ATMLVE

No problem guys. Can someone who was at the conference confirm that the currency unit is indeed "Quanta"? I am only 99% I heard it correctly.

I have “transcribed” the Q&A from the video of the conference that was held on February 28th. This is not a direct transcription; I have cut out general conversation, anything that was repeated, and just put in an overall format change to make the discussion that occurred more appropriate for reading. The idea was to isolate information. It was often difficult to hear exactly what was being said, so this was further reason not to quote the conference verbatim. I have not added anything that was not said (there were times when I was tempted to add in some of the things I know about the game, but I didn’t!). If you feel that anything is left out, or that something should be changed, then please let me know! Something else that I have added in is ‘extra info’. This is stuff which was not directly asked about, but which came up in discussion and I thought appropriate to add. This documentation begins around the 30 minute mark of the video (which can currently be found on their Facebook page), when the Q&A started. How in depth will the mechanics of refining resources and creating alloys be? There will be some pretty deep recipe networks, which will make building complex or high-end elements quite complicated, to the point where the specializations required will be so varied that some of the components will most likely have to be purchased from the market. There will be different alloys which can be created by combining different resources and materials, which can be used to create interesting materials and properties. Alloys may be something that the player can research, to allow for them to find new ways of combining different resources to achieve different properties. Can you transport hover vehicles inside of larger ships; in other words, transport small ships inside of larger ships? Definitely yes, this is the whole architecture of the game. The technology of the servers are all made for that, so yes. How is in-game currency generated? Do you do missions, sell stuff, buy orders? It is unlikely there will be missions, but this is not completely ruled out. They may be added later, but the main source will be from NPCs/bots on the market, where you can spend your money or sell your stuff. One of the issues with bots however is that they have to be designed such that they do not disrupt the economy; the economy is intended to be shaped by players. The intent is that market bots will amplify or emulate transactions that are occurring between players. Will market bots be permanent, or will they come and go away after a while? The idea is that, if there is a lot of activity by players, they should go away, but this is not final. They may be used later in the game's life to make changes to the amount of money in circulation to regulate the economy. The main thing is that the amount of money in the game should be proportional to the number of players, as well as the type of activity taking place and the amount of the respective activity. Extra Info: The name of the currency in the game will be quanta. Quanta, the plural of quantum, is a unit of energy; since the currency will sort of be the “energy” of a lot of the game, the name quanta is appropriate. Does having things in your inventory increase your mass, and does that influence construct physics? Definitely yes. If a player has a lot of things in their inventory, and they step into a ship, they might push the ship down. A ship with lots of containers may fly well with no cargo, but if the containers are filled up then the ship may not be able to fly anymore. Will there be chat systems? Global, regional, planetary? There will be some sort of local regional chat. However, regional is not easily defined in the game; for example, a planet could have hundreds of thousands of people on it, so regional is not something that is precisely defined yet. But there needs to be something at least that allows players to talk to other nearby players. Will there be such a thing as ship linking; will there be docking ports? Small ships docking inside of larger ships is definitely a planned feature. However, docking two ships of the same size together gets a little bit more messy. With that feature, large layers and chains of ships could be created. At this point, which player is controlling the physics? How will construct repair work? Will there be repair units, or will it all have to be done by hand? It will always be possible to repair by hand, but there will be repair units that will be able to restore a ship back to what it initially was before it was damaged, provided the unit has the required resources, energy, and time. The repair unit will know what the construct it is a part of is supposed to look like, and it will have the capability of restoring a construct back to that original image if the construct is damaged. How does the production of ships from blueprints work? Is it an instantaneous process, does it happen after a specific time, part by part? It is not going to be instantaneous, it is going to take time. It will take resources and energy, and probably if it is significant then it will need to be defended in some way, unless it’s happening in the safe zone. The required time will be proportional to the size of what is being built, so mass producing battle cruisers is not something that will be able to be done overnight. What happens to a flying ship when I destroy its engine in space? Does it just come to a stop or does it continue at the last known speed? Engines are physical. So if there are two engines, one on each side of a ship, and one of the engines is destroyed, then the ship is going to spin. The core idea is that engines are physical, so if they are destroyed then that can impact how the ship moves. There is a very good chance that, given that there is no friction in space, a ship will continue to move if its engines are shut off. However, if a player were to be in a moving ship, log off, and come back three weeks later, they would find themselves in the middle of nowhere; this is not desirable. Will there be cloaking? There will be cloaking. It will probably not be around at release, but it is one of the features that seems obvious for a game like Dual Universe. This is desirable for a player than may want to log off for a while; they can cloak and lock a ship to keep it safe. What methods will be available to detect constructs, and to avoid being detected? There needs to be a way to detect others in the game. There will be ways to scan for players, whether on or below ground; and similarly there will be something like a distortion field that allows you to be hidden from sensors. But, there should never be a totally foolproof way to hide without some weakness. It will also be possible to put trackers on ships, and a corresponding countermeasure to that. Extra info: The nanoformer will be able to 3D print basic and fundamental parts and components for the player to use. Ships can be stolen and reverse engineered; Lua scripts can be read by those who steal a ship with a script on it. How are scripts shared between players; a script runs client side, but is it shared with players? Scripts are always running on the players machine, but the text of the script is synchronized, so everybody can see it. So if there are different control units with different scripts in them, one player can start one of them and another can start the other script, and they will run in parallel. Similarly, whatever the scripts do is synchronized by the server for all players. Scripts are run on the clients computer, but several players can be simultaneously running and using different scripts which are all made by a single player (and thus running on that players computer), and all players can see the effects of the scripts. One exception is that you cannot have two players controlling the same element at the same time. Can scripts be hacked? Hacking will be a skill within the game which will allow a player to bypass RDMS systems. It will require time, and is a planned feature, but may not be present at release. Extra Info: Locations are something that can be itemized; as an example, the coordinates of a vein of ore within a planet can be “itemized” whereby it can be sold on the market. Reputation will be a mechanic within the game, but exactly how it will work is not completely finalized. Will armors for players be modular (i.e. heavy armor chestpiece type-A with legpiece type- B ), or are we looking forward to a single-piece type of armor, and in an extent, will weapons be a part of an armor or are they separate customizable entities? Armor will be separate; that is for sure. It is likely, certainly at release and at least for a while, that player armor mechanics will remain simplified, but the concept has potential to expand. Can a solo player fly a warship with many weapons, or does each weapon need a player? There needs to be a player for every weapon; that is the requirement. This is for several reasons, one being that the game is an MMO intended to have players working together, another that it doesn’t make sense for one person to single-handedly control a huge warship. Have you considered how you are going to do the updates? There will be expansions every ~6-12 months. Updates with new features will come out at regular intervals. If you claim two territories next to each other, do they fuse together as one big one? There will be ways to link territory units. Players will also have the option of having lots of little territory units, or one big territory unit that links everything. This gives the option of having one large easily defended tile which covers a huge area, or lots of distributed and less easily defendable tiles which only allow access to the local territory. One mechanic which may be present is that a claimed territory tile cannot be attacked if it is surrounded by other claimed territory tiles, provided they all have the same owner. Will players ever need food? The question of food is linked to survival gameplay. There probably will not be survival gameplay at the beginning, because it requires so much work to be functional, but it is something that has the potential to be added later. Extra Info: A bowl of rice is 8 dollars in San Francisco.

