Heresiarch

Sorry for the almost necro.
But since I haven't replied here yet, and the thread is not locked, here is my take:

1. KISS - keep it simple, stupid. Do not waste valuable developer ressources on this until it is needed.
2. Avoid horror stories and media backlash before the game is even launched - nobody is arguing for making DACs lootable without any kind of safety net, as far as I can see. Good!
3. Keep your options open - avoid making decisions now that make it unnecessarily hard to change your mind later.
4. Try to keep both sides happy (lootable vs not lootable) - might be impossible, but as long as you keep to points 1 to 3, keeping you early supporters happy is a good thing. :-)

Under the assumptions that everybody has at least some kind of (limited) bank space in every safe zone (e.g. locker by your cryo pod?), and that safe zones never cease existing, I'd do it the following way:
- There is no limit to the amount of DACs you can put into your Arkship locker
- You are unable to leave a safe zone with DACs in your inventory.
- You are unable to materialize DACs outside of a safe zone
Finished, thats it, nothing else left to implement. :-O

Now what does this actually DO!?
- Whoever buys DACs with real world money can use them on himself, or trade them on a market (if the market is located inside a safe zone).
- You have to put your DACs into the locker (or any other safe container) before leaving the safe zone.
     Which is normal and prudent behaviour anyway. The game is simply enforcing it to prevent edge cases.
- Reselling of DACs you bought is possible. That should avoid any weird price spikes resulting from being unable to resell DACs
- There should not be anything for the proponents of lootable DACs to complain about - having DACs you have LESS options compared to normal items instead of more.
- There should be no way to spin this as too unfair towards griefed players - your DACs can't be lost because the game prevents you from getting into that situation.
- There is a good chance for emergent gameplay because players travel to different safe zones to buy or materialize and sell DACs, because the DACs can't change safe zones.
    So while you lose emergent game play for DAC traders - hiring escorts and so on - you on the other hand gain gameplay by having more players traveling, making for example passenger liners more likely.
    Even if win and loss of emergent gameplay only equalize each other, we are coming out ahead! :-D
- You keep yourself the option open to allow lootable DACs later on
    - You only have to remove the check when leaving a safe zone
    - You are in the best possible position to spin it for the press:
        "We are only providing an additional option that was not there before."
    - You have not locked yourself down in any way regarding safety nets - while also having avoided spending developer ressources on that before they were needed.
 
EDIT: Another way to look at this suggestion is that it makes DACs safe zone bound on first trade (because they have to be materialized for that), instead of soul bound (non-tradeable).

Since the new version of the website is now giving us the option to back the game via paypal (https://community.dualthegame.com/pledge), I have now done so.
Very much looking forward to the alpha!

Since the new version of the website is now giving us the option to back the game via paypal (https://community.dualthegame.com/pledge), I have now done so.
Very much looking forward to the alpha!

@lethys:
 
I get your point
I still feel that we are talking past each other.
 
I'm not talking about some kind of realistic damage model, or a lot of additional calculations, just about using the checks that the engine has to run anyway - with or without collision damage.
 
I would assume that speed, mass, vectors and collisions are things that the game already needs to check very frequently - or how should the game know how fast you can accelerate, where you are right now, if you can land on that platform (or even on another ship) and not just fall through?
How should the engine know if your ship is already touching the platform, if it doesn't check collision points anyway?
Also, touching the platform / ground will usually slow you down to zero - so it does interact with the ships speed.
And if the engine is able to handle the weapon damage of large battles (let's say about 50 shots and also 50 hits / damage locations per battleship every second), it should easily be able to handle one or two collision-damage locations per two ships / second.
 
I don't think that the game would crash because of that, if it does, it could potentially crash at almost any time, even if there's not much going on.
 
So, ramming tactics would be an absolute valid thing, you just would have to take into account that you would most likely lose a lot of ships - so maybe retreat would be the better idea.
 
Maybe I should ask a mod to change the topic's title to "collision damage - workaround suggestions".
Again, this topic originally wasn't meant to be about high end, super realistic, calculation heavy damage models - just about possible ways to handle it in an easy way, so it doesn't have to be completely abandoned.
In the original post, I mentioned the AMA video and the KS post of Novaquark first, which already make it clear that realistic collision damage won't make it into the game, but maybe some kind of workaround.
 
And my question was: If it is implemented in a stable way that doesn't cause lags and crashes, would you like to have this feature?

