Muttley

Top tip: use pixlr.com to resize your images before posting. It will be kinder to those on mobile devices and limited data plans.

Absolutely do not attempt to delete a system folder like System32. I assume that Kuritho is attempting to be funny rather than being mendacious. Either way, it's a dick move.
 
If you are getting a BSOD then I'm guessing the issues you are having with Firefox is just symptomatic of a much wider system issue.

My advice is to gather as much data as possible - e.g. error messages, the conditions under which you get the issues, your OS and it's version and anything else that you can think of - and then tell us your findings or go onto a specialised forum.

Absolutely do not attempt to delete a system folder like System32. I assume that Kuritho is attempting to be funny rather than being mendacious. Either way, it's a dick move.
 
If you are getting a BSOD then I'm guessing the issues you are having with Firefox is just symptomatic of a much wider system issue.

My advice is to gather as much data as possible - e.g. error messages, the conditions under which you get the issues, your OS and it's version and anything else that you can think of - and then tell us your findings or go onto a specialised forum.

The wider gaming community has long displayed some negative characteristics. One that springs to mind is the desire to see a project fail. So these type of questions are going to arise again and again and again and if NQ are not careful they will be feeding into fears. And that's not helpful when you are trying to crowdfund.
 
Let me put it this way. When I see a well-considered post such as the OP's go largely unanswered by the community (and that's not an attack on anyone here) or ignored by the devs a horrible question arises in my mind: "have I may have bought into another Starforge, NMS or any other turkey I care to mention?" And I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking this. Of course, there might be many legitimate reasons why the OP can't be answered and I've not lost faith in DU as a concept. However, I do think it would be very wise if NQ broke their radio silence very soon and started addressing such questions on a regular basis.

I'm happy as long as NQ keep us in the loop on a semi-regular basis. By semi-regular, I would be satisfied with a newsletter every week or two. 

Anywho, thanks for the official response.

Hi guys, 
 
We can understand your impatience. For Community Managers, it's as rewarding as it's frustrating. 
To be clear, we're amazed by the support and love you guys show everyday. And for that, we're truly grateful. 
 
As we already said in the past, it's normal that the communication activity is less intense, now that the Kickstarter roller coaster is "over". You'll notice the brackets for "over" as as Nyzaltar said, we're still very busy with the necessary "behind the curtain part" to manage, without even talking about all the daily duties we have. 
 
So that's where seeing you always eager for more is satisfying as you obviously like/backed our game and is also frustrating for us, because we can't do everything in a single day of work. 
 
As many of you know via the forum or our recent Twitter activity, we took very few rest and we do our best to be there for you. Like Nyzaltar just announced, we have some cool stuff for you. We hope you'll like it and we'll do our best to increase our presence here to exchange with you as much as possible 
 
Best, 
 
Nomad
 
PS: We're considering applying the DU theme to the mobile version of the forum. This being said, you can already switch from the white data-friendly default view to the full dark desktop version by scrolling down and by taping "Full version" (please see screenshots below). 
 

 

Hi everyone!   @ghoster:   Despite how you might feel, we are not going in radio silence mode.   A few points that we want to clarify here:   - We never expected either to have a success as large as Star Citizen for many obvious reasons: we started to really communicate about the game a few months ago, we had no celebrity in our team and no big brand to put in front. That alone were legitimate reasons to keep our expectations realistic. We are already amazed to see how far we went in a such short amount of time and we are not going to stop there! - As Pang_Dread mentioned it, we communicated in the last Kickstarter update that the communication now won't be as intense as it was during the Kickstarter.  - A few things are coming soon:
1) new forum sections will be opened on Wednesday 2nd of November 2) a newsletter for the end of the week (with some stuff that might interest more than one ) 3) a fan fiction contest that will take place from Tuesday 15th November to Thursday 15th of December! (more info very soon!)   @Anonymous:   We can understand that you are concerned about our current lack of presence. However, you should understand in return that you can't expect the same presence from a Community Manager in a big company or being a part of a big structure than one in a small company. Why? Because in small companies (like indie studios), people are generally brought to do more than the exact job written on their contract. If not, then the company might quickly run into some problems to work properly.    Just a few examples: - Apart the communication from JC, all the comm from the devs is handled by the CMs (who are doing the link between devs and the community). - Managing discussions on Facebook and Twitter is totally within the job of the CMs (it's really disturbing to say the contrary). - This might be shocking but yes, Customer Support can be something a CM has to do (and right now, this is also part of our job). - Internal, invisible tasks related to Kickstarter and hugely time consuming are also among the things we currently have to do. - Despite what you're saying, Reddit can also be an appropriate place where a CM might have to interact with people interested in the game.   All in all, we would love to interact a lot more with you guys than what we are currently doing. We will do our best to increase our presence in the coming months. A few replies are coming soon to some important topics.   Best regards, Nyzaltar.