You mean things like shipping routes? Cargo lines? The content of the game is made by the players; if players want there to be, then there will be. For something like regular lines of cargo to exist, there would have to be a reason for them to exist, which would probably be that they connect very well-developed systems/planets. Such lines would have to be protected my military escorts as well, due to the danger of piracy. So it's possible, but there needs to be a reason.

My favorite type of planet is a Vesperian world; a tidally locked planet with an extreme hot side and a cold side. But, there is a ring around the edge which is in eternal twilight, and in that small ring the temperature is just right. Of course stuff like this would be awesome in Dual Universe; but alas, without temperature effects, there won't be much point.

Those beginning days will be priceless... Literally, like so valuable. It'll be the only time in the game's history that the circumstances will be as they are then; forever after things will be different, and anyone who is there at the beginning of the game, when there is nothing, will have elite status forever.

Looks pretty cool! Though you might have trouble getting it to look like that in the game, you'd probably have to make everything out of straight-up voxels and that would be a pain. Is there something you particular you like about this image?

Creating treasure hunt types of things is something I thought of before as something I'd love to do. You have similar ideas; however, your ideas and mine both suffer from the same problem, and that is getting to a new system before anyone else to set stuff up, otherwise you'll be working in a possibly populated system, possibly being watched, kind of defeating the whole point. However, it's a big universe, and creating things like ruins and such could really give someone else an awesome experience, and you are totally free to do that!

The developers showed in the last update video that they are currently working on the UI. They definitely are not at the point where we know enough about it to tell you what features it will have. Most well-funded games these days do have features like this, so I imagine 4K will look fine. So my guess is, yes!

