Phroshy

Yes, the plan is one new pack a year. With only the base game you can't land on planets, with the first expansion you can land on airless bodies. Atmospheric planets are still completely off-limits. Since I'm a backer with a life-time subscription their approach never bothered me much. I guess since they plan to keep expanding the game for many years to come they can't finance the development off just selling the base game. Their end goal is a game not dissimilar to what Star Citizen wants to become after all, they just took a different approach to development and financing. And their focus on game features is a different one, obviously.

The only online game that I've been playing for any length of time in recent years is Elite: Dangerous. The only proper MMO that didn't lose me within a month and kept me coming back instead was Wurm Online. It's the only thing I've ever played that attempted something similar to Dual Universe, only not with a sci-fi space opera theme, but instead in a medieval dark fantasy setting. The first players got dropped into a vast, unexplored wilderness and had to build civilization from scratch. It's the only MMO I've ever played that gave me a true sense of adventure and wonder, there are no decorative backdrops without purpose; every cottage, town, castle, cave or ruin you stumble upon has a history and is there for a reason, exploring with friends or alone is dangerous and exciting, building your first primitive cottage somewhere in the woods feels like a real achievement. The game feels really antiquated now: It has barely any animations, most things are just represented in the form of text; the game feels more like a MUD with an advanced graphical interface than a modern MMORPG. But it always provided a unique experience that I hope DU will be able to replicate in a sci-fi setting with modern technology and good old new voxels. The game is still online and has a surprising number of still active players. Be warned if you want to check it out, the game pace is absolutely glacial, it's very grindy and punishing. Last time I checked there was free trial period with skill caps on your character.

It should be possible to have it automatically transferred to ore containers within your ship. Getting out of your pilot seat to place your bounty into storage crates in the back makes little sense.

It's only a grind if you want it to be. I've been playing the game on and off since Beta and still only have a fairly small ship and maybe 10 million credits. For reference, end game ships start at around 500 million entry cost. The big ships are better at almost anything, but they don't open up any new gameplay elements, so I never cared about earning lots of money to upgrade. Although this will soon change with the addition of passenger missions, for which you'll need specialized passenger ships (which are rather expensive). So if you wanna ferry about paying customers you'd need to grind a bit to get there.

I don't think aerodynamics are planned, but supposedly they want to make it so that thruster placement matters in relation to the centre of mass. So presumably your ship could be hard to control or even spin around wildly if you get this wrong.

Sorry to rain on your parade... I'd say cameras streaming footage to another in-game element could only be done with limited range, e.g. within the same construct. Long-range streaming isn't feasible because the client is only ever loading a small part of the game world that is immediately visible to the player, or at least within a certain range. Replaying recorded footage on an in-game screen sounds horrendously strenuous on the servers, I can't imagine that becoming a thing at all. Unless you'd somehow made it peer2peer driven, but then you'd potentially lag out all players in the vicinity. (Edit: Now that I think about it, it could be done in way that you upload a video somewhere else (e.g. Youtube) and stream the video from there onto an in-game screen. ) What OP proposed, some kind of "viewing only" client bound to camera elements, I don't see any reason why that wouldn't be possible. Hard to tell how much work that would be for NQ. I can't imagine that too many players would benefit from such a feature; I guess you'd need a spare computer that can run the game but which you aren't using for gaming? If you don't have that, under what circumstances would you log in to check your cameras rather than log in to actually play the game?

If they really go for the promised realistic flight model, mirroring will absolutely be essential. No, actually I feel mirroring would be an essential feature no matter what. In 'coarse' voxel games like Space Engineers you can easily eyeball symmetry, counting voxels in finely grained voxel game like DU would be a nightmare.

Maybe they envision something like an infinite, featureless plain where people can design their constructs in peace. Edit: Just noticed OP was talking about exactly the same thing, sorry for only skimming the OP post. I believe the devs are already on the same page here. I agree it would be pretty sweet if you could only enter this virtual space through an actual in-game element, so as to properly ground the feature in the game world. And maybe other players could even boot you out of your designer mode by destroying it or cutting the power (your WIP should be saved, naturally).

I don't think anything official has been mentioned yet, at least I don't remember seeing anything. One thing I can say, I presume mining will only be done with tools that immediately move the mined resources into your inventory or your cargo hold, rather than physical ore objects being created like in e.g. Elite: Dangerous or Space Engineers, in order to reduce the load on the server.

I would imagine you'd still need some kind of physical access, or at least get fairly close to the elements you'd want to hack. Otherwise a hacking mechanic would both be uninteresting and, as you say, potentially very unbalanced.

