Cheith

True, but maybe - just maybe - one should stop trying to work around using the rocket engines you have. Either get enough thrust up with the atmos to keep you going until your space engines kick in OR us the rocket engines. I can agree the rocket engines need fixed but frankly I don't think you need a new type of rocket engine to do that.

Right now when flattening terrain it is pretty easy to get rogue voxels floating in the air. Many of these rogue voxels are easy to spot but some are not as they contain a tiny amount of terrain in them. Right now I have several on my base I cannot find. Give us a way to highlight them so that we can discover them and remove them.

That I would agree with.

What I am saying is there is no real reason for the ion thruster fuel to be more expensive. Now as today they use Xenon it likely is, but you don't have to use Xenon. In fact for rocket fuel - if we are being picky, you need two tanks one per reactant and both need to be very flipping cold. After all you need to carry your own oxygen to get it to burn at that rate in a controlled fashion and you need to cool it to have enough. But as this is all new stuff can't see anything happening anyway - they are pretty clear on not doing anything new that is not on their existing list (whatever that is these days).

Not buying it. Afterburners could do the same thing without adding another item to the game and use the same fuel as the engines. So, seems logical to me.

Why? All ion fuel is really for is reaction mass. You need to throw something the other way from that which you wish to go - in this case a charged something to qualify as an ion. In principle it can be anything. H+ is an ion after all as is O-- . Not sold on the fuel aspect - the 'drive' certainly but not the fuel.

The rocket discussion is interesting as it clearly depends on what kind of rockets we are talking about. The rockets that put things into space are massive, use enormous amounts of fuel and are hugely expensive. So, if that is your view of a rocket - for getting into space - then yeah they are expensive and chew fuel like it is going out of fashion. Saying that it is not really advanced technology per-se so it likely should not be top tier technology but should deliver the thrust needed to put things in orbit at a fuel cost. Ion engines n the other hand should be high tech but likely a lot less thrust. Space propulsion also requires you to throw some mass in the opposite direction that you want to travel - so that should add another interesting twist. Then, of course, we have solar sails - but sadly we don't have them in game. As to take-off assist, sur you could have disposable rockets but it would be much easier just to add an afterburn capability to the atmospheric engines. More thrust, a lot more fuel.

lol

Why is a Bonsai plant considered an end-game item. I mean a Bonsai plant, seriously - almost enough to make one rage quit

At this point there are no 'worthwhile' tiles. All of the values, according to NQ, were test values and WILL BE CHANGED. So ... the rush was purely speculative. It is up to the distribution gods as to whether or not your newly claimed territories are any good/

Sorry - 100% disagree with you - and CCP had all sorts of criticism and stability issues at the start just as a by the way. Generally makes the DU critics look like amateurs! I would agree that their back end technology was very cutting edge for the time, but their front end was absolutely not. Also their scale of ambition was different from the DU challenge. The DU challenge is made way harder by the decision to allow deformation at the scale they do. You can argue that it was a bad idea to go down the path, but it is an extremely hard thing to scale. Their problems are way harder than EVEs. The IDE argument is a total red herring - professional IDEs in 2003 were still decent, sure not where they are now but not crippling in any way. And NMS - right - the non multi player multi player game? The reformed disaster? Limited ambition and frankly spectacularly dull procedurally generated crap. Not quite sure why it is relevant and as my PCs GPU fan just died not likely to be checking that out I’m afraid until a new one arrives. In the end EVE 2003 and DU 2021 are just not comparable - different eras, technologies, expectations, ambitions.

Apples ... oranges ... technically you cannot fairly compare this to EVE in 2003 - this is a lot more ambitious. It might also be worth pointing out that there was way more negative posting, acrimony and general whining in the early days of EVE. Also CCP with Dust might be a more appropriate comparison and that turned out well. Now CCP made some very smart choices with what they did, to be sure, and kept the really hard stuff to 'how do I single shard this' which was (and still is) very difficult. They also didn't think that players would make all the content - another smart move. In my opinion they bit off a lot less. Their 3D engine was very basic - but it was a simpler time. I would also say that the expectations of what an MMO can deliver in 2003 and now are entirely different. With the vast spend on some titles setting crazy expectations (yes, SC). Twenty million while a decent sum of money is not a lot compared to some of the competition (assuming you even consider this in the same league which is another question all together). I would imagine NQ are burning upwards of 5 million a year right now so I don't see their 20.6 million lasting all that long. It really isn't that much money and Paris is not Iceland.

Bitcoin can't scale - so it will never be a real, widely traded, currency. The ledger is a big issue and from the little reading I have done on it the system will struggle with TPS and might make 7 tps on a good day (Visanet by itself is on the thousands). Now there are claims of potential fixes for some of this but as it is a distributed system with multiple parties effectively unknown to each other this is unlikely to be trivial. The other problem, of course, is that mining bitcoins just keeps getting harder and will always do so until you can't actually mine any more. The limit is 21 million. At that point who knows how it will operate as there will be no reward for validating transactions. It should get interesting. Something that becomes less affordable the more popular it is.

True, but you need time and space to do that. For something this size you would likely be looking at 12-18 months of doing nothing else to get there even if it is well designed (including testing, etc). Probably not viable in my opinion unless you have a second team doing it and migrating in new features as they go. This of course comes with the usual caveat of not having seen the code!! Could be more time than that.

For the simple reason I have seen a lot of 'we put money in via KS therefore ...' chest thumping. Just putting the amount into perspective.