Can you explain more of what this is? I read your post and the page, but can't really gather exactly what you're suggesting.

This gif would suggest that you can collect dirt and other "useless" materials; here, the player is collecting "ForestRaw". I cannot imagine that all mined materials are not kept. After all, this would mean that destroying the dirt below you would essentially be destroying matter; what happens if you want to fill in the hole again? Go mine some iron and put it in the dirt? As for trees and plants, this is not yet known. It will be possible to clear trees out but whether you can collect wood from them is a different question, one which there is currently no answer to.

It paints a cool picture for sure, I like the idea a lot. One thing, has Void said, we don't know how fuel/energy will work out. Something else that may factor into that is resource distribution, i.e. will the mechanics of the game allow for there to be a single asteroid belt abundant in the same materials (is asteroid resource generation asteroid-specific or system-specific)? Something like that could definitely create the environment you're describing. Will there be systems with only asteroids? Also a possibility. Asteroid bases are a cool concept, and some Mos Eisley-esqe pub but out in space, where there is a much larger operation going on outside would be very cool and could attract a lot of players if there is a corporation willing and able to make it happen.

Welcome to the forums! For information regarding the game, I suggest checking out the Wiki; clicking that will take you to a random page. There you can find lots of information on the game. For light discussion, check out the discord servers as yama said; and for more formal, wordy and serious conversation, browse the forums! There are tons and tons of threads to be found here on all sorts of topics. Thanks for pledging!

Welcome to the forums zywaar! This is a creative solution to the issue of automation, one I have not personally seen yet. It sounds good in practice, but my question for you is, how does the game differentiate between a script that is harmless (such as one controlling the thrusters on my ship) and a script which is automatically building my ships or controlling my turrets? Basically, how does the game know which scripts should be limited to one-at-a-time and when, and which ones are okay to run freely and continuously?

Hi, welcome to the forums! Glad you're here. I found it funny that you posted a topic named "Hello world" right after someone else posted a topic about programming. Anyway, you have already been given some good info on the forums and where to head, and I'll add to that; I suggest checking out the Dual Universe Wiki, as there is a lot of info there and it might answer some questions you may have. Again, welcome!

This is cool of them. But how big are these guys? And whoever they are, they either didn't think or didn't care that finding them by googling their name would be next to impossible. :/

Welcome to the forums! It's hard to say at this point what will happen of course. A whole bunch of people getting thrown together in a procedural universe, who knows. How players will make money will depend on what they want to do within the game. Yes, in order for a huge project to be accomplished lots of people will have to work together to achieve it, and someone, or a group of people, will have to be pretty rich to build it, whether they pay workers or not. NovaQuark has said that there will be gameplay reasons for grouping together and building cities, so we can expect that people will most likely do that. And quite honestly, look at what some of the insane things people have done in games like Minecraft... People will have much more incentive to build expansive cities, if not solely to look cool, because whatever they build has the potential to stay there and be seen by countless players. When the game comes out everyone will be equal, but as it progresses some people or organizations will get rich by some means. At that point, with new players coming in, I think it's very viable that those who are rich will pay new players to work for them. But the internet is the internet, and whether that will or happen, or how long it will take for large structures to become common, is all speculation. However, in my opinion, which is the point of this topic, I don't believe that organizations paying anyone outside of their organization to build things will be very common. How do you know they won't sabotage something, or how do you get them to work hard, or be organized? I personally don't think it'll be common at all. But I think large organizations working with other large organizations will be more common.

I completely agree, this stuff would make the game better. The developers think so too, as they have already said that physical items (not the batteries, but things like iron and other cargo) will behave just about as you have described! Everything must be transferred physically, and every inventory has a limit. As for the batteries, as in a battery detached from a construct maintains its charge, I imagine that they would behave this way. However, it is possible that they may lose their charge upon being detached from a core unit or power supply (not directly, but a construct with those things). I personally believe that it would maintain charge no matter what, but there hasn't been word on if it will be possible to directly link two constructs into one, and it is possible that the mechanics might make removing charged batteries impossible, so I'm just making some realistic speculation. Yes, the mechanics you described are great in my opinion, but they are not 100% confirmed.

Could you just keep the script for the timer and lap counter on each of the vehicles, instead of at the start/stop gate? And make it so that those driving can't edit the script; the owner of the track is the one that makes the script and puts it on everyone's vehicles (in the case that the participants are making their own vehicles).

