Sharknoon

Very nice job! Thank you!

JC said at gamescom, the pre-alpha access will last until the alpha release, so you guys should be able to play DU at least once a week ?

The build they showed at gamescom was the build from july with some of the august features added in arrears. The august build was very unstable at that point so they decided to use the july one.

At gamescom NQ said, they will try to implement a bug reporting feature in DU. In the lastest Dev Diary you can see a button for that at the bottom right of the main menu. So I think they will get it in DU until the pre-alpha starts. But they also said, if they can't make it to that date, they will make a dedicated forum thread for bug reporting.

Really happy to see the cool new UI, I played the old one at Gamescom. While it was usable, the keybindings and the readability weren't that good. But the old UI was just a placeholder. The new UI seems to be way better. Also the new Textures look very nice. Some of the new Elements are really great. For example having a bigger bar at the bottom of the screen unit makes it way more easier to align it. Wasn't easy with the current one. Also the new lights look very promising. NQ is really exceeding my expectations on DU ? Very good job NQ ?

I can totally agree @An0ubiS answer. I had the pleasure to meet some people from NQ at gamescom. Very great and talented guys with very high ambitions to make the game as good as possible

JC itself said at gamescom, he played hundreds of hours of EVE Online and Minecraft (Space Engineers wasn't out at this time). He wanted to join the building and first person part of Minecraft with the singleshard and complex structure of EVE. So he founded NQ in 2013 ?

NQ is hoping, that the community is going to regulate the trolls. People who behave against the rules of NQ, are getting first a short temporary ban, second a longer one and third a permanent ban. I share the same concern, because I dont think that the community is willing to invest much time and effort to prevent trolls outside of their organisation.

I havent seen an option to load your own library sadly. I also would love to see this feature being implemented. Right now, there is just a whitelist system of libraries. Maybe they will add some player-made libraries to the list. No Info on the metatables, gues wee have to wait until September 30th

Yes, in this case, the data is streamed directly from youtube. I dont know, if the HTML-Code of the screen-unit is hosted by the server or by the player via peer to peer. I guess by the server. The Youtube-Video itself has nothing to do with the DU-Server, its a connection between the client and Youtube.

They arent developing the HTML-technology itself, they are using CoherentGT from CoherentLabs (http://coherent-labs.com/coherent-gt/) which is actually a embedded browser. The size of the screen unit also influences the dpi of the website. BTW, the whole ui is also made in HTML, so you can freely edit the whole UI of the game

They will have a whitelist-system on lua-libraries. Only the ones reviewed by novaquark are going to be enabled. Network-connections arent allowed. This way, NQ has the full control of what you can and can not do with lua scripting.

Alpha. They are targeting around Q1 or Q2 2018 for a complete game loop (alpha). Beta should come in H2 2018. Remember, these dates are likely to be changed in the future!

In the future they will implement stargates, which allows teleportation. So only the first time traveling to new solar systems takes that long. This time is targeted by NQ as the best time you can reach. They will also implement (post-release) a function to send out "probes", which teleports you to that location, when they have reached their destination, so that you can build a stargate. But all of this is post-release!

I had the pleasure to talk to JC for about one hour at gamescom. Here are some hopefully new informations I can remember: JC dont know when the Alpha is ready but it is going to happen in 2018 The Market-Feature is going to be implemented in the first update for the alpha (some weeks after the alpha launch) They havent done much yet to prevent hackers To prevent glitching when standing on moving objects (like space engineers or GTA) they give every construct their own relative coordinate system, called Local-Frame, which the player is bounded to. To detect which Frame is the right one (e.g. jumping from a ship to a planet) they send a ray downwards and the ray detects the Frame underneath the player. Right now only the skybox is rotating, but planet rotation is planned for the future On Tuesday, August 22, Novaquark has implemented a sitting function for the couch (not a joke!) They are hiring several new people starting in september, including a webdeveloper, who is going to work for the first 4 month on the community portal full-time JC itself has written the LUA-Scripting, flight-mechanics, logical-gates and the HTML/SVG Screenunit The Community Managers are really happy seeing such a growing community and that much interest in the game Most of the people at novaquark are playing the game mosty at work, not very often at home You can freely reskin the entire UI of the game, the whole UI is made up of HTML and CSS, NQ wont prevent making changes to the ui Right now, you can embed any HTML-content, except for Javascripts, in the Screen-Unit, e.g. embedding a Youtube-Video works right now, they arent sure, if they continue to allow that The client and the server are written in C++. The client needs C++ for the performance, the server is also written in C++ due to the high amount of the same code with the client. They wished, they could make it in a safer language like Java, but htey simply doesnt have the time to write a lot of code twice. Traveling to other planets takes in average 2 days, to other solar systems 2 weeks When the player has a limited internet-connection, they lower the refresh-rate of constructs and players When the player has a slow computer, they are limiting the viewing distance and also lowering the refresh-rate of constructs and players The goal is to reach 30fps on every mid-sized pc Thats all for now, sorry for my bad english and some typing errors

My thoughts on the postponed alpha: In my opinion, NQ had a taff decision. Last month they've done a lot of code refactorings and bugfixes to keep the game easily to expand in the future but also stable. Unfortunately this process was needed to keep the quality of the game high and the development of new features had to wait. They decided to give the backers a peek (you could call it a tech-demo) into whats possible with DU, but dont expect a game, that has a full gameloop! The alpha will be complete, when the gameloop (mining -> crafting -> building -> trading...) is finished. Btw, trading is coming in the first update for the alpha (Alpha 2). So in general I think I would rather have a complete, bugfree game at a later stage instand of a buggy game, which has all the features hastily implemented.

I visited the Novaquark booth at gamescom. There is an NDA to not take any photos or videos. Novaquark doesnt want to show the game in this early stage to the public yet. In the pre-alpha phase starting in september, there will also be an NDA. But what I can tell you, that the game is exactly whats promised and its going to have some eastereggs for you to find out