I believe there was also talk about "hacking" possibly being a thing in some capacity, so that you could control foreign elements without destroying anything. What that would exactly entail, who knows.

With the creative use of gravity generators you could make omnidirectional dropshafts.

I don't like the idea of renaming planets, this could lead to lots of unnecessary confusion. Once a planet has a name, it should keep it indefinitely.

I think they were referring specifically to blueprints. The master blueprint that builders get from their creation is indeed planned to be unlootable. If you're selling (or giving away) copies people can still loot those, though.

Nyzaltar already quoted my main points against lootable DACs, so I don't need to repeat myself. While I find the compromise agreeable from a purely game mechanical POV, I still feel it's a pointless waste of development effort for something that is bound to have so little effect on the game. I'd like to add something different, though, directed at Nyzaltar and the team. I believe someone already mentioned it in the last (unofficial) thread on the subject, but this topic of lootable DACs or not is probably not quite as hot or as important to the community as it might seem from the furious debates. There are just so few gameplay elements yet that are really set in stone, so when NQ announces something that does sound like a definite decision was made, naturally we will all latch onto it and tear it apart. DACs are maybe the first thing we are able to discuss in a factual manner, rather than the pure pie-in-the-sky speculation we are left with concerning almost everything else in the game at this point. Well, now I'm baffled that nobody else thought of this yet, or at least I haven't seen this idea. Sounds like a pretty straightforward alternative.

They should be able to show some kind of carrier approaching a planet, and then a bunch of smaller craft whizzing out and descending to the surface. That's the kind of stuff people love to see. They curiously haven't shown any custom ship interiors yet, just that space station over and over again.

Here's a piece of concept art of how they envision shipyards:

Elements currently seem to be all for show with little actual functionality yet. But I do agree, I'd love to see a dev vlog about what they have planned here. They already have some element concept art floating around, surely they must have a pretty good idea at this point of what is planned for release (and beyond?). I'd also like to see how / if you need to connect these elements together, some feature a visible pair of connectors. Are these for two different types of resource being transferred, or do they represent some kind of planned i/o system? http://www.dualthegame.com/marmoset/Container-Liquid.mview

On the topic of ship physics, I imagine they'll make it so the physics engine doesn't care where you put your thrusters in relation to the centre of mass, just in which direction the thrusters are facing. Even Space Engineers doesn't care where on the ship you put your thrusters. I'd love if they went full "hardcore" physics though, just to give people more to think about when designing (and scripting, if they want to do so) their ships. Also imagine all the noob threads about how their spaceship keeps spinning and doesn't want to fly straight, because their thruster placement is so far off that the standard cockpit LUA script can't compensate anymore. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of ship designing being an advanced player skill. The more headroom there is for player specialization, the more interesting our virtual civilizations will be.

I imagine it would be possible to make it a peer2peer network, maybe with an extra check with the server about who's in hearing range in local chat. This would probably reduce audio quality, but then NQ's monthly server costs wouldn't be so heavily dependent on how chatty people are feeling.

Guys, he posted the same thing in English as a separate thread, read that one rather than Google translating this... Edit: Oops, I missed that he linked his translated post by now. Can't find a way to delete this...

What's that supposed to be? Yes, I'm familiar with the concept of a black market, but what would such a thing entail in a game like this? Such a station would likely have to heavily invest into 24/7 security btw, but I agree it would be really sweet if people could pull it off.

I agree a bounty system is pretty much a requirement for a game like this; players will have to mostly police themselves no matter what, and the game should provide ways for people to do that effectively so we can build virtual civilizations and not immediately descend into anarchical chaos. The game shouldn't only inform you who killed you, but also who damaged your constructs imo, for cases when people gank your stuff while you're offline. Lootable bodies are on the books, btw. It's not set in stone yet, but iirc the idea is that you drop a more or less random selection of the items you carried, and keep the rest while you respawn. Some minor skill loss might be pondered aswell if people find ways to abuse "naked runs" and the like.

That would certainly address the concerns I voiced. But this suggestion has another catch: peer2peer networks would leave the game wide open for hackers. Effective anti-cheat mechanisms are afaik only really possible in a client-server system. Not sure how much of an advantage it would give players to hack such a system, i.e. to make other ships leaky and magically plug their own holes. But it would happen eventually that someone did just that.

Best post in these forums, I'd give you all of my today's thumbs-ups if I could. Lots of good questions. Something I'm wondering about are the mentioned underground "lava zones". They wouldn't tiptoe around the issue of how water is going to work in their game if they could handle (volumetric) liquids, so what is that lava going to look like? Maybe a similar kind of "fake fluid" as in Minecraft? Or just hovering glowy balls? Or zones that are really hot and cause damage to players passing through?