le_souriceau

The "devblogs" were published little over a month ago.. 
 
My expectations
PVP will not see it's rework until maybe.. possible.. end of this year, early 2022
PVE.. well.. we'll get scripted events called asteroids mining
power/energy management is put on hold
 
There is no actual information on anything right now.. it's all deliberately vague and non descriptive. I still suspect that there is no certainty about the future of the company and at best I can see a 3-4 month budget while the powers that be try and work out to either do an investment deal or turn off the lights.. I doubt we will hear anything structural about he future of DU until after we hear anything on the future of the company.
 
Finally.. here's a good example of providing informative updates, focusing on what you _can do_ instead of putting the effort  in excuses for what you are not doing .. ANNOUNCEMENT Elite Dangerous | Odyssey: Roadmap | Frontier Forums

It should be obvious by now that NQ is pulling numbers out their ass trying to shape game play with easy solutions, and at the same time not considering if the decisions make sense as a whole.

ohh shit.. Just noticed I ruined your 666 likes count.

Yeah, mostly.
 
Deckard tried to engage on several occasions in little quasi AMA in Discord, relativly in depth (not seen for long time in DU).

I have been a proponent of Tier 0 materials for land structures since at least 2018. 
 
Likewise, mining coal for wood, Tier 2 concrete etc etc. 
 
my original threads in the alpha discussion channel got dozens of responses each. Hundreds over all. 
 
this same point kept coming back by other people, too, again in the alpha forums. same dozens of responses, getting less over time as people started losing hope. 
 
At this point in game’s progress, there really is zero use starting new ideas threads. 
 
1) someone has already said it. 
2) the forums are where good ideas go to die. 
3) NQ didn’t listen last time (or the time before that, (or the time before that, (or the time before that.)))
 
Still, I suppose it’s fine as a vehicle to vent one’s frustration. 

A good example of the problem. Look at the number of likes, reactions and retweets.  Kinda cheap posting.
I do get JC loves to retweet pretty builds, and that's all right.  But that hardly something akin to community
engagement. Who is the a target audience for a tweet like this? Most of us who build, trade and script have
been hanging around ducreators from the beginning in one form or another.  For anyone else it's just yeah
a ship.  It looks great when you evaluate it with the knowledge it's done in voxels, but if you take that context
out of the equation the image is a dime a dozen. It the kind of tweet that get buried within minutes.
 
 
 

The problem of this tweet comes especially that the "creator economy" is just a euphemism for neoliberalism, for "human capital".
 
You won't make a civilization game if you don't understand how civilizations have functioned and sustain the human species WITHOUT everyone having to be HIS own business.
 
Of course if you deny millennia of history through political thought, you ultimately play a game without functional civilization because your current of economic thought is not viable without the state institutions of which we have NO tools in play to begin to establish them.
 
Community? Give us already the tools to be able to organize in community.

No, at least not a one that survived infancy. I believe there were some experiments close to no PvE, but they all ultimatly failed.
 
Even more, facts prove contrary -- pretty weak games in terms of overall sucess and population, still limping around on dedicated fan bases, who stay & pay solely for PvE. Reason quite clear -- sub (and not only sub) games to large extent carried by more or less casual players, who usualy prefer focus on PvE content. Its like 1+1. Hardcore players can use PvE quite a lot too, even if see its like more technical beefing up grind. 
 
So NQ desicion was horribly wrong. All this "civilization building" BS story dissipated in air and majority of people discovered there is nothing to actualy do.

Have been saying this since September in my Beta Review right after the Beta started .... "Players" cannot create engaging "content", because they cannot create Story, Mystery, Exploration, something to keep you curious and wanting to actually go look for.

Monthly Update - May 1st, 2021
 
Two rescues were made over the last four weeks, 89 for Beta 1 and 227 overall!
 
-----
 
Very little has happened over the past month, emphasizing how complete the burnout is in myself, the organization, and from my impressions, the game overall. Things are still happening and plans are still being made, but the silence is absolutely deafening.
 
To fill the void left by DU, I’ve taken to writing fanfiction and making some forrays into the Halo franchise. I’ve seen videos and its stirred memories of my early teens. On my old Xbox 360 there was a Halo 3 ad that was factory installed, this was from the time when I didn’t have the internet at the home. Things were so easier a decade ago, don’t you remember?
 
-----
 
HQ Work:
Most of the roofing is done with only a small hole that needs filling. I’ve been doing some mining and refining but its been tepid and slow. Sometimes I look around and visualize what I want things to look like in the future, where constructs will be parked, how elements will be placed, ‘paint’ on the floors.
 
The sun is getting higher in Madis so I’ll be placing windows ‘soon’ and seeing how things look. I don’t want to say that I regret my choice in Tortuga, but I’m really wishing that we’d built upon one of Alioths moons like I was initially sold on. If there’s a wipe in the future as NQ recently made a hot topic about, I hope the move is made.
 
-----
 
Tidbits:
Have I heard bits and pieces of info from around DU or is something brewing in Eyes & Ears ripe for teasing? I’ll post it here in my ‘Tidbits’ section. I hope readers find it a curious bit of information to wrap up these posts. If you’ve heard something you want shared, let me know!
 
Is a wipe on launch really in the cards or is NQ just stirring the pot? The further we progress into beta, the more I seem to want one. With everything that’s happened since then regarding bugs, exploits, everything that is ‘unintended gameplay’ and the likes that NQ should have corrected, it rubs me the wrong way and sets a bad precedent.
 
