Dunbal

August 15th 2018

Yeah - because THAT's why SC hasn't released lol

Someone forgot to read the fine print. Welcome to the community. Now you have to be patient like the rest of us

Nah it's no biggie. Parallel economies always develop anyway. Find me a player in EVE Online who will refuse to be paid in technetium...

Yep, until one player comes along who doesn't scam people and screw people, and tadaa, everybody's favorite money-changer is born. You don't _need_ currency. Anyone who has played, say, Ark:Survival Evolved knows that currencies will emerge. Before certain things happened to make it quite common, Chitin used to be the currency there. It was an item relatively difficult to obtain from critters and many servers had exchange rates set between chitin and other items. Once chitin became freely available due to dev modifications, other items have been used as a means of exchange - including gunpowder. Artificial currencies encourage grinding and farming for currency. Leaving the means of exchange to the player encourages scamming, murder, and all other sorts of EMERGENT GAMEPLAY. I know which I prefer. In EVE there is a guy called Chribba. He has earned the trust of all players because he's honest. If you want to buy a supercapital from someone else, you go through Chribba (or one of his designates). The seller deposits the supercapital with Chribba, and you deposit your cash with Chribba. That's the only way you are sure you won't get scammed. There's no reason other players can't rise to that level of trust in DU.

I'll take the opposite view: any dev created currency automatically results in "farming" or "grinding" behavior as players will find the least balanced way of obtaining said currency and milk it forever. This has happened in every single multiplayer game to date be it gold farmers or ISK farmers. It's up to the devs to create the game they think people want to play but the lessons are there: encourage players to seek after currency for the currency itself, or encourage players to solve the problem of value through trade. The first results in permanent inflation because of grinding players. The second will result in an economy in constant flux as players seek to control EACH OTHER as opposed to "the source of currency". Besides, the devs have already provided a very real currency to the game: the DAC.

I tend to agree with Dinkledash. Currency is a man-made thing. It should not be imposed by the devs. Doing so will result in a wholly artificial economy subject to all the things that destroy artificial economies in other games - imbalance, inflation, etc. If you look at the history of currency on our planet - humans have used all sorts of things from shiny rocks, to rocks with holes in them, to livestock, to other humans (slaves), to bits of metal, to bits of paper and now, actual electronic bits. I think that players - in their markets - should be allowed to create their own system of credits and debits - just like the moneychangers of old. Actual "currency" is, after all, just a "chit" that represents a credit somewhere, kind of like a casino chip. The actual value of these "chits" depends on the faith the community as a whole has in the organization that backs that currency. So the Republic of Zimbabwe, for example, might have trouble convincing the community as a whole to adopt its currency, while the United States of America has no trouble having others use its currency - even when both nations apply very similar monetary and fiscal policies... So what I would like to see (because it is what closely models the real world) is that players/organizations should be given the TOOLS to fashion a unit of currency that fulfills the basic requirements of money: it has to be portable, it has to be difficult or impossible to forge, it has to be difficult to destroy yet fairly easy to store, etc. Then let all the different organizations try to create their own currency. Some will be more successful than others. Some will go bankrupt, leaving players with millions of units of a currency no one wants anymore. And some will become hugely successful and become the de facto currency standard throughout the game. If this is NOT done, then the devs will be assigning arbitrary values to things and these values will simply be exploited. It's much easier to create the conditions for real trade and real allocation of value through market forces, and then let the thing run itself.

Getting to this thread a little late but: To those complaining about the video - go ahead and judge a game by a PRE-ALPHA demo. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. I expect to see this game improve and grow over the next few years.

And now the mass cancellations start.... just kidding - congrats. Looks like we'll get our game after all. Hopefully even before SC comes out

I don't watch TV in real life I certainly won't want to watch it in a game...

Or you could have designated mining tiles/hexes in the secure zone which can be mined out for a time and then the tiles are rotated, kind of like crop rotation. As the mined out tile stays "fallow" for a few days/weeks real time, it slowly and automatically recovers to the original state. If the recovery is slow enough players won't really notice it happening (kind of like watching grass grow) and the sever load should be almost nil. Once it's fully recovered, it's ready to be rotated to "mining allowed" again.

It's been mentioned elsewhere that you cannot dig all the way through to the other side of a planet. Eventually you will encounter a boundary layer probably disguised as magma, which may or may not have harmful effects...

MegaWars III and Island of Kesmai. But most lately EVE Online. I've used the Dunbal nickname since 1986 back when they were called "handles". You may call me grandpa.

Vorengard and CaptainTwerkMotor have the right of it, in my opinion. It really doesn't matter what the actual size of the universe is. The number of players is not infinite, and the distribution of skill and talent among players will not be even. Some people have more time than others, and some people are better at some things than others. Therefore there will be an uneven distribution of resources - above and beyond the geographical. Whether these resources are materials, constructed things, markets, violence, etc. it doesn't matter, they will be clumped into regions concentrated around those people or groups of people who far exceed the rest of us in that particular area. Specialization is innate to the human creature simply because we are not all "created equal". Some are better book-keepers, some are better traders, some better builders, some better hunters and some are better fighters. Therefore I expect the game population to slowly organize around specialized groups - and necessarily those of us who are not as skilled in one area or another will loosely orbit those groups and territories that hold the skills or things we need - or travel between sets of areas (and thus the trade route is born).

