Vorengard

@huschhusch
 
hexagons have a diameter of roughly 1km - plenty of space to dig plenty of holes. So it still doesn't solve anything
 
Again: they already plan on taxing those people who spawn a TCU within the arkzone - this prevents people from taking too many tiles AND can be used as quanta sink too. Since TCUs will be tremendously expensive (AND you have to pay for the upkeep within the arkzone) I don't think that many privateers will hold tiles within the safezone - this is (and always was intended to be imho) and org effort.
 
To me you can't restrict players in taking a tile for themselves. If they can pay the upkeep costs and don't fuck it up big time (so that NQ has to intervene), I don't see any reason why that player shouldn't be allowed to keep that tile. Or 5 tiles. Or, if he has billions of quanta, 10 tiles.

Repairing from the Inside sounds fun.
But I would also like a Method to do it from the Outside (maybe a Space Walk - or a Repair Droid a la Star Wars). 

JC has mentioned the idea of repairing ships during combat, so I assume this is something we will see eventually. However, there are no details on this process (or repairing of any kind, for that matter) so we can only speculate as to how any of it will work.
 
That being said, I really hope they implement this feature ASAP, not only for convenience, but because it sounds really cool. Being a part of a damage control crew on a large warship during a pitched battle would be amazing, and it would be a shame if we're not allowed to do it. 

This has been proposed before and it boils down to the same answer:
They can't check hundreds and thousands of constructs for leaks, every second (was in some interview)
 
Oxygen would be a nice thing to have in a later expansion but imho it shouldn't be tied to the hull of the construct in any way - this just makes up for bad gameplay in a mmo. I would be the first one to just fly around, poking holes in random structures just to annoy people there who would have to find all leaks.

I also would prefer the Starting Zone not being mined out like a cheese. But Building should be allowed, since it only makes sense that there would be a City.
But this City is the first impression new Players get from the Game. So it should be somewhat nice. Maybe the Devs should allow free Building there but with low Moderation on what is allowed and what not (like some Building in Form of a Raised mittle Finger or a d*ck or whatever).
 
This is in regard to all Save Zone Ark Ships. Since those are apparently non Destruction, non Kill Zones.

If implemented you'd have to balance this quite well so:
 
- only in build mode usable
- shows no players
- can't be used on other players' caves
 
Or, if they go for a more sophisticated scanner (which I would love) then it should be balanced so that
 
- the higher (=more expensive) the scanner, the more info it shows (wider radius, shows players, shows constructs,...)
- players can counter this scanner by building some kind of base equipment

Simply put I like idea of building underground (bunkers, hidden bases etc.) but it can be very difficult to keep track of the caves, what's the shape of the cavern and especially to not accidentally dig into another room unintentionally. I learned this could be challenging in Space engineers except with free cam, which probably won't be possible in MMO.
 
My suggestion is to have some kind of scanner that lets builder to kind of see through the voxels, not necessarily details of what is going on in another cavern, but at least where all of the caverns are.This could have a limited range that would depend on how advanced tool you have. This could also be used to make maps of tunnels that could be useful. A deep mining tunnel could have signs shoving people what to except/where to go.

Absolutely. Something like this could also be very important when people work together to build something large. If I do something decent sized alone I can look what seems right and make random corrections. If you have 10 people working on single construct possibly, different parts at different times, it is quite necessary to have at least some sort of plan and measures, so you can tell people to built this to 500 meters long, make sure that all hallways are 3 meters high and airlocks 2 meters in radius so they all match each other. At that point people should be able to measure what they are building without spending half of the time to count whatever grids are shown on voxels. 

Would be cool to have a tool when building to measure the distance between voxels, so that is easier to create spheres, circles or other curves. At the same time is very useful just to measure the lenght of your ship, wings and other parts, so that we don't have to count the voxel manually (and lose count inevitably 10 times before getting it right).

I think these are great ideas, and I'd be very surprised if they didn't make it into the game in the long term. However, I doubt we'll see them any time soon as this feature is definitely not critical to having a complete game. As you said, it just takes a lot of effort to make the art and to balance the items, but perhaps this will be implemented eventually. 

If you're talking about Surface-to-Space missiles that we could fire at ships, then whether or not they're implemented would depend on the existence of Space-to-Surface weapons you could mount on ships. You can't have one without the other because then one side or the other is at a serious disadvantage.
 
So, with that in mind, I'm going to guess that we won't see either of those things in the game for one big reason: gameplay imbalance. JC has said on multiple occasions that he doesn't want there to be any aspect of the game where a player would be powerless to stop something from happening to them, and either way this feature is one of them. If you can shoot missiles from the ground at ships in space, then ships would need to be able to shoot back, or you have a major force imbalance. But if ships can bombard planets then they could also harass people just walking around mining, or smaller bases who can't afford ICBMs yet. In both cases those people would be unable to defend themselves, and that's not something any of us want. 
 
