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Limyaael

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Everything posted by Limyaael

  1. Google Translate isn't exceptionally simple to use from within games (I suppose you could quickly type in the foreign language on a tablet or something) and it's terrible for full sentences in plenty of languages. It would work for a few European languages I suppose, but those are the easiest languages to go to English from and a lot will be officially translated after the initial release.
  2. The game won't be out for two years and isn't even out of pre-alpha yet, it is horribly unoptimised so providing such an answer at this stage is close to worthless. However, JC has stated that he thinks that modern high-end machines will probably be just above the recommended specs in 2018 for the game. Looks beautiful now. I also wonder how much better looking the regular voxel stuff looks too.
  3. I really want to hear about this, safe zone mechanics are one of the things I'm most interested in at these early stages. From the perspective of promoting emergent gameplay, I think the first option is better. It creates more transport jobs to explicitly move people from safe zones to organisation headquarters (even if you have to jump through multiple safe zones to get there) than being able to jump straight to another org's homeworld. it also promotes turning every individual safe zone into trading ports over time. I can see them being harshly fought over as well, but over time they'll be more valuable for economic activity after a single org takes over, or multiple orgs agree to a truce. The whole idea about warping between safe zones is a great idea either way though. Prevents Alioth from becoming the centre of the universe so harshly.
  4. Self destruct capability might seem like a good idea but it could actually make the job of pirates close to impossible. Quickly, people will understand that a self destruct system is a must to avoid pirates trying to loot them for profit, and that would kill the pirating gameplay. One possibility would be to provide pirates with a self-destruct scrambler that they should use prior to any attack. We would like to have your feedback on this! In any case, this would be a post-release feature that we could introduce in an expansion. This game doesn't have predetermined spaceship classes. Unless you also own a copy of the exact spaceship you're boarding (or have boarded it a lot, and it hasn't been modified) you aren't going to know where the self-destruct's off switch is. They might have turned it on at the bridge, but turning it off could be in the engine room. Or it could be in seven different random barracks.
  5. The restricted, cheaper Kickstarter pledges aren't available, but the slightly more expensive ones are still available to be bought here. NQ have said this portal will at least stay up for another month, potentially longer. The cheapest alpha access (available sometime during the first half of next year) is the €120 Digital Gold pledge, but beta access is available (sometime in 2018) with the €60 Silver pledge. Welcome to the forums.
  6. As Lethys and CommanderLouiz have said, please watch the videos on their Youtube channel and read the devblogs first. But, from the AMA during the Kickstarter:
  7. The DU Death Star will be able to do what it does in Rogue One (blow up cities) but no planet destroying. That's just too devastating and gives far too much of an advantage to whoever builds the planetkiller first and goes on the warpath.
  8. I don't know of any other Kiwis, but there's a surprising amount of Australians around. Am I the only member of the forums from Melbourne?
  9. The opposite, actually. Earth and Mars have nearly identical days (24h and 25h) but all the gas giants have much smaller ones (10h, 11h, 17h, 16h). Mercury's is over 58 Earth days (only about 30 shorter than its orbit) and Venus over 116 days. These rotations have little to do with their location in the system. Mercury, for example, is thought to have such a long day because early in its history it was hit by a planetoid so large that its effects rippled through the core of the planet producing marks on opposite sides of the planet. Venus spins on its axis in the opposite direction to everything else, so it too was probably hit (so hard that it changed direction). Days will probably be randomised by planet within a certain range. Or maybe NQ will do a little bit of interfering and assign values when they drop the alien ruins they've said they could potentially drop to fit in with some lore.
