Phroshy

All I can tell you is that it's a relatively simple* general-purpose programming language, so yes, you'll find plenty of material to read up on it. I don't know of anything I could recommend to you myself, though. * at least it's often referred to as having a rather short and shallow learning curve compared to other languages. Haven't bothered to look into it myself yet, so I don't know how accurate that really is.

Keep in mind the game's official launch is planned to be by the end of 2018. I imagine your friends may own better and more futuristic potatoes by then which may be able to run the game. I'd actually be really interested in required system specs, too. I'm not worried since I own quite a high-end PC, but I'm curious nontheless, as I can't think of much to compare this game to. There are other complex voxel games, yes, but not at this scope. But at the same time a lot of work can and will be offloaded to the servers, so I find I really hard to eyeball how powerful a PC you might need to run this. Everquest Landmark might be the closest thing. It would be really unusual to give any official information on hardware requirements this early in development though, so I'm not getting my hopes up that we'll find out any time soon.

A sincere thank you. Chris Roberts linked to the Dual Universe Kickstarter page in his Star Citizen devblog, and told his fans to contribute generously if they can.

To be honest, if you don't trust in the project now, I don't see why you'd trust in the project after seeing some Youtubers build pretty ships. There are still a million things they can get wrong building this game, so much of the game design is still up in the air, so many important decisions that can make or break the game... Basically all they've proven by now - if you choose to believe their videos - is that they're capable of building a functional game engine with voxels and that they excel at netcoding. They still have to prove themselves capable of building an actual game around these things. I'm not hating here, I still agree with you it'd be a smart move to reach out to more Youtubers to get the word out. I guess I'm just wondering about your thought process.

As far as I'm aware haven't reached the singularity yet, coders still have to work with a variety of real world limitations. I mean, sure, is your idea technically feasible? Yes, of course it is. The question is, is it feasible for a single shard MMO with a server-client architecture? I don't mean so much technologically as economically. I think we can all agree it would be awesome to basically get Space Engineers: The MMO with millions of players online at once. But the required processing power on the server side would probably be prohibitively expensive. The same goes for wheels, rotors, pistons, rails, and similar general-purpose mechanical bits. It's too costly on the server side to do all the required calculations all the time. These things can be done relatively cheaply you might think, but think of the scale involved. Think of the millions of constructs that need to be checked if they're leaky whenever they're interacted with, of all the little wheels on vehicles rolling across surfaces, etc. Things add up very quickly and can add an enormous overhead on the server architecture. I feel people are right when they say you need to temper your expectations. This game isn't going to be the next Space Engineers, it's more likely going to be Eve Online with voxels. The devs may go and see what they can add in terms of advanced survival mechanics when the game is live, when they see what they are earning, where the game is going, and what their servers cost when they are up and running. But you need to understand they can't make such things a priority.

Not sure if I agree with Scott Manley being a good spokesperson, at least not at this stage. The game is currently little more than an impressive tech demo, and I don't think Scott is the type of guy who'd enjoy building nice looking space ships which little actual functionality. But now that you mention it, sending out a playable client to popular Youtubers might have been a good strategy. Not sure if NQ could still get this done in time before the Kickstarter ends. Ripper is right btw, NQ invited whoever wanted to come over for a tour through their office and demo of the game. The game engine does evidently work as advertised. But actual game mechanics are as of now practically non-existent.

Sure looks like one, well spotted. There doesn't appear to be another one at the opposite end of the room, so I guess they aren't using VR extensively in that office. I sure wouldn't bet on VR support being a thing for this game. Although I'm quietly hoping it will be.

Asteroids can be seen in the teaser video. I expect them be static though, and not able to be moved around.

I agree there should be explosives of some type or another. How powerful they should be will be a very crucial balancing element in a game like this. I don't think we can determine that this early in the development cycle. Structures would have to be easy to defend with shields, turrets etc. to allow for big explosives without upsetting the balance. This is also closely related to the question of how much damage you should be able to do in foreign-owned territory, if there's some magical protection against damage, if you can even damage stuff in foreign territory at all without fighting some kind of red tape á la war-declarations or "hacking", and so on. Personally I think I'd favour a system where there's little protection or automated defenses, but explosives are rather puny for balance (do a lot of damage and destroy voxels, but have a very small explosion radius). Simply because this would be less punishing for builders. Hey, those guys took over your base, but at least it's mostly intact and they can appreciate your designer skills. I imagine this would be less upsetting than seeing it all reduced to craters.

Pretty sure I read that pressurized environments are chalked up as "would be nice to have, hard to do, might be considered in the distant future". The serverside calculations required would be intense in our rather fine-grained voxel-world. Not really feasible for an MMO in this day and age. I'd love if it was otherwise, there could be so many cool features coming along with pressurized interiors vs the vacuum of space, but alas that's just not a realistic goal for this game.

As I understand they are contemplating NPC robots that act as player-owned vendors, i.e. you put a robot somewhere and drop stuff you want to sell into its inventory. The plan is to have no money sinks. Literally none. Money that is in the game stays in the game forever (unless a player carrying cash decides to stop playing and logs out forever along with the money). How new money makes it into the market is a hotly debated subject, as you can imagine. There was thread about it somewhere...