Former EVE player here, I certainly don't advocate cloning EVE at all. However EVE is/was groundbreaking in terms of its economy because it is (apart from the artificial and inflationary infusion of ISK through ratting/incursions) a "real" economy. Absolutely everything is player made by raw materials that have to be mined for one way or another. Absolutely all the prices are set by players and the market as a whole. So if DU is aiming for a player-driven economy, similarities to EVE will necessarily develop. It would be foolish both to repeat the mistakes made in EVE and not to try to learn from what has been proven to work - and hopefully make it better.

I think the best possible answer is: Kickstarter at 315k with 23 days to go. Sorry to see you go. kthxbai

I just want to see if you squirt ink?

After 40 years I think it controls me now.

Yeah that's the one. Last I heard he wanted to visit a place called Italy, was last seen near a restaurant and never heard from again.

Yeah I like stated I'm not advocating more grind - people having to maintain mundane stuff, etc. For example how many years will it take your hammer to rust, honestly? You won't see it in your lifetime. BUT for more complex systems... your computer... SUPERcomputers used by gov/military, etc... the amount of maintenance work (preventative) and repair work HAS to go up. If you never clean the gunk out of your keyboard and computer fan, expect to have to buy a new keyboard/fan. Etc. So I'd like to see some "complexity" value assigned to items and the more complex they are - the more work they require to keep them running at optimal and the more expensive to fix if/when they do break down. And the more complex they are, the more likely they are to fail under extreme conditions - temperature, g-force, etc - ESPECIALLY if they haven't been maintained properly. Your hammer will work just fine at 50g, or at 500 degrees temperature. Your computer or jet engine, probably not. So if you have this game that has building blocks and components like cockpits, etc - well I'm guessing the building blocks are going to be pretty solid and not prone to failing all that often - but your spaceship cockpit - you'd better maintain that after every X hours of operation if you want it to keep working well and fewer hours if you're jigging it around in high g combat maneuvers all the time. When you do the maintenance (which probably requires specialized skills/equipment/tools) you'll find maybe some components have to be replaced not to keep it working but to keep it working at OPTIMUM. If you don't replace, it will still work, but total failure rate gradually increases, sensors/dials become fractionally less accurate, etc. I'd just hate to see a world where all constructs work perfectly well 100% of the time forever and ever. The universe is not like that. "Random" failure is horrible too, the real world is not subject to a random number generator. Ahh but slow, steady erosion and gradually increasing chance of failure which can be countered by periodic work (maintenance) - that we're familiar with. It's the real world model. Check and change the oil in your car once in a while. Check your tyres. Clean the dust out of your computer. Wash your clothes. Bathe. Brush your teeth. It's all around us. Again the idea is not to add something tedious - but imagine that if properly implemented, you could have people and machines that specialize in maintenance and repair, keeping the highly technical part of world operating in tip top condition. It's really easy to implement this badly, but it would be amazing if implemented properly. My widgets are better than your widgets not only through design and tech but because you don't look after your widgets, I do. So I can get that extra 1%...

Welcome - we need new victi er, community members!

Hmm speaking of space squids.... knew a guy. Akkar... Akbar.... something like that - know him? I think he was a general or something

Not spice. That stuff causes a lot of trouble, encourages monopolies, vendettas, mutants, irritating witches, messiahs and gods who think they are worms, and angry worms who think they are god. Anything but spice. That stuff is bad news. Even when it flows. Shai Hulud prevent this!

But to be honest, gravity is a function of position. Like was mentioned earlier - and this really depends on exactly how the meshing of player "grids" is done, you don't HAVE to calculate gravity for every single object in the game, since objects in a similar reference frame have exactly the same gravity vector. All of them. Gravity changes as a function of the inverse square of the distance to the object - but planetary/lunar masses are so large that you're not going to see a real difference over a few hundred or even thousand km. Lack of gravity is not the reason astronauts in the ISS are "weightless", for example. The gravity 60 or 100km up is almost the same (within a few decimal points) as on the surface. So you calculate once for the "region" and everyone with positions corresponding to that "region" has a g value of "x". Well x-arrow, cos it's a vector Now if your "region" is slowly moving around on the map and its position is changing relative to large planetary masses, you do have to recalculate the gravity vector for the region every once in a while - but you don't have to do that every iteration through the game loop. You can easily get away with it once every few hours or so unless said region is moving at relativistic speeds.

In other news I'm about to launch a Kickstarter campaign for my multiplayer Solitaire game... watch and cheer as up to 10,000 players fight for control of the mouse pointer.