The wider gaming community has long displayed some negative characteristics. One that springs to mind is the desire to see a project fail. So these type of questions are going to arise again and again and again and if NQ are not careful they will be feeding into fears. And that's not helpful when you are trying to crowdfund.
 
Let me put it this way. When I see a well-considered post such as the OP's go largely unanswered by the community (and that's not an attack on anyone here) or ignored by the devs a horrible question arises in my mind: "have I may have bought into another Starforge, NMS or any other turkey I care to mention?" And I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking this. Of course, there might be many legitimate reasons why the OP can't be answered and I've not lost faith in DU as a concept. However, I do think it would be very wise if NQ broke their radio silence very soon and started addressing such questions on a regular basis.

Wow ... some great feedback guys.
Did someone say Unigine! ... I love that engine, their Heaven demo makes me want to build an MMO in that world!
 
I'm not looking to rock the boat like maybe ... BlueDrake42 or whatever his name is ... but I do want to understand what it is that NQ is saying they have here.
 
For example ...
 
Procedural generation 
I know that Voxelfarm worlds are procedural and look amazing but my experience in a shard based world was poor when using a real world MMO solution built on the engine.
The alternative is something like no mans sky that did not meet expectations at all and both didn't save the players chances (no mans sky didn't even allow any changes).
 
Voxel Technology
Oddly enough I have been talking about doing exactly this for a couple of years now but couldn't find enough support from a seasoned developer community to get help with this idea of using Voxels on this scale because I had developer after developer tell me "it's impossible on todays tech without breaking the laws of physics"
...
 
That said ...
 
I am believer in the technology and do feel it can scale, using procedural in combination with static data and compression / bit packing techniques for the transmission brings the scale in terms of raw bytes in to the possible but it does come with a few "negotiations" you have to make. 
 
As I said when I started this thread, the raw numbers of Voxels that represent a large object are just insane and with something like a space station or a large ship you simply can't start from a procedural base so every Voxel has to be considered a change.
 
Given that "fact of how Voxels work" you can then take a data source containing any number of voxels and generate a mesh from that data easily enough and using some pretty common programming techniques known by many today construct meshes at varying "qualities" for use in game.
 
So in short ...
 
My question really wasn't "Using this number of Voxels is impossible right?" it was more something along the lines of ...
 
Given that I as a keen user of the game spend say 2 hours per day for say 10 days in a row editing Voxels I could as a single player build a pretty hefty space station looking at the tooling available here it's reasonable that I could build one of those space stations.
Looking at the raw numbers I presented before, lets assume my space station creation was something like 10 million Voxels, that's 10 million individual Voxels that 1 player has created that the server has to process and store and hand out whenever someone looks the right direction from the right spot on the game.
 
I am however, only 1 player ... so lets scale that up ... add another 999 players and we have 1000 x 10 million Voxels that are all entirely non procedural and could be reasonably constructed on the game server.
even if those ridiculous number of Voxels are not right next to each other that's still a lot of data to be managing and processing.
 
For an MMO that's a tiny number of players and for a single shard that's an insane amount of mesh data being handed around, the previously mentioned "developer community" tell me this is not possible.
 
So how I see it ... 
This is either being massively over sold or there are some "gotchas" that are still being overcome (and I seriously want them to be) but these guys must be on to something that through years of digging around and researching this particular technology (Voxels) I have not found anyone that can do this or anyone who even remotely has an idea how to do this on this scale. 
 
That on it's own raises questions does it not? 
 
I really don't want another no mans sky ... but I do want to know that this stuff really is possible so a little insight in to the tech would be really nice to have if the devs over at NQ are in a sharing mood (just a little technical peek ... please!).

