ATMLVE

Just wanted to share a little Dual Universe keychain I 3D printed for my car keys. It isn't beautiful and I think it will break in a few weeks or months, but it didn't take long to make and I like the personality it adds to my keys!
 
 

Just wanted to share a little Dual Universe keychain I 3D printed for my car keys. It isn't beautiful and I think it will break in a few weeks or months, but it didn't take long to make and I like the personality it adds to my keys!
 
 

(now for another infamous several-pages-long yamamushi post...)
 
Hi Everyone,
 
I know this isn't the normal type of "Fan Art" that gets posted here but seeing as how Dual Universe was the only reason I created this thing, I figured it was subforum-worthy.
 
For the past several weeks I've been working on a bot for the Dual Universe Community Discord that I help run (with plenty of help from others on the discord staff like Sunrider, ComradeMoco, Soarnir, Dark, Kurock, Wilks Checkov, Zamaro de Metus, Haunty, Wardion2000, Code24, Anonymous, Cybrex, Khaymann and Spamfox - and if I forgot you I'm extremely sorry). I don't want to say I "own" it because really it's you, the community, that make it possible. Without community involvement, it would just be another empty discord out there. 
Also a special thanks to @Kurock for helping me with a bytes-to-timestamp conversion method the other night as I was half awake. 
 
 
And now that it's in a somewhat usable state (a point which could be argued against, haha), I'd like to "show off" some of the things I've put into it, describe some of the features I have planned for it, and get a feel for what people might want out of it. 
 

I'm quite aware that many of these features already exist in other bots, but my goal was to try to consolidate the features we use the most to try and replace the bots we have that don't quite go all the way I'd like them. One major example of this is Tatsumaki's credit system, as the credits you get can be used for buying things for your profile but that's about it. 
 
 

Before diving into it all, anyone is free to look through the 10k+ lines of source code on the GitHub repo for the project:
 
https://github.com/yamamushi/du-discordbot
 
I don't think many people here are that interested in contributing, but hey if someone is feeling adventurous enough to learn some Go they are more than welcome to make pull requests against the repo. In fact, I've documented the project fairly heavily throughout the Github Wiki for that purpose.
 
All of this runs inside of a docker container at the moment, and is fairly simple to setup and deploy. I find the whole process way easier and cleaner than many of the python based bots I've seen, but that's just a personal preference I'm sure. I attempted to refactor it into a more distributable scalable model, ended up writing a p2p publish/subscribe system, and realized it was overkill for a Discord bot and fell back on the model that I originally wrote it around. I even looked into using an actor framework for Go (thinking about the C++ Actor Framework DU uses), but even that would be way too much overkill for something as low latency and simple as a Discord bot. 
 
 
 
 
So what is DU-Discordbot useful for, other than annoying people with spam?

1) First off, the bot has an internal permissions system that is separate from any permissions distributed on Discord. It is all stored in an embedded database so that it's actually fairly trivial to transfer to another discord (useful during testing especially). It also means that I can hand out permissions on the bot without having to hand out permissions on discord itself (thus maintaining a separate layer of accessibility). 
 

2) The bot has an internal wallet and banking system (with a forthcoming "loans" system). Not only can you spend credits out of your wallet (for which there are few uses for at the moment), but you can store them in your bank account for safe keeping (more to come on that in the future). I'd like to wrap this into a "prize" system wherein active discord users can spend their credits on things like steam games or other random goodies. "Credits" cost nothing to users other than just being active on discord, and the only person paying for any of this is me. It's effectively my way of acknowledging people who are active in chat for being such a cool group of people. 
 

 

 
 

3) Chess! - The bot has an internal Chess AI (that arguably needs a ton of polish) that will play chess against a user. You can spend credits on new chess piece styles, configure your board how you want to play (with or without helper plots). The board is displayed using Discord Emoji's even.
 

 
 

 

 
 

4) Phases of the Moon. The bot will display the current view of the moon from the Earth in ASCII.
 
 

 
 
 

5) LUA interpreter. I'm fairly certain this is the only one of its kind on Discord, but I could be wrong because I've been doing this all in golang... I've added a LUA interpreter with some safety checks (no infinite loops, no long running processes, caps on the stack size, etc). It's not the greatest thing in the world, but it certainly gets the job done. It's not terribly useful to most people at the moment, but I anticipate as the game rolls out that people may find more value in it for testing or to share various code snippets.
 