So, no, I don't think we'll be able to build missile launchers that can shoot space ships... or at least I hope not because then planet fortifications would be more than a little OP. Imagine if you spent hours building a nice space station, and then some guy puts an ICBM launcher on the planet and there's nothing you can do about it short of a full-scale assault on his TCU.
 
That being said, I'm sure you could build a ton of small, cheap, disposable ships with high DPS and suicide them in waves at the enemy fleet, in much the same way missiles would work

If you want ship ideas, I would totally check out this website. You can put it any combination of any characters and it will generate a ship based on that, which is a seed. Put in absolutely nothing, and you get a random ship every time. But, whats more fun is to put in text, and see what ship it generates, because you can put in that same text later and it will generate the same ship. I've found it neat for inspiration, and there are definitely some super awesome ones that can generate, but unfortunately I can't think of any right now. Anyway, try it out:
 
http://ship.shapewright.com/
http://ship.shapewright.com/?name=ATMLVE
http://ship.shapewright.com/?name=Dual+Universe
 
I've put in 100+ characters in the name field before and it will still use every character as a seed to generate a new ship; and the same ship every time for that seed. I think the number of ships it can generate is limited only by how many characters you're willing to type in.

I agree, the ability to destroy someone else's hundreds of hours of work in seconds with something that you bought with real money isn't going to make that many people happy.

The problem with "very powerful but very expensive" weapons (be it a ship, bomb, gun, etc) is that such weapons always grow out of control and become imbalanced, simply as a result of a growing economy. EVE's Titans and Supercarriers are the perfect examples. CCP has said that they only expected there to be 3-4 Titans ever. Today there's a couple thousand, and CCP has to dedicate far too many resources to balancing and re-balancing them, because when Titans are too strong alliances with 150  of them are unstoppable, and when they're too weak the alliances that poured trillions of ISK into building them scream that their investment has been wasted.
 
The same thing will happen in DU if NQ isn't careful. If you can make MOAB-like bombs that obliterate things from orbit, or massive spaceships with orbital artillery, it wont be long before the uber-rich and powerful of the server start using those things to screw with the little people, simply because they're bored and they know nobody can touch them. I played EVE for a couple years where couldn't go to Low Sec without having to worry about some idiot from PL hotdropping you with his 6 Supercarriers just because he was bored.
 
I can't even count the number of times I've been hotdropped on a gate, alone in my Battlecruiser, because the local PL guys were bored, and the cost of the fuel was a drop in the bucket to them. If you give people the option, they will do the same thing in DU, and believe me that really really sucks.
 
Don't get me wrong, the idea of sieging people from orbit is amazing... but no orbital weapons or super-spaceships, please and thank you. 

I suspect that orgs will lay claim on land despite not having a TU on it. A TU means nothing if you can't back it up.

They're not going to do that (they stated that time and time again) because a player on that enemy planet can't do anything against it and he just dies incl. All his stuff. That's not fair nor it's good gameplay

Yes and no. Automation of certain features is very possible in Dual Universe. The combination of Lua and Interactive Elements will make for very interesting possibilities. Lua scripts themselves will be files on your personal computer that you call in the game, and youll have to be near them to run them. So, yes to everything you said, except the examples.
 
Both mining and defenses cannot be automated. Weapons and turrets will either be completely inoperable or at least very inefficient without direct player input. And mining can only be done by hand, there are no drills. Both of these limitations are put in place to preserve the integrity of the game. Automated turrets would allow one man to control a battleship, and automated mining would have a negative effect on the mining industry, and thus the game as a whole.

Just throwing it out there, I like mining by hand....
 
For all the previous reasons NQ gave I'm happy mining is the way it is. If you dont like mining as is, do something else.????

I hope that there will be massive veins of ore instead of blobs of it.
So a mining operation actually makes sense.

Hi everyone! 
 
To answer your questions (and requests):
 
1) About raw/uncut videos as technical demos:
 
We will do raw/uncut videos from one planet to another in the future. However, we might wait for some FX to be implemented. Why? while we think it's important to debunk as much skepticism as soon as possible, and keep the hype in check (some hype is always good, too much hype can have the opposite effect), we also think it's important to avoid releasing too much early raw stuff without anticipating the consequences: once a video is released on internet, even with a proper communication, you can expect situations where some people will take the video, use some parts of it (and sometimes the worst parts) for their own videos talking about the game, and give a pretty poor image of the game (intentionally or not) to new viewers who don't anything about the game yet, turning them off. For those who are in the community since nearly a year now, you might remember the controversy raised with BlueDrake42's videos. That's why we want to release our videos (even the raw ones) with the lowest risk of complaints in mind, and not hiding anything at the same time. 
 
Such videos will be also released as unlisted: while the community members will be able to share them with their friends, we won't use them as material to promote the game. Again, there is a reason for that: Statistics have shown that in order to catch the attention of new viewers (who don't already know the game), we have to aim for 2 or 3 minutes video length. The average attention span regarding videos hosted on media like Youtube was not much more than 2m40s in 2015 and has significantly decreased from 2000 to 2015. So it might even be lower in 2017, and we are already at 3 to 4 minutes in our last Dev Diaries. While we don't want to make overwhelmingly aggressive marketing campaigns, we want to avoid shooting ourselves in the foot and at least follow Marketing 101 guidelines . We hope you'll understand our position on this.
 