  10. Most of my comments will be concerning ships designed for military use, as I think they're the ones that will be most harmed by an approach allowing easy use of automation. If I don't mention another specific type of ship, I'm probably talking about military vessels. Purposefully vague. Early game "large" ships will be in the range of smaller crews numbering in the dozens. It won't be for a few years (probably after the stargate network and a few profitable worlds are established) until capital ships with crews >50 will start being used. Crew size won't be about some vague number. These things don't need to be simulated here - they're actually happening and can be a part of interesting tactics. Pulling some numbers out of nowhere, let's say your organisation is at war with another similarly sized one, and you encounter large battles on a regular basis. Analysing previous battles, you've found that on average your fighters become damaged enough to require repairs at a rate of 0.25/min, and the average repair by a well-trained engineer takes two minutes. Thus, your engineers should have constant downtime in battle and really, you only need one, no? However, perhaps you're a little cautious and instead prefer to have a crew of three engineers so that in the event of an uncharacteristic set of damages, you can still get all your ships out into the fray as fast as possible. This will be more expensive (you need to hire the engineers, buy their equipment, etc.) but it could end up saving your ass. But if you can't acquire the funds, or your boss doesn't consider it important enough, your ship now costs less but could have problems. This game will have accountants, or if not dedicated members, accounting. Depends what you're doing. Are you controlling a cargo freighter with few weapons, having hired a mercenary company to protect you through no man's land between two warring factions you're smuggling between? Sure, having automatic weapons might work, and you probably don't need to be an extraordinary pilot. Just keep those shields up and watch your engine. Are you controlling a dreadnaught ready to go into battle? You'll be fine getting there, but in battle you'll want proper navigators telling you exactly what's going on, a commander to coordinate everything, dedicated engineers for the engine and for your fighters' maintenance, people on comms to communicate with other ships, a first mate to help oversee everything, and gunners to control all the firepower on the ship to fire at the same time. An automated ship will be used once in battle, get utterly routed, and then no organisation will ever buy the design again because it's terrible and the free market will render automatic ships extinct. It's not that it won't be allowed, but you are intentionally crippling your ship in a battle. People can't rush from the bridge to the engine room on a 20km capital ship. You can't have one person mount all the guns on each side of the ship at the same time to create a coordinated attack on the enemy's capital ships. They can't be coordinating the attack run of your fighters *and* repairing the damaged ones in the hanger bay. Out of battle, automated ships will have a place. Freighters, diplomatic ships, people with enough money to burn and hire mercenaries, they'll all be able to use automated stuff for most things, but even then you probably want a small skeleton crew to run things more efficiently. This is a problem real life ships face and one good commanders will have to effectively solve. How do you keep a company's morale up? How do you entertain them between battle? Most ships have a smaller amount of the crew manning the basics between battles with other members sitting down playing card games. No one sits at a gun all the time. This is what will make good commanders invaluable. They won't just be good at coordinating attacks and battle tactics, but at having a presence and keeping their men in high spirits. Once again, it's not "you must have multiple crew members". It's "sure, go solo, but you will die". Two friends might be able to coordinate what they want to do better than a nation can, but the nation has the power behind it to actually get these things done. Furthermore, ignoring why solo/skeleton crews will be less efficient, how will solo players even be able to build ships like this? It would take forever to gather all the materials for a ship so large, let alone to script all the elements and connect them to a bridge. It just seems like an enormous waste of investment, especially in a game all about working together to rebuild humanity.
  11. It would screw up every scientific equation, and most of them will now need pointless constants that are introduced only because people didn't want to stick with the perfectly acceptable SI units of today. They have been purposely designed such that they are universally applicable. There are going to be lots of planets in the universe and mass does not change no matter where you are. Hours are just convenient divisions of the approximate length of an Earth day.
  12. This brings up an interesting problem future humanity will have to deal with - after Mars is colonised, what time will the locals use? What time will be used for interplanetary communication? I think the difference here is whether or not it matters. It'll matter in real life because businesses don't work at night or on weekends. But when in the game people will be working for their organisation or themselves no matter the time, is there any point in a set of nonuniform times? Is there a point in not just displaying UTC in the game?