 
 
 

6) Forum Integration. The bot retrieves posts from the forum every 5 minutes through the RSS feed we have access to. Every single post that arrives on the forum that pushes a thread to the top will show up in our #forum-posts room now, neatly formatted with a link to the comment in question. I've actually found that this has been incredibly useful to me, as the forum's new post page is somewhat... lacking.... Using this feature I get near instant updates on all the happenings on the forum :-)
 

 
 
 
 
7) Twitter Integration. It still needs polish, but the bot attempts to retrieve live twitter updates from JC's Twitter feed and also from the DualUniverse twitter feed. Because this relies on a 3rd party RSS service, it tends to have issues that are out of my control.
 

 
 
 
 
8) Youtube Audio streaming. This was a big one for me to try and tackle, both so I could learn a thing or two about Opus audio encoding, and so I could learn how the voice system works in Discord. It's in a pretty preliminary stage (there are tons of features I want to add around it) but for now, it will download and live encode audio from youtube videos and stream them over a voice channel. It also has the ability to pause and restore songs. All of the audio encoding is done through golang without having to use ffmpeg like some bots rely on. After some heavy work cleaning up the memory allocation, I find it uses at most about 20mb of ram as opposed to the 300mb+ it was using while writing it. I've been pretty happy with the way it turned out (although Discord audio streaming ends up choppy at times no matter what simply because it wasn't really built for this kind of thing). 
 

 

 
 
 
9) Countdowns - Countdown timers to important "DU Dates". Currently lists the days until Founders pledging ends, until the beginning of September and until the end of September. September's dates are included because NQ said they were still on track for a September Alpha, so I figured it would be in between those days. 
 

 
 
 
10) Easter Eggs - There are a few easter eggs hidden around the bot's commands. Celery Man is there, for example.
 
 
11) DevDiary - The "devdiary" command will display the DevDiary for the supplied month and year:
 

 
 
 
12) Interviews - The "interview" command will either display a list of interviews with NQ, or will display the interview for the ID supplied:
 

 
 

That's all I've been able to knock out over the last week, with plenty of downtime to spare in-between sprints of coding till 5 in the morning (I even dreamt about handler functions in a library, woke up and spent 2 hours trying to find them before realizing it was all a dream I had and ended up having to write them myself based off the things I remembered from my dream). However, there are plenty of other features on my task list (on top of the unfinished work and polishing needed on the above features):
 
A Casino - We need real games of chance, like poker (which I don't know enough about poker to attempt yet), blackjack, slots, roulette, etc.  More Games! - Checkers, PVP chess, slots, hangman, whatever fits here I'm very open to A Prize system for spending the credits from winning games - previously discussed Reminders / Notifications - Setting personal reminders with ~remindme 5 days "pledge to dual universe"  MyCroft.ai Integration - For natural language processing, so you can ask the bot to do things with natural language like "what time is it in Tokyo?" or "find me a video of a puppy eating a carrot". I'm actually relying heavily on my experience with integrating MyCroft for a cool project at work Dual Universe Wiki Integration - I would like to be able to query the wiki for things in real time from the bot. Dual Universe Resource Guide - When the game is playable, I'd like to catalog various DU resources into an easily accessible system in the bot. Wireframe Globes - Using this library to not only generate earth wireframes, but also wireframe models of Alioth - https://github.com/mmcloughlin/globe An Alpha Countdown - For when we have a clear date to look forward to for Alpha.   
 
Like I said, I am quite aware that many of these features already exist in other bots, but I wanted to try and slowly pull all of those features together into one single bot that was more focused towards DU specifically.
 
I am eager to hear from people what kind of features they would like in the bot, as that kind of feedback keeps me motivated to keep working on it and adding more things. I know plenty of people have already seen it in action, but I mostly just hear people complaining about it haha (half joking...half...). 
 
I'd like to continue to add more DU-focused features (things like the forum integration have turned out very useful), but most of those will have to wait until Alpha is out and we have a better idea of the kinds of things we'd like easy references for.
 
