Phroshy
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Posts posted by Phroshy
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what if it isnt server side calculated, but by the cpu of the 100 clients around, a remote calculation that will be done almost instantly
once air point clouds setup in the enclosed room of the ship, at ship start, there wont be more calculation unless there is a modification of the hull, breach opened, but once detected the elements send alarm message and the calculation is canceled
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.
- wizardoftrash and Jeronimo
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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?
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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.
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From the footage I've seen, I am impressed outright. However on that note, do you have any idea the specs of the machines they were running it on? And maybe what FPS on average? I've got a few friends that are interested in this but are entirely uninterested as they own potato machines and aren't convinced they'd be able to run it when it comes out.
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.
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I have so many questions.
Why did they make this?
Is this just a joke, a sincere thank you, or sarcasm?
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.
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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.
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this is a such a simple answer, as we are in 2016, games whith such simple mechanics will be very fast forgotten
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.
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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.
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is that a lighthouse unit in one of the photos on the ceiling?
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.
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Asteroids can be seen in the teaser video. I expect them be static though, and not able to be moved around.
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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.
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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.
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When I heard this statement I took it to mean that NPCs would not be selling any goods. I assumed that since they are providing the game currency they would also provide some form of global market structure that is immediately accessible by the players with taxes and fees levied as monetary sinks, like in EVE Online.
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...
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It seems like a lot of work for a small team. Keep in mind that the majority of constructs will be made of voxels. There's no prebuilt ships that can be "skinned." Only the mesh elements would get skins.
Also, if you back the Kickstarter high enough, you get an ingame pet. So a cash-shop might go down that road instead of alternate element skins.
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.
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It´s even unsure if we can take off our helmets in safe zones.
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.
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I don't consider this to be a premature discussion, because they brought up the premium cosmetic shop within the context of Alpha and Beta players. They mentioned that as an outlet for those players to continue to support the game, without charging Alpha and Beta players a subscription. It is their intent to make cosmetics available at a very early stage, hence my bringing it up.
Oh, I must have missed that. Exciting!
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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!
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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.
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If anyone can build a market anywhere without a significant input of resources then what's the point of being able to control one anyhow? Why wouldn't I then just build my own market with 0% sales tax?
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.
Face it, no matter how you frame it, direct player control of markets is at best pointless and at worst game-breaking.I very strongly disagree.
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Besides, you don't have to control all the resources to be in control, you just have to control the ability to sell them. For example: buy a huge amount of basic resources, then jack up the listing price for your market to 1000% of the sale value. Now everyone has to pay 10x the value of their sale price just to put their goods on market, which is obviously unsustainable and nobody would list any goods. So the entire economy stops. But you, the market owner, don't care because you saw this coming and you've got a huge surplus of minerals to last you through. Or, even worse, you can now list your goods for free because the cost of the list price just goes right back into your own pocket. So now you can buy all the minerals off everyone else directly at whatever price you want (because they can't use the market so they have no choice) and then re-list them for any price with no competition because you're the only person who can afford to use your market. Instant monopoly, and the only solution would be to leave. But what happens if you get so rich you can take over all (or even most) the market, especially the market at the starting zone?
What's stopping people from building a competing marketplace next door?
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TL;DR - Markets themselves should not be owned or run by people. Control of a market should come from owning the goods for sale and the property used to store and transport those goods
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I don't think giving players the ability to regulate things like sales tax is a good game play decision. All realism aside here, allowing the "market" owners to decide what people pay in taxes, especially for individual goods, is a recipe for a broken economy. Just think for a second about all the possible exploits, manipulations, and just plain griefing that could be done with such power. What happens when someone buys all the stores in a system (or, heaven forbid, multiple systems) and starts charging everyone 50% sales tax? Another example: you're at war with Group A, who primarily flies ships that use a ton of component X, so just increase the sales tax on that component to 1000% and voila, their entire doctrine is worthless because they can't afford to buy the parts/materials they need for those ships. [...]
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.
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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.
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I've got a hunch that the fact that it is subscription based mayyy be enough to keep people from using DU as a harassment simulator, but they announced a free trial period, what is to keep people from using throwaway accounts to verbally assault people?
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.
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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.
- Nostogue, wizardoftrash and Deacon
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Dual universe - Visit at Novaquark headquarters
in General Discussions
Posted
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.