Jump to content

Zxaber

Alpha Tester
  • Posts

    4
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Zxaber

  1. This is an excellent question, one asked a few times but never answered sufficiently from NQ.

     

    They do not intend to respawn resources. Periodic asteroid impacts was a suggestion, but how would you choose where it hits in a populated planet.

     

    To be honest, asteroid impacts sounds like it would be neat to build around. Similar to Space Engineers, if turrets could be set up to target asteroids then you could set up defenses. Perhaps even a city that taxes people in return for a protected build area?

     

    Also, the resources could be so extensive, that it takes an enormous amount of time to deplete them, kinda like earth. It is suspected players will be on the starting planet for a year before any real expansion begins. Of course if there are richer areas elsewhere, the better equipped groups would want to move there immediately. Leaving the extensive, but low quality ore patches for noobs.

     

    I feel like with enough of a playerbase, it'll go surprisingly fast. Especially since it was mentioned that resource scanning will be a thing, which will remove a lot of simple blind stripmining.

     

    I've proposed in past threads on this topic that the basic resources are renewable -- so a farm and/or hydroponics produces plant matter which is process into hydrocarbons (fuel) and can be processed further into basic construction material (plastics). This solves the spawn area resource problems. Because construction seems like a major focus of the game it also makes sense to have the basics be self sufficient for those far away colonies and ships.

    I'm not sure I like this idea for two reasons. The first is that I feel it would take away a lot of the need to expand. Without the constant need to gather material and fuel, I'm certain a lot of players would be content to just sit on a solar farm and never explore.

    The other reason is that a solar farm and everything else needed to setup a such a self-sustaining system would cost materials in the first place. So it wouldn't really help new players get started. At best, new players would get these materials from other players' setups for free. Being outright given mid-game or end-game equipment is never fun in Minecraft or Terraria, and I'd expect the same for DU.

  2. So here's a question that has been on my mind recently. Do we have any information on how resource needs will play out in the long run? In other resource-gathering games (Minecraft, Factorio, Space Engineers), resources (iron, for example) are permanently gone when mined. Makes sense. In DU, we can leave permanent changes in worlds, so it only follows that resources will be permanently harvested as well.

     

    This is well and good for singleplayer/small server games because there's virtually no chance that the area will be mined out to the point of excessive travel to find resources. The only real possible problem is if a new player joins and there's nothing for miles to harvest. Which rolls nicely into my real point.

     

    I have to guess that as resources are depleted and spent, assuming resources don't respawn, the player activity bubble will expand as a hollow shell. Players will mine out a planet until the scraps left are not worth retrieving, and then expand the bubble of human influence as they jump to the next system. Past the ”skin” of the bubble where most of human interaction is, will be the dead and barren discarded planets, possibly dotted with the HQs of corporations that decide against periodically moving and rebuilding their main base on the frontlines. And somewhere in the center of the resource wasteland is the starting planet. So what will new players log into, a year down the road? Will it be an early game devoid of much if the playerbase; a newbie island of sorts? Will there be anything worth mining, to help them get on their feet? Perhaps periodically-spawning asteroids? And what of their trip to the bubble's edge, that would presumably hold most players, especially with destroyable warp gates?

     

    Perhaps, if "Safe Zone" planets are peppered in throughout the galaxy, the game could just choose such a planet near other players as the current newbie spawn zone. This could ensure that new players are spawned where everyone else is. But a returning player could face the same issues, if they had last played months ago and the bubble has expanded without them. Returning players might have enough stock to keep going, and players on board their corporation vessel would be dragged along to the frontlines even while logged out, but neither of these can be assumed.

  3. The only question I really feel strongly about answering is the first one.

     

    How would you feel more confortable to build?

    I chose Online Immersive + Offline subversive. I think the first-person editing would be a sort of entry-level/touch-up type of building, where new players spend a lot of their creation time and veterens simply make a few small adjustments here and there. Meanwhile, for serious or complex creations, designing the blueprint in a 3D editor would make things easy.

     

    That being said, the ability to make a garage or workshop ingame, where people could use a 3D building mode, might be neat.

     

    --

     

    As far as the other two questions go;

    I think that people should be able to choose whether or not their creations are subject to direct cloning.

     

    I'm not sure I understand the third question fully; is it asking about the ability to pocket ships? I think that certainly shouldn't be the case, and I'd argue that if blueprints are involved, certain parts (say, the voxel material) should be unrecoverable once placed. Sure, inventory limits might prevent one from storing a space station in their backpack, but even getting to a location and just eating their land speeder seems too much.

  4. Here's my question, do we know if large ships can viably have smaller ships move internally? That is, opposed to Space Engineers' physics where anything not bolted down makes a mess of all involved? Because a large capital ship with a tram for moving cargo around, or even one that moves small ships between launch bays and storage slots, would be really cool.

×
×
  • Create New...