Yes, but what if the elements just don't match the colourtheme of my favourite ship? Maybe I can buy element skins that match the rest of it. Or, let's put it the other way around: I can always just manually match my voxels with the element-skin. The argument "it's a small team" doesn't hold in this instance: The game is largely voxel-based and player-built. If anything, NQ needs to come up with ways to keep their artists busy in the long run, when all the game-defining elements are in place. Putting their artists to work on useless bling for the cash shop just makes sense.

The game won't be able to tell which areas are pressurized and where people could breathe because that would just be too computationally intensive for a voxel-based MMO to handle. So the game wouldn't be able to tell when its safe to remove the helmet. I guess it would still be possible to allow customized faces that are visible behind the visor, but really, all things considered it makes sense to focus entirely on customizable clothing and armour.

Oh, I must have missed that. Exciting!

I don't often say this, but good lord does this feel premature to discuss. I do agree though. It would be a nice addition to the game and an additional stream of revenue for Novaquark. You, know a couple years down the line. You should only be able to apply skins to ships you own, though. Otherwise it would be too easy for people who sell all the cool-skinned ships to completely dominate the market (see "pay-to-win"). The skins would have to revert to vanilla when the ship changes owners. That is, unless those skins had limited uses. Like you could buy a tenpack of a skin for a buck or two and when you've run through it, they're gone. Then it would make sense to make skinned ships fully transferable between players. Mmmh, so many interesting possibilities to milk the common folk!

I thought about the subject and must admit I'm not sure if the inclusion of WMDs in the game is a good idea. It carries the risk of scaring off all the creative builder types which we will need for the game to work. As fun as reducing a city to a crater at the press of a button sounds, it might be a necessary sacrifice to completely omit such a feature. I imagine this is subject will lead to lots of heated debate both in the community and amongst the developers. At the very least there would need to be some kind of strong defence against such weaponry, defences that attackers would need to take out on the ground before they can drop a nuke. Maybe this is a workable compromise where we sometimes can witness cities getting obliterated in a satisfying mushroom cloud without scaring off all the "carebear-y" types (not sure if it's fair to call someone a carebear who starts crying when hundreds of hours of his beloved work just explode). Balancing this might be difficult.

Because people expect to not get robbed when going for a trade, so trading hubs would require some kind of security, which needs to be paid for. And I didn't say anything about a new marketplace not requiring "a significant input of ressources". But when there is no functional market around, there may be a strong incentive to build a new trading hub even if its costly. Or otherwise, trade may just naturally shift elsewhere. Even if building a new marketplace next to the illustrious Mr. Fatcat you described doesn't pay off, people may just flick him off and trade at the anarchical meadow next door, and risk getting attacked rather than pay for his absurd prices. I very strongly disagree.

What's stopping people from building a competing marketplace next door?

I disagree. In a procedural, effectively endless universe such market failures seem unlikely to me. We face the danger of monopolies in real life because space and resources are limited on Earth. We don't face the same problems in this game.

The only way I can see this work is if Arkships aren't part of the procedural generator, i.e. Arkships are limited in number and have to be placed manually by Novaquark. Otherwise, no matter how rare those Arkships would be, in the end procedurally spawned Arkships would result in safezones being the only viable spots to settle in the entire universe. Outside of the safe bubbles we'd only ever see mining operations and nothing else. Exciting in the first exploratory phase, yes; but very stale in the end game. Remember that people are going to be able to connect star systems via Warp Gates at what seems to be arbitrary distances. People may have to go to great lengths to connect all safe zones with Warp Gates if Arkships are rare and Gates hard to construct. But after enough time has passed, the endgame is always the same: Nothing interesting happens outside the cuddle bubbles around the revitalized Arkships. So yes, I agree with the proposal as long as there is a hard (and very low!) limit to those crashed ships.

Voice chat could be a premium feature for subscribers only. VoIP takes a not inconsiderable amount of server resources, so it makes sense from economic POV, too.

I'm still not sure I understand how DACs being lootable turn DACs into less of a pay-to-win mechanic than when they are purely digital. Even more importantly, after three pages of discussion, actually I still don't see how DACs are pay-to-win either way. If I butcher my piggy bank to buy lots of game money I still can't just conjure up an uber weapon of mass destruction. If I want to buy the biggest and baddest battlecruiser ever to gank noobz with my rich parents' money, someone still has to construct that battlecruiser first. Presumably someone who already is at least as powerful as I am as a newcomer with a golden goose next to my computer. And the money I spend isn't just disappearing either. If I pay a million spacebucks to the ship vendor, now the vendor has a million spacebucks. On top of how he probably was already pretty well-off in the first place if he is in the place to sell expensive spaceships. I guess my point is, so many people here are acting as if the devs allowed rich people to produce uber weapons out of thin air. But I have a hard time seeing how a newcomer with too much money to spare could just usurp the powers to be and become the next kingpin. Every time they spend money, people around them will profit. And you can still loot, capture or destroy whatever they bought if they don't know what they're doing with it. If they bought expensive materials, you can attack them and snatch all of it. If they buy a big battleship, you can gather your boys to zerg them and show everyone what you think of rich people privilege. And so on. It's getting late here in Yurop, sorry if my ramblings are becoming a little incoherent.