 

This was originally posted back in April, but I've just now gotten around to having it translated for those non-French speakers among us:
 
 
 
English translation/transcription available with timestamps @ https://dualuniverse.gamepedia.com/Archive:Devoxx_France_-_April_24th_2017  
 
Please feel free to edit it as necessary, as it's mostly translated, but has some minor errors here and there (like the word Technology being translated as "Techno's")
 
 
 
 
 

Here is the transcript in French, working on getting help for a translation asap:
 
https://dualuniverse.gamepedia.com/Archive:AFJV_-_July_28th_2017
 
I'll provide an update here when the English translation is available (or you can put it into Google translate for a very broken interpretation of the interview) 

Griefing and ugly terrain are not the same things. Griefing involves intentionally harassing other players in a way that is inconsistent with the rules of the game or goes far beyond "standard play". Ugly terrain is just an aesthetic opinion. 
 
This has come up in a few other threads, which I will look for and then link here for you to look through. The general consensus has been that if certain players don't like the way things look or other players are doing things, it is up to them to try and do something about it. This is the nature of a sandbox game. 
 
Edit: Threads:
 

You can bet there will be wars. The first reason that comes to mind will be... They'll happen because people want them. Two militaristic factions may go to war simply for the fight; it's a game, and shooting spaceships with your spaceship is fun, so thus, war in a game is fun!
 
However, that won't always be the case. Organizations can own land with Territory Control Units. They can also own ships and other things. But those things can be stolen, hacked, etc. So you could attack a faction to try and take what they have. Maybe their territory is sitting on a bunch of good resources.
 
Or perhaps they have similar goals as you. Maybe your goal is to set up a safe and guarded trade route through an otherwise dangerous system, and you charge money for people to use it. And someone comes in and starts to set up another one to compete with you... Go attack them, destroy their possessions, so that they can't achieve the goal that you want. 
 
So bazically, people will go to war because they want a fight, they'll go to war because they want what someone else has, or they'll go to war in order to weaken an opponent. 

You can bet there will be wars. The first reason that comes to mind will be... They'll happen because people want them. Two militaristic factions may go to war simply for the fight; it's a game, and shooting spaceships with your spaceship is fun, so thus, war in a game is fun!
 
However, that won't always be the case. Organizations can own land with Territory Control Units. They can also own ships and other things. But those things can be stolen, hacked, etc. So you could attack a faction to try and take what they have. Maybe their territory is sitting on a bunch of good resources.
 
Or perhaps they have similar goals as you. Maybe your goal is to set up a safe and guarded trade route through an otherwise dangerous system, and you charge money for people to use it. And someone comes in and starts to set up another one to compete with you... Go attack them, destroy their possessions, so that they can't achieve the goal that you want. 
 
So bazically, people will go to war because they want a fight, they'll go to war because they want what someone else has, or they'll go to war in order to weaken an opponent. 

You can bet there will be wars. The first reason that comes to mind will be... They'll happen because people want them. Two militaristic factions may go to war simply for the fight; it's a game, and shooting spaceships with your spaceship is fun, so thus, war in a game is fun!
 
However, that won't always be the case. Organizations can own land with Territory Control Units. They can also own ships and other things. But those things can be stolen, hacked, etc. So you could attack a faction to try and take what they have. Maybe their territory is sitting on a bunch of good resources.
 
Or perhaps they have similar goals as you. Maybe your goal is to set up a safe and guarded trade route through an otherwise dangerous system, and you charge money for people to use it. And someone comes in and starts to set up another one to compete with you... Go attack them, destroy their possessions, so that they can't achieve the goal that you want. 
 
So bazically, people will go to war because they want a fight, they'll go to war because they want what someone else has, or they'll go to war in order to weaken an opponent. 

I think this is a topic that is still under debate too. I am of the mind that logging in and out is something that needs to be tracked per player; I could log out on my friend's ship, my friend sells the ship, I log back in right on the bridge and steal the ship. Impossibley easy.
 
The true answer is that it has not been set in stone just yet; I personally feel that there should be some sort of element you log out of at, which then displays that you are logged out there, and if you don't log out at one of these elements then you respawn at your designated res node when you log back in.
 
Others disagree of course!

A quick suggestion: before starting with the story just give a short summary about what DU holidays is/does (pretty much the purpose  ) It helps for those that look at the wall of text and go ...TLDR
xD

I've just published Outpost Zebra's next article, and its all about scripting. Dual Universe will have several languages in it; Lua and CSS are the two main ones. If you always thought that writing code was something way over your head... Well, writing code for Dual Universe might surprise you with how easy it is.
 