Well, having research only in the sense that the developers add in new items, is of course a possibility. I already outlined the advantages I see in having research in the game, but in the end, this is just the idea box forum, right? ;-)
 
As for the changing recipes: It depends on the crafting system.
If you immediately go from ressources to finished product, it is no problem:
Say a laser weapon takes 100 iron ore and 20 unobtanium to make. You can then have the rule that every damage time your tech increases the damage of the weapon, you increase the iron ore requirement by 1%. So after the 1. increase the recipe would cost 101 iron ore, after the 2. increase 102.01 (rounded down to 102).
The fun thing is, the player does not need to know these rules, so they can be way more complex. All he sees is the new builing plan for the improved laser weapon, which lists the ressources it needs.
 
Now what if a a laser weapon recipe instead needs an emitter, a weapon base, a ball bearing, a tracking computer and 2 cans of oil to be build?
In that case I would not make the laser weapon recipe itself improvable by research at all. Instead you could tech up the recipe for the emitter (increasing firing speed, damage, and energy draw), and the tracking computer (improving tracking speed and electronic warfare resistance).
 
Almost, but not quite.
 
If somebody just texted you the symbols of the tech in the game chat - that just won't be enough information to do anything with (well not quite, it might still be usefull in reverse engineering, see below).
 
If you got your hands on a building plan (either by buying or by stealing it), then you have everything you need to build the item yourself - these are the detailed instructions after all!
 
But what if you only captured an item? That is reverse engineering, which I did not explain in my first post, because that is an addon to the basic concept (additional work to implement, and not needed for the framework to function).
The way I imagine reverse engineering might work, is that you have a scanner you use to analyse your item as well as possible. Depending on your own skill, the quality of your scanner and maybe the amount of time you spend, you would get a data package of a certain quality out of that (the data package is an item). So you don't even have to aquire the item - A spy with enough time alone with the item could smuggle that analysed data out!
 
You would put that data package into a reverse engineering machine (ain't I grand at naming things? ), together with a building plan for a different variant of the same item (so still a laser, but with +10% firing speed instead of +10% damage).
Now the engineering machine goes to work (endlessly), and if you are lucky, at some point it will spit out the building plan for the item your data package came from. (Optional: Even if it has not managed to give you the building plan, after some time it will start to figure out the symbols of the tech used to make the item whose data you are analysing (Not all at once, one symbol at a time), allowing you to look for a closer technological match to feed the machine.)
 
What does the difficulty for the reverse engineering machine depend on?
-The amount of commonality between the tech you are analysing and the comparison item you gave it, as determined by how long the tech DNA strings stay identical before diverging (this should be the deciding factor - if the analysed tech is only a minor variation of tech you already know, it will be way easier to figure out compared to if development forked of a long time ago).
-The tech level of the item it is analysing, the higher the harder
-The tech of the reverse engineering machine

So I have not heard anything about in game research yet.
Now I am not saying that research is a needed feature for this game, it is not.
But then again, this game tries to emulate our universe in a computer, and give us the means to build up a new civilisation.
In this grand context, and especially in a science fiction game, I think that research would add a lot of depth, believability, and gameplay options and goals.

It is also something I have spend a good bit of time thinking on over the years - how you could represent it in a game with maximal flexibility (the way this game handles Organisations for example).

So let me try to describe the framework I would utilize. I can always explain certain aspects in more detail, if people are interested, and I would very much like to hear about weak points in the concept! :-)

For the purpose of this concept, I am going to assume that functional elements in this game are crafted gathering the needed materials, and then assembling them (how else would you do it?).

My concept:

The buildingplan of any functional element (weapon, cockpit, shields, armor, electronic warfare, ...) has a component called "build pattern", which gives the building machine the precise instructions on how to construct the result.

==Science machine==
Now we add a new machine to the game, lets call it "science machine".
The science machine takes a "build pattern" (see above) as input. As it's a big bulky supercomputer, it also needs a lot of energy, and possibly other ressources to run.
What it does, is that with a very very low probability, it throws out an improved version of the build pattern (think on average once every 10 years). It just runs continously until that happens or it is turned off.
That improved version has one of the stats of the previous version improved by a little bit (1% or 2% maybe) compared to the base values of the input build pattern. (I think it is very very important that this improvement is multiplicative - many games make the mistake of making them additive. If you make them additive, later improvements will matter way less than earlier ones, which means that improving everything equally will be the obvious best strategy, killing variety.)
There is also a chance that a different stat has gotten worse be a small amount.