  13. But they don't. I'm not privy to the internal goings on at McDonalds because I'm not a board member nor an investor in the company. People who aren't currently involved in CSYN don't "deserve" to know anything about the organisation - anything they do release is just marketing stuff to get people on board. Yes, people in the organisation probably deserve a voice there (although I don't know how it's actually being run as of yet, and one could argue that subordinates don't need to know absolutely everything). So this "journalism" is a waste of your time and only serves as something to chuckle over for a little bit before moving on. Forum drama is unneeded so early into development.
  14. I voted other only because you don't have a "None" option. No sentient alien races. The game is about rebuilding humanity. The only aliens should be dumb animals and beasts.
  15. Make your own. Everyone has their own sets of morals independent of their own country's rules. A cursory glance at the poll's question makes it very much sound like you want people to follow a set of laws. But since you think people have misunderstood (maybe you should have elaborated in your opening post) let's overanalyse your question. "Should we create community laws - some kind of unwritten space laws that define good and evil in the world of DU? For example - destroying an unsecured construct is not legal." "Law" and "not legal" make it sound like these will be enforceable rules. Like the Geneva Convention. But then you mention "unwritten" - is this like the British constitution, in which it's more a set of rights defined over dozens of documents and hundreds of years, or do you mean literally unwritten, and thus not legally enforceable in any way and completely unrelated to the first part of the question? Then you mention "good and evil" - moral concepts. Are you talking about defining community morals? By unwritten rules? So what, don't be a dick to people? I do understand that English may not be your first language (although with a name like Gerald and going over your previous posts, it certainly doesn't seem like it) but I don't see how you could think people would interpret your question in any way other than "Gerald_Deemer wants DU to have game encompassing laws that will affect everyone". If you wanted to talk about morals, or something other than the rule of law, make it more clear. Can't rule if the police will kick your pirating ass out of the city. If you wander outside of the safe zones, and aren't armed, expect to be robbed. If you're in a city of pirates, don't be surprised when one of them scams you. The frontier will always resemble the 16th century - mostly lawless, fairly difficult living. Want to make it rich and live an easy lifestyle? Live in the inner rim of systems, which will resemble the 20th century's politics more, of mostly stable nations occasionally warring. This stable lifestyle will need to be defended with the lives of many and trillions worth of ships and weaponry, but the alternative is a wild west lifestyle of shoot first, ask questions later. Stable business will arise in cities (and will be one of the reasons cities will grow, their relative safety), traders will find inner worlds a safer area to trade in - but more populated, so they're potentially going to make less money competing with many other traders.
  16. It's now entering its sixth year of development and what little has been delivered to backers is a buggy mess. The technology to make the game as of the current vision is either impossible or simply won't exist for a very long time. They're using a modified version of Cryengine 3 (why you would use a high fidelity graphics FPS engine for an MMO is beyond my knowledge) and the current modules can't even handle limited multiplayer as of yet, let alone proper MMO numbers. Squadron 42 sounds like it's a "failed Hollywood developer makes a video game" kind of thing ala The Order 1886. They've collected literally hundreds of times the originally asked for budget, yet are still raising money (via the selling of images of ships that don't yet exist in the game, no less) for a game that's now two whole years late. They've made dodgy changes to the ToS. Feature creep has been impacting the game since 2012. They are rumoured to be spending 3 million per month (aka six times more than they originally asked for, which would have lasted two years) through their four different studios in LA, Texas, Manchester and Frankfurt. Why does an indie game need so many studios? Basically there are a ton of problems that would have gotten the game canned, or they would have been reined in heavily, had they a proper team of producers and a publishing company above them.
  17. I see no reason why an unprotected ship can't be scanned all the same as the ground. If pirates are monitoring a busy shipping lane, and you come by with expensive materials with no kind of stealth shielding, you're asking to be raided. It should still be difficult to use though. If you can get a ship in your scanning range, the scanner should tell you everything. Trying to scan (presumably with electromagnetic waves) through a ship with lots of electromagnetic interference (because there's electricity running through wires, other electromag signals being sent out etc.) should return a messy signal - maybe you notice something nice through all of it, maybe not. If a ship has turned off everything but emergency power to try and sneak by somewhere unseen, it should be easier to work out what's inside it but harder to even work out if there's something there (Is it an asteroid? Could you even get close enough to a ship that you can't see?). Can't other systems be detected by well, looking for the stars? And as they're lightyears away, the angles needed to actually measure this stuff is tiny - dozens of arcseconds at best. This is actual astrophysics and I feel is a little much for a space MMO, especially set so far into the future. It's easier to measure approximate distance using a star's brightness and type anyway.