Anyone Can Script is an article focusing on explaining how intuitive and easy programming will be in the game. If you feel that being able to write Lua and CSS to make yourself more valuable as a player and improve your overall experience is out of your reach... Well, I say you're wrong!

I've just published Outpost Zebra's next article, and its all about scripting. Dual Universe will have several languages in it; Lua and CSS are the two main ones. If you always thought that writing code was something way over your head... Well, writing code for Dual Universe might surprise you with how easy it is.
 
Anyone Can Script is an article focusing on explaining how intuitive and easy programming will be in the game. If you feel that being able to write Lua and CSS to make yourself more valuable as a player and improve your overall experience is out of your reach... Well, I say you're wrong!

I've just published Outpost Zebra's next article, and its all about scripting. Dual Universe will have several languages in it; Lua and CSS are the two main ones. If you always thought that writing code was something way over your head... Well, writing code for Dual Universe might surprise you with how easy it is.
 
Anyone Can Script is an article focusing on explaining how intuitive and easy programming will be in the game. If you feel that being able to write Lua and CSS to make yourself more valuable as a player and improve your overall experience is out of your reach... Well, I say you're wrong!

I've just published Outpost Zebra's next article, and its all about scripting. Dual Universe will have several languages in it; Lua and CSS are the two main ones. If you always thought that writing code was something way over your head... Well, writing code for Dual Universe might surprise you with how easy it is.
 
Anyone Can Script is an article focusing on explaining how intuitive and easy programming will be in the game. If you feel that being able to write Lua and CSS to make yourself more valuable as a player and improve your overall experience is out of your reach... Well, I say you're wrong!

I've just published Outpost Zebra's next article, and its all about scripting. Dual Universe will have several languages in it; Lua and CSS are the two main ones. If you always thought that writing code was something way over your head... Well, writing code for Dual Universe might surprise you with how easy it is.
 
Anyone Can Script is an article focusing on explaining how intuitive and easy programming will be in the game. If you feel that being able to write Lua and CSS to make yourself more valuable as a player and improve your overall experience is out of your reach... Well, I say you're wrong!

I don't want to get involved with this, because I don't speak German. But I just want to say that watching the conversation from one side is a bit funny. Like hearing only one side of a phone call. 

I've just published Outpost Zebra's next article, and its all about scripting. Dual Universe will have several languages in it; Lua and CSS are the two main ones. If you always thought that writing code was something way over your head... Well, writing code for Dual Universe might surprise you with how easy it is.
 
Anyone Can Script is an article focusing on explaining how intuitive and easy programming will be in the game. If you feel that being able to write Lua and CSS to make yourself more valuable as a player and improve your overall experience is out of your reach... Well, I say you're wrong!

I've just published Outpost Zebra's next article, and its all about scripting. Dual Universe will have several languages in it; Lua and CSS are the two main ones. If you always thought that writing code was something way over your head... Well, writing code for Dual Universe might surprise you with how easy it is.
 
Anyone Can Script is an article focusing on explaining how intuitive and easy programming will be in the game. If you feel that being able to write Lua and CSS to make yourself more valuable as a player and improve your overall experience is out of your reach... Well, I say you're wrong!

I would think that the Dev Diaries won't stop at Alpha. Even once the game releases, they are still going to be developing new content. 

It floats. This was an early design decision, people could chop mountains off at the base and cause huge server strain for nothing.
 
I think the only voxels that will be able to move will be those created on dynamic core units. So you can't just attach a piston to some ground, cut out the ground and expect it to move. In order to make voxels physically move, they will have to be placed, by a player with the nanoformer, inside the building zone of a dynamic construct. I could be wrong about all of this, but based on the info we have and what's been announced, I think that's how things will be.
 
That isn't to say you won't be able to copy chunks of ground and paste them into a ship as dirt voxels. At this point we don't know if that's possible; though again, my guess would be that copy and pasting only works with voxels placed within the building zone.

There are actually some details on repairing ships already. During the GDC interview in February, JC was asked this question. He said that there will be elements which can repair constructs based on their original blueprint; as in, the repair unit is aware of what the construct is supposed to look like, and can gradually restore the construct back to that state.
 

Hi everyone,
 
Please remain polite on the forum toward everyone, even if you are in conflict with some participant(s) in this thread.
As this topic starts to be recurrent, it seems there is a need to clarify publicly our stance regarding subReddit channels.
 
1) Please do not bash Reddit and Subreddit communities. 
 
