...but this was also from someone that hadn't worked in gaming before... The academic theories about how it "should" scale in the real world were never challenged, tested, or fully understood. Their early prototyping was not done correctly -- someone with experience in gaming (or tech in general!) would have known to challenge the many absurd ideas or assumptions about this product that never were never realistic, especially around scalability. The technical core of this game was based on foundations of sand, which makes the game's many design issues even harder to solve...but also means that issues with lag will never likely be solved, even and especially if they somehow manage to attract more players.

Just like their survey about what features to implement was never actually real...sometimes NQ has put effort forward to collect ideas or feedback, but then they get mad about the feedback they do get and shut it all down. Frankly...I'm not convinced development on DU will continue in any meaningful way. Their CEO is at a metaverse conference right now talking about other products NQ has been working on...let's not pretend DU is doing oh so well that NQ's higher ups are "all in". NQ might have issues....but even they surely see that this product is deeply flawed to the point where more dev won't make a difference. There's very, very, very little chance they can fix in the next 3-4 months what took them 8+ years to break. Why should they continue development of DU?! What's in it for them? The chance they can save DU through development changes alone is so abysmally low it's hard to argue it's worth the development cost. The opportunity to fix DU through development alone came and went years ago. I wouldn't be shocked if an announcement comes sometime after the CEO is done trying to hawk whatever scammy metaverse / web3 project they have been cooking up (e.g. "3d blogging stack") and are only keeping DU online until they can sink their hooks into some desperate vestige of business opportunity elsewhere.

This description is hilariously inaccurate in my opinion -- it's very kind to use NQ's description of what DU is... Wrong on two counts -- it isn't "massively" multiplayer. That applies to games with a massive audience -- when there's more people playing games with small-scale basic multiplayer than DU, that's not massive. When I can log into NMS and interact with dozens of more players by happenstance compared when I try to seek out crowds in this "MMO"...that's not "massively multiplayer". DU is a persistent multiplayer game, but at this point I don't agree that it is an "MMORPG". Obviously there's no "vast procedurally generated universe", there's a single solar system and no evidence they will ever add another system...and the procgen that does exist is boring and lifeless. Real-time? Even that is arguable with how much time gating there is. Emergent gameplay...? That fled the game long ago because they couldn't develop the tools to support this. Gameplay is "emergent" today not because the game offers so many wonderful tools...but because NQ doesn't even test gameplay, so everything people do is "emergent" in some fashion. The only "emergent" politics is people stealing stuff from orgs thanks to a permission system even the devs couldn't work properly then screaming about it on the forums or Reddit. The only other "politics" in DU now is in arguing about how long the game will stay online, lol. Forget the economy...we all knew DU's economy would never work as NQ wanted and I can't help but roll my eyes and the idea that players "drive" the economy when players can't even build their own markets. Also who thinks it's a good idea for players to "drive" anything...? It's a game and needs actual game designers to balance it -- putting players "in control" does not make a good game even if that was how DU worked.

That also depends on what you mean by "signficant user" -- I'm skeptical NQ is actually big enough to leverage much of a break. For example, an adtech company I worked for had well over $50,000 a month in AWS usage. The only break they gave was in flexibility of payment terms...that was helpful, but hardly game changing. The only other discount they pointed us to was in reserved instances, which is very significant but also comes with very significant up-front costs. Other services (like bandwidth charges for CF) have built-in discounts that scale based on usage, already. I can't emphasize enough the world of difference between on-demand and reserved instance pricing -- the more you can afford to pay up-front, the more affordable (and less flexible) AWS is. Otherwise, the only other discount I know of is for their enterprise level plans -- e.g. companies with more than $5 million in spend per year start to get discounts, with more committed spend leading to more discounts. Honestly, I was under the impression that it's really rare for Amazon to give special pricing, except through very high levels of enterprise spend or existing discount programs -- that's the experience I've had with firms that likely outspend NQ, but I'm hardly an expert with the biz side of AWS. Either way, with the list of the top AWS customers being mostly billion-dollar entities, I don't think NQ would be a "significant user", relatively speaking. Also...I wouldn't underestimate their CPU usage! CF might push huge loads of voxel data, but there's still plenty of server-side processing that relies on traditional infra, likely including RDS as well. We can only guess on their usage, but I wouldn't lay a bunch of bets on their stack being efficient.

I think I mentioned this somewhere before, but after Squenix decided to mulligan FF14, the producer/director in charge of the successful rebuild commented about the early project's failures in a postmortem. Three main issues were identified: NQ certainly fits the latter two like a glove -- team members with actual MMO experience are either not in leadership roles or moved on a long long time ago. Their insistence that they can patch the game into health post-release was similarly naive and arrogant...they wouldn't have fallen into such a trap if more of their leadership had experience with MMOs. Hell, maybe they'd have realized the flaw with that sort of thinking if their leadership had experience with large projects in general, but that isn't the case. Again, the CTO's only non-internship job is working at NQ. The design lead's last job as a designer was a Trivial Pursuit game adaptation that's so bad it isn't even on the mobile stores anymore. I'm not seeing that these are "bad" or incompetent people, I have no clue about their competence nor does it really matter...the point is that NQ's decision to make these people leaders is puzzling. Experience really matters, especially for a product where you don't have another shot at a release.

Why do you think your data is being processed by Prismic...? The actual login API points to DU's servers (a POST to https://www.dualuniverse.game/api/auth/login specifically). The API endpoints to access user data all appear to point to DU's API and have nothing to do with Prismic....from my limited sleuthing, API calls to Prismic are not user-specific and fetch general site information and images from a CDN. There's no specific evidence I could see to suggest they have shared user data with this third party in violation of EU law.