It is a fair enough point, but in the end if steak is not achievable at the price point the customers are willing to pay then you are not going to get steak - and to be honest the Kickstarter funding wouldn't even have got you Spam. So, now the customers get to make the choice: 1) keep yelling for steak they will never get, 2) decide to go to a different restaurant, or 3) have some bacon for a lower price point. It takes a certain kind of mentality to persist with (1) and sadly the MMO community seems to have no shortage of that personality.

I think this is a definite must - it is just silly that we don't have a fully suite of parts that have scaled up. Just scale up the graphics even in the short term rather than going for something fancy. I would also (honestly) say you either need hybrid engines (atmosphere/space) or more clearly delineate atmospheric/space craft by making the rocket engine the only thing that can get you from earth to space permanently and then use space stations as launching pads from there. Part of the problem is trying to be everything to everybody - not going to work.

And I would expect they thought they would raise more money. Just to put the Kickstarter funding into the perspective, the money raised might keep a team of 5 decent developers going for a year (assuming standard overheads and some support) and then they are done. Sadly software estimation is not yet a science - or even close - and it is usually underestimated. Saying that the underestimation is certainly NQs fault, not the players. They certainly own that, but in that they are not alone. As to the patch - what would you rather have? Well tested and functioning features that are late or rushed features that are buggy? At this point (based on what I have read on the forums) I would be pushing things off until I was sure they functioned as well as I could make them rather than releasing them when I promised but with known issues. The community is pretty unforgiving.

I find it amusing listening to some of this as I do write software for fairly large systems for a living. Changing the fundamentals of a large, complex piece of software (which DU undoubtedly is) is not a trivial exercise. There will be at least 100s of thousand of lines of code in there and who knows how many components. Quick change, especially to core elements, does not happen - at least not without breaking a lot of things which will then just lead to more complaining. Assuming this is a smallish team - after all the Kickstarter raised a relatively small amount of money - then they will have manpower issues focusing on new features and stability at the same time. Too little money, too few people. Think about what SC has burned through after its crazy money raising - and frankly this project is no less complex than SC, the focus is just different. To be honest I think the expectations raised on this forum about turn around time for new features and fixing issues are completely and utterly unrealistic. While people are, of course, entitled to their opinions I don't see much sense talked here when it comes to development. Comparing the development to Starbase is also crazy - Frozenbyte is a much larger more well established company (130 employees). Starbase has also supposedly been around for 7 years - but likely with more money and more people.

I'd vote for this - but can you imagine the gnashing of teeth, tearing out of hair and general wailing that would accompany this? Basically almost nothing currently in existence would fly any more!!

Don't really see the point in buffing engines and, in reality, engine walls are what they are - and attempt to lift vast amounts of cargo in places. The 'proper' way to fix this would be to add in a concept of strain on the airframe when in gravity - after all that (and cost) is the reason we don't get engine walls lifting ridiculous amounts aloft in real life. At some point the materials cannot stand up to the strain. If it were done 'properly' then most heavy stuff would only be supported (when under gravity) by hovers and flying would be restricted to a smallish number of tonnes in weight. Not going to happen though I don't think. People would likely revolt! It would then be rockets for bridging planets and space probably putting the game back where it was intended and removing hybrids except for very small payloads.

Sadly you have to deal with the 0.1% because they soon become the 99%. Just the way the universe works. Of course you can go the other route and just ban people for exploiting but that has its own pitfalls.

You are fine, we were discussing. Thanks though. RSI - Repetitive Strain Injury. Continuous repetitive motions (such as repeatedly clicking the mouse while doing nothing else with that finger or giving it some rest) can cause muscle and other issues. Most common for computer users historically was the wrist. Having has a mild case of it in my wrist once (fortunately caught it before it got bad) it is no fun. For some people it can be debilitating. Generally you should design games to avoid these kinds of actions. Unsurprisingly, there is a wikipedia page for it!! I don't think we will agree on this, we just have different views and that is fine. I personally am not a fan of large corps/factions in games as they tend to try and control certain areas of gameplay which may be a part of the issue for me. In the end neither of us will make the decision!! Was an interesting discussion anyway. And on your last point, yes I hope there are other things to do too - games are not fun when you are forced to do things you don't like to progress (for me that is PvP)

Um, if you are going to throw in the comment on 'please don't give me the following argument' then please don't start with the old favorite of 'if you don't want it ignore it'. As this is all opinion - in my opinion removing megas makes a more balanced mining game and make it more likely hexes will be mined out. It will remove the 'cherry picking' of single nodes out of a hex which, again in my opinion, is bad for the game and favors a well-off established gamer who can afford all the scanning equipment. Mega-hunting is not new player friendly. Megas also create multiple tunnel 'sets' in a hex - where you have one lot of folks tunneling and finding the mega before leaving and another set of people tunneling and finding everything else. Not great if you are trying to cut down on tunnels. Frankly I am not a great fan of the automated mining and would much rather keep an interactive mining option - one reason I like the find/mine scenario. If there are tunnel issues I understand changing it, but frankly I wouldn't otherwise. As I said before the thing that makes mining more boring is just clicking on the same node continuously. Single continuous repetitive actions are just a bad thing for all sorts of reasons (including things like RSI). And it won't be better for everyone - I am not claiming it will and not even trying - my goal would be to make it better for most people who wish to mine, after all those are the people who use the system the most. If you don't wish to mine, don't - just like if you don't want to build don't. The argument works both ways.

Right now the color palette for honeycomb materials is very limited - and there is really no good reason why. Why not add paints/dyes and allow us to re-color the material surfaces to a mix of our choosing - you could even add skills, etc that allows more variety in colors or machines to create the paint, ores that create the colors. Endless hours of time spent just getting that right shade of orange.