Yes, there are drama, conflicts, rants and many other negative things that can be found on some subreddit channels, like on any platform. It’s the Internet. However there are also a lot of positive discussions and nice people on many channels. So please refrain to condemn redditors as the whole, without exception. Also, as mentioned before, Reddit is an efficient way of giving more visibility to Dual Universe. Not all Reddit readers are bad people (far from it) and it would be nice if we can show them that Dual Universe exists and might be a game they were waiting for.
 
2) Reddit insists to avoid having company staff in charge of the subreddit(s) talking about game(s) of the said company and we understand that. 
 
While it might seem as a poor excuse to get a non-qualified person in charge, but it's not: even if it's not the case of the majority, there are some companies that don't behave professionally when it comes to communication by silencing dissenting without exception. That’s sad to say but even it’s a minority of devs, some don’t act ethically when they get moderation rights. We are a few at Novaquark to have already witnessed that. Is the current subreddit management mode perfect? Probably not, as other abuses can be made, but we have to deal with it. For the same reason, we also understand that Novaquark has no right to put in charge any community member on a specific subreddit. The request must come from the community member alone.
 
3) In case of subreddit Moderator abuses.
 
The Reddit policy invites anyone targeted by an abusive moderation on a subreddit channel to contact directly the official Reddit staff (contact@reddit.com). You can tell us for informative purpose if you have been the target of an abusive ban by a subreddit moderator, but we won’t be able to help on that matter. To be more precise, here is an official (and understandable) stance of Reddit Staff:
 
4) The current situation between both subreddits talking about Dual Universe.
 
- On one side we have the oldest subreddit and the biggest number of followers, but with an erratic activity (nearly no activity during one year after its creation, then highly variable activity afterward) and not tightly connected to the existing Dual Universe Community.
- On the other side, we have a younger subreddit, created due to the inactivity of the first one, with less followers, but with a stronger activity and well connected with Dual Universe Community as it is managed by active members of the existing Dual Universe Community.

Both parties have reasons to claim their legitimacy. 
 
5) Which factor(s) we value as the most important to work with a subreddit channel.
 
Reddit seems to give more importance/legitimacy to the following factors:
- The seniority of a subreddit channel 
- The number of people who follow
 
While we respect their choice, we have however a different approach regarding the factors we value the most for a possible partnership, especially:
- The most regular / highest activity of a subreddit channel
- Regular members of the subreddit are already informed on all basic questions, being able to answer to newcomer questions without difficulties.
 
Why we chose these factors over those chosen by Reddit:
- We favor organic growth: in our opinion, a young but active subreddit is going to attract more naturally and efficiently new followers than an old but less active subreddit.
- Interesting discussions/debates can emerge on Reddit only if a large part of the readers are already well informed about the basic knowledge on the game.
 
In the case where the two subreddit channels talking about Dual Universe don’t merge peacefully, we see two scenarios:
 
a ) No subreddit merge but at least a gesture of goodwill from both sides to gather the whole group of Dual Universe fans on Reddit.
Considering the other subreddit channel as a “subreddit” sibling and inserting a link pointing towards it (which would mean that there is a link on /r/dualuniverse pointing to /r/dualthegame and another link on /r/dualthegame to /r/dualuniverse. Maybe even share the activities between both subreddits (like all basic questions would be posted on /r/dualuniverse and all the more complex discussions on /r/dualthegame. That’s just a suggestion based on how both subreddits have evolved until now and absolutely not an order). If such agreement is reached, there will be no problem to partner with both subreddits. However, it will be up to subreddit moderators to submit to Novaquark possible events they would like to do on their subreddit (not the other way around). Then we will discuss how much time we can allocate to such events.

b ) No subreddit merge and no agreement reached.
In that case, we will partner only with the subreddit that has the highest activity and connectivity with the community, for the reasons stated above.
 
As the moderator of /r/dualuniverse seems to be someone else than AidenAiden now, the new moderator will be contacted to inform him about our stance toward subreddit channels and we'll see what comes from the discussion. 
 
Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.
 

If you want to see some voxel shape creation in action, check out this part of the latest devdiary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz-XcdbaC3E&t=33s
 
Also, there is an article on the wiki all about building, which I'll link below. If you just want to see a quick example and move on, then don't bother with this article, it's pretty lengthy. 
https://dualuniverse.gamepedia.com/Builder_Guide