==Represenation of science developement==
Now there should not be very many possibilities for new versions from any given base "build pattern" - you could for example have 1 of 5 different metrics which could improve, and 1 of 5 different metrics that could get worse as a trade off -> 25 possibilities.
If we make sure the possibility space stays about that small, we can express it with a single symbol (letter/number)!
That means, that on close examination of the build pattern / the functional element build with it, we can show that string of symbols to the player (if he has the right skill).
If that player compares two such strings, he can even see at what point in the development process the two components diverged! That is a pretty cool feature. B-)
That compactness should also make the server side storage very manageable, while still keeping the door open for future possibilities like merging of different technologies, or reverse engineering of stolen hardware.
If you want to make this system even more complex(!), you can even let every advancement modify the building cost of the component. I would not randomize that though, but only make it dependent on the current improvement, how complex the technology already is, and possibly also which improvements came before (e.g. how often you improved into the same direction). That way, you keep the number of possibilites the same, and can still express this more complex variant with one symbol per improvement. Increasing ressource usage can also be a good way to balance the improved stats of the functional elements a bit. :-)
 
By the way, getting the same symbol when building upon the same base building plan (same symbol string), literally means that you just made an identical improvement. Which means that different players can by chance make the same improvement to a technology - which I think is a very cool thing. :-)
You can think of that symbol string as a very compact form of representing the DNA of the tech in question.

==Scientific progress==
Another thing this representation is very useful for, is guiding the science machine by the game server.
I said earlier that it will only succeed very rarely (you just let it run endlessly). Obviously it would succeed more often the lower level the base tech is (=symbol string of improvements is short).
But the server could also change the probabilites of different improvements based on the history of improvements already made.

So if it takes so very long for the machine to have a success, how do we as players get our hands on new technology before 10 years have passed?
Parallelisation! A big alliance might make a big building with 100 science machines, which all search in parallel for an improvement on the best tech the alliance could get its hand on as base technology.
And every time an improvement is found, you'll have to weight the pros and cons of using it as the new base technology for further research: Yes, you just made the tech better, but you also just made it more complicated (symbol string got longer), so any further improvement will be just a little bit harder.
That might not make a lot of difference for a single improvement (the work should only become a few % harder for each improvement), but it does compound, and at some point you might just have made a technological dead end which can't compete against a different technological strain whcih has been kept more efficient. :-)

==Effects in game==
So now that I have outlined (hopefully halfway understandibly) how I would handle scientific research, what effects would that have in game? We (hypothetically) just spend a good amount of work to incorporate a fairly complex mechanic, so there should be a payoff ingame for that, right!?

- Not all components are the same! Without research, all lasers of a certain size in the game would be functionally identical (maybe with some small bonuses for being exceptionally well crafted). With research, you might buy lasers that fire 10% faster, or instead lasers that do 10% more damage per shot, if both variants have been researched.
- Not everybody has access to the same stuff! Without research, as long as you crank your skills up high enough, and gather all the ressources, you are able to build all the functional elements in the game. Now with research, everybody can still build a laser, but if you don't have the build patterns for the variant with +10% damage, then you can't build that variant. And maybe the alliance that developed it is jelously guarding it and only using it for its own ships? Now you need spies to steal it! :-D
- There is a sense of progress! If you are in a current state of the art warship, and you fight against a similar ship that has not been upgraded in the last 3 years, you will probably come out ahead - Your shields are better, your weapons do a bit more damage! This gives players more to do, and feels very scifi-like to me...
- It opens up additional game play paths and goals like building a research center, collecting a scientific library, having a monopol on certain advanced tech, stealing tech, trading tech, and more.

Stuff not touched upon in this post:
- How you could implement reverse engineering and merging of tech (I'll just state that its possible to do within the framework outlined).
- Pseudoscience to explain all of this in game (think simulation/evolution, but I'll gladly go into detail if there is interest)
- Effects on markets. How can you have a market for lasers of a certain size if those lasers have different tech levels? I don't have an answer for that one yet, but would love to hear more details about how markets are going to be implemented. I have a hunch that this kind of problem has already occured elsewhere in developing them (e.g. if you think about lasers getting bonuses due to high crafting skill).

I am really curious what people think about all of this. Please poke holes into it!
I'll update this concept post as I get suggestions to improve it (if I decide to take them ;-)).

There have been some topics around this area, particularly with building ships, but I feel that the this is a concept valid for the entire game. In a huge civilization-building, player-interactions-driven game, I feel that having people skilled in just certain areas will eventually lead to a more enjoyable experience for players. And this is something that many people may disagree with upon first hearing it, but find in the long run that they think it works really well. Or maybe they'll hate it! I want to share my opinion on it though, and I ask that those reading, who may think it's stupid, give it a chance. Also remember that there are two sides to this, neither are correct, and both are valid. It's just opinion based.
 