Take the big space economy of EVE, and make it singleplayer. Use the blocky graphics style of StarMade. Throw in some of No Man's Skys wacky procedural slap-together-a-bunch-of-random-assets generation and apply it to spaceships. And you get Avorion! Yeah seems pretty neat, not sure if I want to pick it up.

I gotta agree, the most outstanding thing out of this shirt is the ridiculous price! 32 bucks for a white t-shirt with some side print?

Yes but can the community as a whole? After all this isn't Minecraft we're talking about here. It's a game with one single world, which is going to keep that one single world for the entirety of its existence. And the purpose of the game is the development of this world by the players, the development of an economy and infrastructure. Large game-changing updates can't just be tossed around willy nilly.

Hey now. I said you could disagree. I didn't say you could tell me I was wrong. NovaQuark definitely wants to implement this stuff into the game. They would have no problem saying "No, we don't want this" if that was the case, as they have done that with other suggestions. From what I see, the general consensus is that yes, it will cause problems to add in certain mechanics later, but it is the most preferential option. Another thing I wanted to do with this post was simply bring to light how it's not as easy as simply adding something in later, and of course people realize this, but not all of them. Thank you everyone so far that has given their input! Also, the answer of "not at release" is given just as much by members of the community as NovaQuark.

There are always lots of questions about Dual Universe... Some of the same questions get asked a lot, but people are still always coming up with new ones. One of the most common answers to any question is... "Probably not at release." I realize there are a lot of things that can be pushed off for a time, but I am afraid that there are some features which may be initially neglected which will later become very difficult to implement. For instance, I would love for hostile environments/weather to cause wear/damage over time. Extreme heat, sandstorms, toxic rain, etc. requiring different materials and skills to be able to operate in these environments would be awesome (my opinion of course) for the game, but if I asked whether this will be added the answer would be "probably not at release." But how could you implement something like that later down the road? It would be difficult. You would have to wait for new planets to be generated and then give them those effects; after all, the developers can't just say: "Update 5.67: Surprise! All of your bases on sand planets are now being torn apart by sandstorms. You need a new material we've introduced to make anything that can last there now." Something like customizable elements is a great example of what can totally be added in at a later time, with little to no negative effects. But something like significant weather, or gas giants, or new materials, I feel are things that really either need to be in at the start, or it'll just be a hassle to integrate later. Some others might be: - Food: Spawn into the new update of the months-old game, suddenly you are hungry with no food. A whole new economy based around food now has to be created. - Farming: Farming requires land. If an org knows this from day 1, they may design their bases around providing themselves with land for crops or animals. If instead, they find out on day 100 that it's now going to be beneficial to have tons of open plains, and here they've built themselves a city with large flat one to two story buildings, now they're screwed. Of course NovaQuark can't add in everything at the start. They can't know what update they'll want two years down the road. But, to rephrase what I've said, I don't want features which would otherwise be awesome and good for the game, to instead hurt it because they were added in at a later date after the game had already developed around their non-existence. One thing I am suggesting is... You can lynch me if you want. But add in, especially for alpha and beta, add in features that seem like they would be difficult to implement later into the game in at least a buggy state, so that way players can at least somewhat adapt to their presence. Yes, I am suggesting cramming in features in a buggy state rather than having a mostly stable game. I think that, in the long run, it'll end up for the better. Please let me know if you agree or completely disagree. I know people will disagree; I'm sure of it! Maybe you can change my mind with brilliant logic or reasoning. Please, of course, let me know, but please understand that I am very open to being disagreed with.

A group of people can certainly try to live off of just a single ship, and indeed there are orgs that want to do that, like the Blue Moon. The issue is there will be other people that want those resources too. As you said, nomad tribes would sometimes fight with each other. You can bet that if a decently well armed ship trying to mine some resources stumbles across a less armed ship doing the same thing, there's going to be conflict. Undoubtedly there will be people that will spend all their time on a ship, never settling on a base. Perhaps a Migrant Fleet or a lone little cruiser. Either way, it's a cool way to play, and it might work out well, but if you have all of your stuff with you and you go out on your own all the time, there's a good chance you'll find trouble. It's a high risk/reward system... I'm sure some people wouldn't have it any other way.

I have no idea if they have stated what size voxels will be, like the grid size, but given that they are both intelligent and not American, I cannot imagine they wouldn't be using the metric system. In any case, why would that help with making 3D models? It's not like you can import things into the game. As long as you use the same unit of measurement throughout your model, it's proportions should be identical, whether you use inches or decimeters or Planck lengths or parsecs. Although I suppose if you wanted the astronaut size for the sake of sizing a ship, you could base it off of the size of the cockpit.