If feel you're grossly overestimating the population density we're going to achieve in this game. Juggling channels for line-of-sight communications sounds needlessly complicated, somehow I doubt it will be a common occurrence to have so many people around that you need to filter them. Except maybe for the early days, when everyone is still milling around the arkship.

Yes, I support their decision against lootable DACs for a variety of reasons: I can't imagine the grief of spending money on DACs and losing all of it shortly after in-game. That's the stuff that can quickly turn players away, presumably those that are especially willing to spend a lot of money on the game. Safe zones, like around the arkship, are apparently planned to be rare and far between. Trade with DACs would almost certainly only be happening in those safe zones if DACs were lootable, possibly giving safe zones an enormous economic edge beyond what they already inherently are going to have anyway. I'd rather there be several big markets with player-enforced security outside the safe bubble, the prospect of all trading hubs being located in safe zones feels pretty bleh. Unlootable money and DACs make active trading hubs outside safe zones much more feasible. DACs are a form of currency, and RP-wise it only makes sense to me that currency would be all digital so far in the future. The counter-argument concerning emergent gameplay feels weak to me, personally. Presumably you can still steal pretty much anything else, and there should be plenty of trade ships whizzing about moving all kinds of goods and resources, some of them bound to be very valuable, too. Looting crates of titanium and a cache of missiles makes for a better story than nicking someone's chequebook anyway.

I feel this discussion isn't going anywhere. The matter of hard timers or miracle shields and how necessary they are can hardly be discussed in isolation, as so many other aspects of PvP are hinging on it. For example: How easy is it to destroy voxels in foreign controlled territory? How big of a hole can I make with a bunch of rockets and bombs? How expensive is the ammo? Can I even damage voxels at all, or only constructs? How easy is it for the defenders to repair the damage? Does the game memorize the blueprint so I can just bring the materials and the holes get filled up more or less automatically? How easy is it to locate the Territory Unit? Does it show up on my HUD when I'm nearby? Do I need special scanners to help me locate it? Or do I need to find it manually, eyes only? This can be a considerable effort on a 1 km² stretch of land. Can territories change owner immediately or is there a timer during which only the defenders / last owners can reclaim it? These things make a big difference to base planning, sieges and general PvP. Imagine for example if it was fairly difficult to destroy voxels in enemy territory. Even as a solo player I could deter most random griefers quite easily by digging a deep hole in a mountain, filling it up with thick doors and bulkheads, and plopping my Territory Unit at the very end. An attacker would need time and maybe explosives to get in there and take the territory from me. --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- In such a scenario a magical bubble of immunity wouldn't really be necessary, imo. Instead, just a spontaneous idea, maybe instead my stuff could always be vulnerable, but broken elements could have a timer during which I can repair them at reduced cost, including the Territory Unit. Let's call this timer survivability. The amount of time granted for this could be determined by the local infrastructure. Imagine if you could juice up this survivability of your elements with special elements that use up a lot of energy, say for a maximum of 24 hours (if you have a lot of them and supply them all with energy). An attacker could go straight for the Territory Unit, break and besiege it while the survivability timer is ticking, and considerably reduce the time by either breaking power plants or directly breaking our magical survivability elements (say the timer goes down to half an hour when all the supporting infrastructure is gone). When the timer runs out for each broken element, it explodes and is gone; when the Territory Unit is gone, the attackers can plop down their own, thusly claiming the territory as their own. This way war would be costly: You need some manpower, you need to destroy and rebuild some valuable infrastructure (and not just the Territory Unit). Battles between equals can be long and fierce, yet powerful organizations can steamroll the little man in an hour or two (a good amount of time imo: It's long enough that they are unlikely to just gank someone's home while passing by, but short enough that there is little to no arbitrarily waiting around during an actual siege). If your neighbour doesn't play the game anymore and doesn't bother to log in, you may just break his Territory Unit and wait for the next day to claim his land. If your organization is limited in its global reach (and thus in its time of the day where anyone is online) you can invest in massive infrastructure that will effectively make it impossible to take the territory without your rivals either pulling an all-nighter, or by outgunning you to a degree where you probably wouldn't have had a fighting chance anyway. Or you can try and take it back next day, or take one of their territories. Your enemies have to sleep, too. --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- Yes, this still leaves the problem where certain timezones have an advantage over others. But I agree with HelloKitty that formally declaring war and then twiddling thumbs for a day is also a bit lame. I'd much rather have a system where you can spontaneously get into the action at any time, but random passers-bys can't just take over my homestead without at least a bit of time and effort (they can still cause damage and grief on the go if they want). That's the kind of balance I'd like to see. The game probably needs a notification system telling you the names of everyone that attacked your constructs (or even just cratered the terrain in your territory), so you can repay them in kind or hire mercenaries.