The wider gaming community has long displayed some negative characteristics. One that springs to mind is the desire to see a project fail. So these type of questions are going to arise again and again and again and if NQ are not careful they will be feeding into fears. And that's not helpful when you are trying to crowdfund.
 
Let me put it this way. When I see a well-considered post such as the OP's go largely unanswered by the community (and that's not an attack on anyone here) or ignored by the devs a horrible question arises in my mind: "have I may have bought into another Starforge, NMS or any other turkey I care to mention?" And I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking this. Of course, there might be many legitimate reasons why the OP can't be answered and I've not lost faith in DU as a concept. However, I do think it would be very wise if NQ broke their radio silence very soon and started addressing such questions on a regular basis.

Ok i'm a developer myself, oddly enough this is my dream and I have been crunching this problem for years trying to wait out hardware that can handle the kind of workload involved here so please don't take this as an insult but I'd like to see some rationality here as to how this really works (although I accept that there's some reasonable limits due to IP protection on your part).
 
So gut feeling here ...
Take Minecraft and smarten up the voxel tech a lot adding LOD and lets face it much better volume management (that should help it scale a little bit) and then allow the creation of multiple "volumes" within the game world. 
 
Lets put some real numbers in to this to exlain the problem I am facing ...
Take the moon (that's 3474km in diameter), now lets assume that the voxel data is the same as Minecraft's where "each voxel is 1 cubic meter" so you need a volume of 3,474,000^3 which is a total of 41,926,580,000,000,000,000 voxels to represent the moon (ever seen a planet that small? ... hmmm, no i heaven't either).
 
Lets be reasonable about this ...
Even at 1 bit per voxel that's a lot of data to crunch but the reality here is that you would need more than just 1 bit per voxel, with the bulk of voxel engines I've seen or written using at least 1 byte usually 2 per voxel.
 
Taking a "non uniform object" example ...
In one of the videos you guys said the space station was 4km in size (so that's a cubic volume of 64,000,000,000 voxels asusming I did my math right), even that seems to raise a few red flags for me but that volume is mostly empty space so i'd estimate you're using maybe an 8th of that or less but that's still a station with actual values for maybe 8,000,000,000 voxels.
 
I just bought a brand new nVidia 1080 GTX graphics card and even if I have that crunch the numbers on each of its 2.5k+ gpu cores it's still going to busy for some time handling that amount of raw data for a whole scene so it's unlikely any client ever sees that raw data instead there must be some magic going on on the server to only send "mesh data" / some form of "view data" from a given view of a volume at a given LOD.
Doing that though, puts a hell of a lot of computation on the server farm when you have say 1,000+ players all editing stuff in a small area all that computation is going to get pricey, and farming that load only adds network traffic and the need for more copies of that data to reduce data access overheads!
 
...
 
Speculation:
A view of a "planet" is generated by using a fractal algorithm that describes the shape at varying levels of detail depending on how close you are and then any changes are applied to that using some clever "this 1 Voxel change isn't visible here but that 1,000 Voxel change does X" type algorithm.
 
The raw Voxel data is only stored when edited / player created ... but that could get expensive over time as Voxels are easily editable and very fast raising the question is this a sustainable platform or is there some plan to "retire old data"?
 
Large "ships" / "stations" are beyond me ... you can't "algorithmic-ally compute" those so how does this all work without going beyond the laws of physics for computing the data or network load?
 
...
 
The raw numbers are massive but computers are good with raw numbers and large data sets so the problem appears to be "interesting" to say the least.
 
The closest we have seen to this is something like Everquest Landmark and the failed Everquest Next project, those games were built on the Voxelfarm engine. 
http://www.voxelfarm.com/
 
I once had a discussion with the Creator of Voxelfarm by email when doing some research in to Voxel engines (I was debating writing my own or using one someone else wrote to build a pet project) and 2 key points came out ...
  1. Small or big, apparently doesn't matter if your search algorithm is smart enough you have a fixed cost (but that lost me)
  2. Physics is where it gets hard not simply drawing!
 