If anyone is familiar with the game series LittleBigPlanet, the first and second iterations for the PS3 played a huge role in a season of my life. They were the main games I played for months, and I had a friend who was into it as I was. Anyway if you don't know the game, it's not important. Basically, you use some basic tools to make little minigame-ish things (I'll refer to them as levels).
 
Anyway, in the first game, there were a few levels and creators that stood out significantly from all the rest, because they were fantastic (anyone that knows the name "Lockstitch" off the top of their head is a freaking awesome person). Me and my friend, we knew exactly what tools were available, and what you could and "couldn't" do. But some few levels stood out to us because, as people who knew the game inside and out, we had no clue how they some of these things were accomplished. A fair few levels were outstanding and amazing due to their mechanics and visuals.
 
When LittleBigPlanet 2 arrived, there were tons and tons of new tools added. These were fun and great to be sure, but they made everything that made the old levels special, not special. Because, all of the fantastic things that had been done before (in the first game) were now basic and easy because there were tools to do them (in the second game). This made a lot of great content a lot more common. Which of course was a good thing. And there were certainly levels that still pushed the boundaries. But overall, by making cool and unique things easy, it made great content a lot more common and thereby a lot less special.
 
If Dual Universe makes building easy, and mining easy, and combat easy, and exploration easy... Well, then there are going to be lots of amazing ships, and lots of miners, and lots of warriors and lots of explorers. You may say, "that sounds great!" But, remember my exceedingly dramatic and emotional story. When you make it easy, it stops being special.
 
In a game like Dual Universe, where player interactions and jobs and organizations are such a key factor, it shouldn't be easy to do anything. It shouldn't be easy to switch from a being an efficient miner working for a large corporation to a stupendous explorer finding rare resources on hostile worlds at the edge of the known galaxy. Sure, you can switch job titles and do whatever you want whenever you want, because it's a game! I'm just saying you shouldn't be able to switch from being outstanding at one thing, to suddenly outstanding at another. This allows individuals the opportunity to stand out, and be known for something. "Hey he's that guy that makes that line of super efficient yet powerful ships. I don't know how he comes up with that stuff." "What, you want to send Xx_M8_SLAYR_xX to go hunting for that anomaly? He's an architect, someone else will find it way sooner!" If someone wants to be known for something, then they go for that something and only that and they end up being great at it, and known for it. Lots of people will choose to not do this, which allows the few that do to stand out.
 
I can't really say much else that I haven't said already. I believe I've gotten my point across. Regarding designing ships or stations, it's easier to see how an individual could be better at it than most others. Mining or exploration expertise could be accomplished, not just by having better equipment or skills, but also by there being hidden techniques that people just have to learn by doing it. Thank you for reading and please try and be civil in your response, as, once again, both opinions are valid!
 
 
When everyone's special, no one is...
And if you're good at something, never do it for free!

So I have not heard anything about in game research yet.
Now I am not saying that research is a needed feature for this game, it is not.
But then again, this game tries to emulate our universe in a computer, and give us the means to build up a new civilisation.
In this grand context, and especially in a science fiction game, I think that research would add a lot of depth, believability, and gameplay options and goals.

It is also something I have spend a good bit of time thinking on over the years - how you could represent it in a game with maximal flexibility (the way this game handles Organisations for example).

So let me try to describe the framework I would utilize. I can always explain certain aspects in more detail, if people are interested, and I would very much like to hear about weak points in the concept! :-)

For the purpose of this concept, I am going to assume that functional elements in this game are crafted gathering the needed materials, and then assembling them (how else would you do it?).

My concept:

The buildingplan of any functional element (weapon, cockpit, shields, armor, electronic warfare, ...) has a component called "build pattern", which gives the building machine the precise instructions on how to construct the result.

==Science machine==
Now we add a new machine to the game, lets call it "science machine".
The science machine takes a "build pattern" (see above) as input. As it's a big bulky supercomputer, it also needs a lot of energy, and possibly other ressources to run.
What it does, is that with a very very low probability, it throws out an improved version of the build pattern (think on average once every 10 years). It just runs continously until that happens or it is turned off.
That improved version has one of the stats of the previous version improved by a little bit (1% or 2% maybe) compared to the base values of the input build pattern. (I think it is very very important that this improvement is multiplicative - many games make the mistake of making them additive. If you make them additive, later improvements will matter way less than earlier ones, which means that improving everything equally will be the obvious best strategy, killing variety.)
There is also a chance that a different stat has gotten worse be a small amount.

