Obikawa

It has been a while - been busy. I distinguish a difference between quantum teleportation and quantum multi-world reality rewrite. Anyway what you said does have sense as well. What I aim at here is reusage of existing technology. It is a confirmed fact that the game's humanity learned to rewrite reality (the resurrection nodes). My understanding is that building of the first player made node will be possible after a technology of the quantum multi world gets rediscovered. On its own I believe it would be major breakthrough allowing for effective (while not desired) transfer of matter through unlimited distance. I believe this "technology" could be split to steps of progress ranging from "rewrite the reality here" to "rewrite the reality wherever in universe". Each of those steps could be associated with new, intriguing tools. I am thinking of barriers, no-damage zones, engines and finally the nodes and stargates. The Dev Blog about the quantum ressurection mentions the extremely high energy costs of this technology with which I agree. The solution to this problem was that only the player's body would be transported on death. I can see here two optimizations: "Only player's body" "Transport to the node" With my understanding of the quantum multi world the stargates could use the same technology after changing energy optimizations to "swap an area with preset location (another stargate)". I believe it may be easier to understand my engine when you step down the energy scale from the stargates and resurrection nodes. When you have less energy and less advanced technology you may achieve only lesser goals. Like rewriting reality to relocate an area on a small distance or (with even less energy required) guard an object from some damage. Explanation to the micro scale teleportation is my attempt to consider the game engine. Actually after some thought I believe it would be an important factor in FTL travel. You see, it is impossible for any computer system to perfectly represent a fully fluid movement. You can take efforts to make it as smooth as possible by updating the object's coordinates as often as possible. But when you have to to track thousands of objects across hundreds of servers it becomes a complex challenge! And I can not overlook the need to make piracy possible, so there has to be a way to intercept an FTL ship. So in effect we get a ship that with every "tick of the game's clock" updates it's coordinates. The more powerful the engine. the bigger the distance covered in one tick. While in FTL mode, it's relative momentum is frozen. Combine that with what I wrote earlier about conditions of failure and you get interesting tactics for combat with pirates. Imagine a transporter propelling away from destination before starting the quantum engine. If it gets ambushed by what I call a quantum anchor (a quantum engine with disc shaped containment zone and no displacement zone) it can still have a chance to escape if the pirates are not prepared to pursue in that direction. At a low level the travel would look like that: Check if any other quantum containment zones intersect. If true, shut down all engines generating those zones. If false warp to the next point; repeat above. I am aware I produced another wall of text, but hopefully I cleared some of your questions. The more you doubt it and point out the weaknesses, the more I can improve the idea.

Energy is the laser's "bullet". Anyway, the previous post was meant to say that I do not see swords happening in this game.

You could be just an external patron. Or not care at all and only buy the parts you want. Do you think every single player will want to engage in this development?

Thank you for pointing the zero momentum aspect of that engine. You are correct. I overlooked that fact.

I think an answer to the problem of unfairness would be to move the whole concept of development reseach from players to organizations. This way even a relative newcomer can help his organization by funding or supplying the research materials.

But guns need bullets. Sword is the only thing that works when you run out of them. That said, from technical point of view mechanics of sword fighting seem very difficult to code. You need to implement collision detection, force and toughness differences, hitboxes on different body parts and respective damage severities... In this game this is too costly for too little profit.

The WoW is a bad example because all those items are monster drops (I am wrong? I played WoW for just a short time long time ago). This is a completely different mechanism than what will be in DU. An example of what would happen is the car market IRL. While the improvements lie in construction techniques not components themselves, there is a general trend. The better, bigger, nicer or more posh cars are more expensive and in smaller numbers. Also, the WoW example you bought made me remember that this game is the very reason for my hate of randomness in games. You could grind a dungeon for months and not get what you want. This is just sad and a waste of time.

Still, that pretty much shows that the Alcubierres are a mystery. The interactions are undefined. In case of the Quantum Engine none of that matters. As soon as two of them intersect they have to stop working because they no longer are able to completely enforce their respective realities. Let me repeat a question for you - what do you think a stationary Quantum Engine with a disc-shaped containment zone could be used for? I hope the answer will let you better understand the importance of proper intersection mechanics.

You did not consider the fact that the suplly of the "best items" will be limited. Very limited. There is no way around it. Knowing people, such supplies will be actually further limited on purpose to drive the price up.

Fix the engine to the rock, program the route and activate - done! If you go slower then light than the energy requirement becomes quite low. The asteroids themselves are quite small but even 100'000 km/h provides them with a terrifying momentum.

No. "They would slip through each other". Literally. In an undefined way they would shrink/expand each other without actual contact during collision.

With the theoretical Quantum Engine that I am working on you could hurl a planet... That is if you have obscene amounts of energy to spare. I am talking about many times more than a stargate needs. So yeah, I would be happy with just "tossing rocks" from an asteroid belt.

Now that I have started to write down my theory of the Quantum Engine I am no longer as keen to compress the space thousandfold. Hundredfold will make the Earth equivalent have radius of 60km which is twice as much as the example planet above. The difference would be alleviated by having the FTL engines be ten times as fast and that's it!

If you suggest going as far as keeping one tab open just for the music you might as well download the track and play it locally. There is no need to burden the server with the extra streaming every day you browse the game's pages.

No. I hate random numbers. Ehem... There is a valid use case for material improvement. If you specialise in let's say production of ship hulls, you could sell those for better price if they have improved stats. This example also uncovers the need for a factory-wide implementation of this idea if it ever gets accepted.