So in a nutshell, you can expect the first raw/uncut video as a technical demo around the next Dev Diary release 
 
2) Wich kind of FX effects are in the work:
 
On the short term, there might be an Acceleration/Speed visual effect in space and probably a visual effect when a spaceship enters a planet atmosphere...
But I said nothing! 
 
3) How long the trip took (in minutes)?
 
The trip took more or less 15 minutes. But the distance is not the final one.
We might reduce the distance to prevent the travel to be too boring.
 
4) All the stacks of iron ore are 95m3 and the coal one is 99m3. Will these be the standard stack sizes? And will different materials have different sizes? 
 
This are temporary stack sizes, not necessarily the final ones.
It hasn't been decided yet if we are going for one universal stack size (in volume) or several ones.
 
5) Having this craft system simplified to on-board refinery/distillery/factory system, seems to be oversimplification and we loosing some immersion here. Are you guys planing such thing? 
 
Again, as clearly mentioned in the Dev Diary, this is "work in progress", a temporary setting to show that basic crafting game mechanics have been implemented, but we are far from the final version. These are just the first steps of the complete implementation. There will be different crafting action types (refining, making alloy, making mechanical or electronic parts, assembling parts to create items, etc) and for each action type, you will probably have to create and use a specific Element such as:
- Foundry Unit for making alloys
- Assembly Unit to create items 
- Factory Unit to create contructs
Of course, at the beginning, the Nanoformer will enable you to create all the Elements for the basic crafting action types. 
 
6) Locking the construct to a point where it won't be editable anymore:
 
Yes, once the builder decides that his construct is complete, he will be able to lock it. The feature is not implemented (yet) in pre-alpha, but it might be there at the Alpha release. We might also give the ability to let the construct unlocked for further customization (by the creator or other players), but we are still analyzing all the consequences it could generate on the economy level and the possible emerging scams related to this customization freedom ("I sell you the AX-23 spaceship, but what you don't know is that the expensive Elements X, Y and Z on the default construct have been removed before putting it on sale").
 
7) About the blue dots in space:
 
The blue dots are just something decorative in the Skybox at the moment.
Keep in mind that we will have only the Alioth solar system available at the beginning of the Alpha: we prefer to focus on quality than quantity, and a solar system should be big enough as a first field test.
 
Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.

I know this topic has come up before, JC has mentioned the idea, and as far as I know a final decision hasn't been made. Please correct me if I'm wrong. So, this thread is for discussing the pros and cons of multi-player ship piloting/fighting, and whether or not this type of system would be fun in the context of Dual Universe.
 
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Personally, I love the idea, and would really like to see it in DU. The added combat depth, teamwork, and strategy would make the game much more fun and immersive. It would make spaceships feel more like an actual ship you're piloting than a character skin or suit of armor you happen to be wearing, like in EVE. It would also place a power curve on individuals, so one guy in a super epic battleship can't take out an entire fleet himself.
 
That being said, I'm sure some people will be understandably annoyed that they can't fly the Enterprise around the galaxy all by themselves. It also gives large entities an advantage over smaller entities in some regards. For example: In EVE, I was in a scrappy Low-Sec pirate corp, but we still had a Titan to bridge us around places. In DU, I would hope that something like a Titan would require a bunch of people to fly properly, but that would prevent small groups from using that type of ship effectively... which may or may not be a bad thing.
 
Overall, the difference seems to be the degree to which we want to force people into playing as a group. Thoughts? 

The swastika example is actually an easy one. There are several nations, most notably Germany, that ban the depiction of the swastika in all non-historical, research, or teaching contexts, including making it "publicly accessible through data storage..." So, NQ would have to forcibly remove Swastikas from the game, or face penalties under German law.
 
Now, a more interesting question (and one that'll cause a lot of debate in the community) is their policy on other types of content. The most notable example being those people who just can't seem to resist drawing penises on everything. I predict it'll take approximately 6.2 seconds before someone loads the game for the first time, sprints outside, looks strait down, and draws a penis on the ground right outside the Arkship. Are we just going to have to live with penises carved into the sides of mountains everywhere?
 
I'm curious what NQ will do once this starts happening. 

... Do you... do you not understand how secret organizations work? Have you perhaps considered that the *best* way to make a secret society is to, in fact, not tell anyone?
 
Maybe it's just me, but it seems that advertising, having designated mechanics, and posting about a secret on public forums are all really bad ways to have a secret society. 

If you are advertising for a secret org you are doing it wrong. I think advertising is a non-issue in this case.
 
I mean, generally you want only selected trusted members in one.

Hi everyone!
 
There will be answers to all your pending questions tomorrow (though a few have been replied already in the Youtube comments)
 
Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.