==Represenation of science developement==
Now there should not be very many possibilities for new versions from any given base "build pattern" - you could for example have 1 of 5 different metrics which could improve, and 1 of 5 different metrics that could get worse as a trade off -> 25 possibilities.
If we make sure the possibility space stays about that small, we can express it with a single symbol (letter/number)!
That means, that on close examination of the build pattern / the functional element build with it, we can show that string of symbols to the player (if he has the right skill).
If that player compares two such strings, he can even see at what point in the development process the two components diverged! That is a pretty cool feature. B-)
That compactness should also make the server side storage very manageable, while still keeping the door open for future possibilities like merging of different technologies, or reverse engineering of stolen hardware.
If you want to make this system even more complex(!), you can even let every advancement modify the building cost of the component. I would not randomize that though, but only make it dependent on the current improvement, how complex the technology already is, and possibly also which improvements came before (e.g. how often you improved into the same direction). That way, you keep the number of possibilites the same, and can still express this more complex variant with one symbol per improvement. Increasing ressource usage can also be a good way to balance the improved stats of the functional elements a bit. :-)
 
By the way, getting the same symbol when building upon the same base building plan (same symbol string), literally means that you just made an identical improvement. Which means that different players can by chance make the same improvement to a technology - which I think is a very cool thing. :-)
You can think of that symbol string as a very compact form of representing the DNA of the tech in question.

==Scientific progress==
Another thing this representation is very useful for, is guiding the science machine by the game server.
I said earlier that it will only succeed very rarely (you just let it run endlessly). Obviously it would succeed more often the lower level the base tech is (=symbol string of improvements is short).
But the server could also change the probabilites of different improvements based on the history of improvements already made.

So if it takes so very long for the machine to have a success, how do we as players get our hands on new technology before 10 years have passed?
Parallelisation! A big alliance might make a big building with 100 science machines, which all search in parallel for an improvement on the best tech the alliance could get its hand on as base technology.
And every time an improvement is found, you'll have to weight the pros and cons of using it as the new base technology for further research: Yes, you just made the tech better, but you also just made it more complicated (symbol string got longer), so any further improvement will be just a little bit harder.
That might not make a lot of difference for a single improvement (the work should only become a few % harder for each improvement), but it does compound, and at some point you might just have made a technological dead end which can't compete against a different technological strain whcih has been kept more efficient. :-)

==Effects in game==
So now that I have outlined (hopefully halfway understandibly) how I would handle scientific research, what effects would that have in game? We (hypothetically) just spend a good amount of work to incorporate a fairly complex mechanic, so there should be a payoff ingame for that, right!?

- Not all components are the same! Without research, all lasers of a certain size in the game would be functionally identical (maybe with some small bonuses for being exceptionally well crafted). With research, you might buy lasers that fire 10% faster, or instead lasers that do 10% more damage per shot, if both variants have been researched.
- Not everybody has access to the same stuff! Without research, as long as you crank your skills up high enough, and gather all the ressources, you are able to build all the functional elements in the game. Now with research, everybody can still build a laser, but if you don't have the build patterns for the variant with +10% damage, then you can't build that variant. And maybe the alliance that developed it is jelously guarding it and only using it for its own ships? Now you need spies to steal it! :-D
- There is a sense of progress! If you are in a current state of the art warship, and you fight against a similar ship that has not been upgraded in the last 3 years, you will probably come out ahead - Your shields are better, your weapons do a bit more damage! This gives players more to do, and feels very scifi-like to me...
- It opens up additional game play paths and goals like building a research center, collecting a scientific library, having a monopol on certain advanced tech, stealing tech, trading tech, and more.

Stuff not touched upon in this post:
- How you could implement reverse engineering and merging of tech (I'll just state that its possible to do within the framework outlined).
- Pseudoscience to explain all of this in game (think simulation/evolution, but I'll gladly go into detail if there is interest)
- Effects on markets. How can you have a market for lasers of a certain size if those lasers have different tech levels? I don't have an answer for that one yet, but would love to hear more details about how markets are going to be implemented. I have a hunch that this kind of problem has already occured elsewhere in developing them (e.g. if you think about lasers getting bonuses due to high crafting skill).

I am really curious what people think about all of this. Please poke holes into it!
I'll update this concept post as I get suggestions to improve it (if I decide to take them ;-)).

So you just have to wait a bit longer

Not really. My credit card is Maestro (not Mastercard) and i can use it on paypal. However, since it's not a Mastercard, kickstarter do not accept it! It's a shame because i really wanted to support the game. There are probably a lot of people in the same situation. But yeah, like the other user said, kickstarter is out of NQ's hands on the way it accepts funds in.