  18. You can try to get the organisations to come together and make Space UN laws, I suppose, but you will never be able to enforce it upon communities of pirates or neutral parties. How do you create civilised society in the entire game universe when there is a constantly expanding frontier? The only rules that must be abided by will be the ToS set by NQ. Nothing else will have gamewide ramifications.
  19. In the devblog it's mentioned that you would have to build constructs to get dirt out of your mines. So presumably, your characters can't just carry all that dirt on them and you'll need to break up the monotony of digging to go up to the surface and dump the dirt next to your mine, or in a truck or something (maybe the planet has a beautification policy and all dirt dug out of one mine goes towards filling up another completed mine). Besides, this isn't like Minecraft where you'll be digging through tons of cobblestone to find three blocks of diamond. Your prospectors will be directing you right towards where the ores you're searching for should be. It shouldn't be as boring so long as you have a good prospector.
  20. Gravitational waves still propogate at c, a ship coming towards you can't be detected. FTL sensors will need to be a completely scifi explanation as in science it seems like there isn't anything to detect them.
  21. Could you elaborate a little? I've never read them and the internet doesn't explain the books in much detail. FTL sensors, whatever the scifi explanation, will have to be very expensive. These should be the kind of things you only put on your massive capital ships to detect another fleet coming at you from a far off planet (or another system entirely). I like this. Stuff like turning off engines should just affect your regular sublight sensors by some percentage, not a specific "the sensors detect nothing in the infrared coming from that ship" kind of stuff - at least in the code.
  22. Option 1: Ensure your ship has multiple guns. This is probably going a little too far from the ideals of making the game hard and easily approaches frustration territory. Option 2: Players disappear at log out. What happens if your single player ship (that you've programmed a clever autopilot AI that can travel to a planet without needing input) gets hijacked by pirates? Do you just pop up in the middle of the ship that they've had locked up in their warehouse for ten hours now? If you want to do that stuff, stow yourself in some hidden area on the ship before logging off. Option 3: Push the gunner out of the seat. Just allow an option so that if a player has logged out and they're sitting in something (surely chairs will be either an element or a part of a gun or something), people from the same organisation (or who have the permission through the RDMS) can push you out and take your place.
  23. Others are also grouped together. Why are the Baltic countries in two categories? Furthermore, just because China and India have large populations doesn't mean they have large representation on the English-speaking internet, especially that of MMO fans. It's especially obvious, as the very broad categories of "Europe" and "Americas" (no apostrophe, that's only for possession or contractions) are nearly 80% of responses. I would have split North and South America, split Europe at the French-German border, combined ME with Africa, and left the rest as Asia-Pacific.
  24. They're setting up the extra funding website because a lot of people (notably in Germany) could only pay using Paypal, as Kickstarter wasn't accepting their credit cards (or they didn't have one). Hopefully this only serves as a nice potential buffer for NQ, rather than a feature creeping income source like with Star Citizen. The lack of contact from the studio is perfectly acceptable. I'd much rather wait for their next announcement to either be about the new website or some new feature of the game. Showing off more of the same isn't necessary at this point, and a few short weeks probably isn't enough to have built anything new into the game yet.
  25. For the exact same reasons as real life. It's easier to make money and easier to defend. Tax everyone living in the city, and use the money to fund a military, enormous defensive shield (powered by a huge powerplant, thanks taxpayers) and huge planetary gun to shoot down potential invasion fleets from thousands of kilometres off. Why does it matter if there are only going to be a few? I only need one zetajoule laser cannon to shoot your fleet out of the sky and protect the planet. Why do people assume that shields only operate skywards?
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