I am still thinking about this engine and coming up with new ideas. For example if you specialize the engine to limit its direction to straight line forward, then you can greatly decrease the energy expense because you no longer need to maintain the Sphere of Displacement and instead just "provide" a cylindrical shape through which the Sphere of Containment can move. First I need to make clear what I understand under term of "jumping FTL". The engines like Alcubierre's are based on idea of slipping through the time-space without interacting with it, from start to finish without possibility of interception. Two Alcubierre ships on crash course would literally slip through each other without them even registering the fact. Thanks to that characteristic this engine creates a space jump rather than a space flight. It literally disappears in one place to appear in another. Now that is cleared up I want to touch on the topic of the quantum jump. This concept is purely theoretical one and simply a means to explain the engine. In practice you have to realise another fact: this is an FTL engine, so it will be impossible to see. At best a line that is visible for duration of one frame. However, even without seeing it you could intercept it with a logical application of the multi-world theory. The engine works by "enforcing reality" in a radius around it. If you put another, active quantum engingine it's path, at the moment of intersection of Spheres of Containment both engines will fail to enforce their respective realities and abort. In result the ships powered by the engine will stop in their tracks. Now, if you can specialize the quantum engine to go "forward only", you could also specialize another engine to create a huge "Disc of Containment" with no displacement at all. This is where I retract my last statement of the previous post, as such disc is a practical use of the quantum engine with zero speed capability. Can you see where am I going with that? I have yet to consider the corner cases. With current theory you could rip pieces out of enemy ships just by starting the FTL travel. It is because the Sphere of Containment locks the space within it. And as I write this I realise that I have to think up countermeasures to that to allow people to move during the FTL flight.

You misunderstood me. "Reliable increments of stats" that I envision are researched improvements to the same object. A piece of steel usually would have a basic and universal value of toughness. But you could research production of the same pieces of steel which are always 1% tougher. With more research you would gain another 1% of tougness. Rinse and repeat until you are satisfied with the toughness of your steel. No randomness here. You just spend your research time for a reliable, repeatable increase of an efficiency.

There is going to be no preset quests. This game will employ "emergent gameplay" which means the players themselves will create the story. For example to build something you need materials. To get materials you need to know where they are and mine them. This already becomes a simple quest line.

The current idea of FTL engines being different from classical thrusters but also different from stargates is causing a number of theoretical issues. For example, the Alcubierre engines. How do those interact with space? What would happen during a hostile interception or crash with a space debris? There is another kind of problem to consider here. Right know DU is known to simplify a lot of the Universe and break exactly one Law. Classical FTL engine ideas would need to break more of the Laws. When I thought about FTL travel from this perspective I had en epiphany. What if we could apply the quantum multi-world theory on which the ressurection nodes are based to other elements of the game? The answer is "yes! we can". It was surprisingly simple for me to devise a quantum engine that has many desirable traits: It is not jumping. It simply moves forward faster than light. It can be intercepted by hostiles during transit in a convincing and engaging way. It has no theoretical limit on top speed. It is only limited by the ships energy supplies. Finally, this engine can solve the problem of size versus speed tradeoff very elegantly, without involving mass! The idea is as follows. The main difference from stargates and ressurection nodes would be range. The gates and nodes seem to work over infinite distances and as such are the ultimate destination of the game's research and development. As such they require the ultimate cost and effort which will make them very rare, so FTL engines become a real necessity to a point where it could take less time to travel FTL to close-by systems than wait in a queue to a stargate for the instant warp. The first change to the lore I made here is that stargates actually employ the same principle of overwriting the reality through the multi-world quantum theory. And the FTL engine I write about here is actually employing the same theory as well, but with local range instead. It is able to modify a sphere of space around it to enforce movement of objects inside. Through quantum manipulation it constantly makes the ship be "in front of itself". While in microscopic scale the ship effectively jumps in a series of tiny steps, macroscopically it moves fluidly and really fast. It obviously needs lots of energy to keep moving like this. The engine actually has two spheres of influence. The inner one - the Sphere of Containment which defines what is moved. The outer one - the Sphere of Displacement which defines how far the Sphere of Containment can be moved in a unit of time or with a unit of energy. Basically you could equate the Sphere of Displacement to range in some contexts. The fun part here is that both spheres are strongly related. A better engine can influence more space. It is up to the designer to distribute the energy between containment and displacement. The ratio here is obvious. The total energy output defines a volume of a sphere which in turn is the sum of volumes of the two spheres of influence. In result, big advances in ship's size or speed require big advances in energy density and ultimately the tradeoff for speed becomes a very real and pressing issue. My choice of the mathematical formula gives a very simple calculation programming-wise which is very important factor when most of space travel will use the FTL mechanics. It is also elegant as it is compliant with the Laws of the Universe. This basically means that to achieve two times faster speed limit on a space craft you would need less than eight times stronger energy output. The reverse works as well. There is even an interesting side effect of this theory. You always will have to devote significantly more energy for the speed factor of the engine as Sphere of Displacement which is smaller than Sphere of Containment has no practical sense.

I am writing about those right now.

I could agree with the idea if the numbers were not random generated. I would rather want small but reliable increments of stats.

Is it infinite like DU strives to be?

You are not wrong about this, but not exactly right either. Stargates are going to be the ultimate constructions which will allow for even the biggest ships to move through. So "private use" and "charging money" drastically changes. Pretty much only alliances will be able to afford to build and maintain stargates.

The problem with that is that it requires an extra effort for visitors to find the button and press it every time they visit. In this case you may as well simply advertise a typical download and whoever really wants the "immersion" would just play it from their standalone player. There is also a problem of continuity. It is impossible to have a track play through multiple pages. The website would have to redesigned to one dynamic page, which would make it very heavy and long to load. It would force the browser to download all the blogs, screenshots, press announcements and so on in one go. This is a huge technical obstacle to just avoid some music from restarting or stopping on every click in the site. So however enthusiastic you are about it, it simply would not fly. Sorry.