I tried landmark out but it suffered from some serious limitations ...
  1. The sharding issue (to handle the network load) which you have somehow solved (or claim to) yet not even the eve team with it's years of experience has cracked that particular problem (simulations don't count).
  2. The game ran slow, even on a high end PC typical frame rates were poor <30 fps was normal (although I admit I was playing with it in beta)
  3. Persistence just didn't happen ... I would dig a tunnel, walk away from it, come back ... and the hole is gone! ... and why ... disk space is expensive when you need that much of it.
  4. The raw numbers here just don't add up unless you have massive voxels (like greater than 10 cubic meters) or you have a chunking algorithm that can spread the load over many servers (something landmark didn't do), the problem there of course is network load leading back to point 1.
 
...
 
So i'd like to ask for more details on how this actually works as looking at raw numbers for Voxel data clearly is not helping me and you guys must have some answer to this raw scale problem!
FYI: I wanted to pledge during the Kickstarter and this is the reason I haven't yet ... really hoping you guys can put my mind at ease as I'm seriously considering pledging enough to get me alpha access (if that's still an option).
 

he's already had his question answered do we need to continue finding new subtle and clever ways to mock him for asking? 

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All Official DU Videos -- most recent Video listed LAST:
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Hello fellow Arkship passengers 
 
I found out this official Artwork at Dual Universe page on IndieDB a few days ago and this thing blow up my mind 
That will be awesome if we can be a Hunter, hunting for Unique Animals that spreads on each planets in each unique Solar Systems. And we can Extract something useful from it, resources like :
Their meat for some foods Their skin / fur for some clothes & accessories, or even some armors ? Or perhaps we can tame them as Space Pets  Also, i think by adding "Hunting" aspect to the Skill Tree system will be awesome (especially for players that love hunt) so the hunting activity will be much exciting & challenging as the skill progress.
 
Adding a Hunt-Specific weapon & equipment will be also interesting, like :
Tactical Arrow that shown on the Artwork A large & strong Net to trap Animal that passing by Or perhaps a Fishing Rod ?   
I realize that i wish too much for a game that even has not been released but hey, i just give my opinion & ideas . I hope the Developer will see this as a potential feature in the future 
 
 
What do you think ? do you have any great ideas ? Let's discuss 

 
Image Source : www.indiedb.com/games/dual-universe 

As planned, we can now reveal the 8,000k backers reward:
Each Kickstarter backer will receive the blueprint of a single-player hovercraft with a design unique and specific to the Kickstarter! (players will still have to gather the materials to build it)
We will give more info very soon.
Thanks again for your support!
The Novaquark Team
 
 
How friggin cool is that!
Just wanted to post it here because not everyone looks at the KS page 24/7.

Impressive elements are impressive.

Once again, glass voxels are needed!  

Most of the information you need can be found on the Kickstarter page.  From that page, you can see the following information:
 
 
It's far too early to say what the minimum specs this game will be. Even Novaquarq don't know at this stage. Remember, that there is no game as of yet, only the basis for one. (That goes for any pre-Alpha or Alpha build.)
 
Whenever considering the minimum requirements you will want to take note not only the supported OS but also the minimum requirements for GPU, CPU, and RAM. I suspect that if you are running Windows 7 (the time for free upgrades to Win 10 has sadly passed) your system is already fairly old and I would not count on it being able to run this game. But I would caution that this is speculation on my part.

Three things struck me.
 
Firstly, it would be really useful to have a pattern library (maybe just your own or a community one) that you select from and apply to surfaces. This would have been useful when the player was adding the yellow diagonal blocks to the floor.
 
Secondly, NQ should have been releasing this stuff at the start of the Kickstarter

Thirdly, some of the edits in that video were messy. While I REALLY appreciate NQ not going all NMS on us and giving us actual in-game footage, it does no harm to spend a little more time on story direction and editing 

Hey Muttley, if I remember correctly JC said that if you have a high level system today it would most likely scale to medium settings when the game releases.
 
I run a Nvidia 760 currently but I fully expect I'll have to upgrade to participate in the alpha.

Combat details here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1949863330/dual-universe-civilization-building-sci-fi-mmorpg/posts/1702763?ref=backer_project_update

Combat details here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1949863330/dual-universe-civilization-building-sci-fi-mmorpg/posts/1702763?ref=backer_project_update

Combat details here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1949863330/dual-universe-civilization-building-sci-fi-mmorpg/posts/1702763?ref=backer_project_update

They should have built a different type of ship. Variety is the spice of life!