At a minimum, magic blueprints for all deployed constructs should be in players’ inventories afterward alongside retaining talents, talent points, and queues. Retaining quanta as well as container and nanopack inventories might be a massive stretch due to ill-gotten gains but it would be appreciated from the perspective of myself who never took advantage of unintended play.
 
Many suggest it would be a way to help boost the launch population by pulling in new players who didn’t buy for the purposes of testing an incomplete game or don’t want to be left behind, as well as allowing old players who may have stepped aside a chance at a fresh start.
 
I’m optimistic as always but tempered in my expectations.
 
-----
 
That's all for now, until next time, take care and fly safe everyone!
- DarkHorizon
 

While Starbase does a few things really well, they have their own technical can of worms they have yet to address. I do wish Starbase a long and happy life, they are very likely to bleed users faster than they gain new ones. In fact quite a few starbase playes were eyeing DU as possible alternative before NQ shot themselves in both of their feet with all that 0.24+ ish nonsense.
 
Most likely mid term effect of both SB and DU will be that no producer will want to touch a voxel based online project for quite a few years to come. Not that there was great interest from publishers to begin with. Esp not after the spectacular failure of Landmark/EQN.  
 
You are completely spot on about the insane size of strings passsed between client and server for DU.  Now that said 100KB/S is not a realistic figure for any voxel implementation, even in the most rudimentary implementation at least 12bytes for positional data in voxel grid and at minimum at 12bytes for surface normals, material type/color. And we're still talking about plain box voxel, now you need to implement some sort of transform, let's say we'll go with a variation index on of predermined transforms 1byte ( which is not that great but gives us a workable 256 possible predermined transform variations), you'll end up with 25bytes per voxel.  
 
  Let's say for surface 256x256 voxels (like a base of M  construct) 1 voxel deep you'll end up with  roughly 1.5mb to stream. Now even on ground you realistically need at least 2x as much even  with modestly sized viewport, that brings you little over 3mb, excluding your ship, other flying garbage around you and all those fancy space elevators and prtocol overhead ( let's say UDP with MTU at 1500,  max packet size 1518bytes -ethernet frame- IP header -UDP header gives you 1472 available for actual data (46bytes overhead)
 
Not defending NQ, just want to give you an idea of the size of dataset voxel engines work with.  
 
 

Yes, most of us went through some sort of own romantic period with DU. It happened in multiple waves (do not forget -- its 6th year now from KS campaign).
 
Then you realise its all like in "The Emperor's New Clothes" by Andersen. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Yes, most of us went through some sort of own romantic period with DU. It happened in multiple waves (do not forget -- its 6th year now from KS campaign).
 
Then you realise its all like in "The Emperor's New Clothes" by Andersen. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Actually your own advise is good OP.

But misdirected.

Take a step back from your addictive nature of collecting resources and building that cool thing, or amassing useless amounts of virtual money. Stop playing for a few months and see the situation with clear eyes. Nothing is happening. No new content. No developer communication. No CEO who's vision was the driving force of the project. The only thing that continues is allowing people to pay a monthly fee. Oh, and the insultingly hollow and 'diplomatic' responses that occasionally filter back through the forums. We are being managed like cattle. Absolute refusal to give us any real information or answer any real concerns truthfully. While at the same time being as careful as possible so as not to scare away the remaining cash cows who donate money every month.

I agree with you that if we don't want to play we should leave and not post negative comments. That's is why I hardly visit here anymore.

But trust me, I was seeing things exactly like you are now. It's foolish, a fantasy. What is worse is that I argued this exact same point against decent people in the community for a couple of months. Those same people were probably equally seeing things like you do at one point. 

NQ's biggest crime in all of this is having people who will defend them and back them up all day only to let those same people down and crush their enthusiasm one by one until we all end up in this same cynical position. I get it now. It took me a while.

I believe each and every customer has every right to express their concerns and grievances for the product they have paid for and in no mean resembles project advertised in kickstarter much less anything akin to what you see in videos and early pre-alpha previews.  Additionally majority of the issues with NQ's product were well known and documented all the way back 
in early alpha, and very little was done in terms of remedies to these issues. What's even more interesting to consider is the fact the NDA we had to agree to was never lifted, not even after beta launch. I've been in quite a few alpha programs, both paid and free  and i have never ever encountered such draconian terms.
 
Now before you resort to pejorative expressions like "whining" let's put a few numbers into perspective and compare them with other past projects of the kind. 
 
First of all NQ is not indie developer by any meaning of the word.  The moment you have venture capital involved, you're not independent anymore. It's not necesarily a bad thing, quite the opposite.  But even if you were to broaden the definition to anything self published on a dime 20mil+KS money+Alpha backer money gives you a number which is very much outside of realm of what is generally considered indie community backed project.
 
Now let consider past project that bears the closest semblance to DU and even JC's original pitch can be summarize as "that game" but bigger and in voxels.
 
CCP developed Eve Online in 2.5 years  with a team of 35 developers on a buget of 2.6 mil euro in a small country of Iceland the pool of available developers of which is a fraction of what you'll find in Île-de-France alone and where everything is pretty much 2x as expensive as anywhere else in Europe.
 
With those 35 people  and 2.6 mil in the pocket  CCP developed their own 3D engine from scratch, developed the full server stack from scratch, built all 3D assets in house and has it run on their own metal server housed in datacenter in UK. 
 
NQ with 35 people (if the number is to be believed) and 20.6 mil in the pocket , merely licensed Uniengine2, licensed core of the server tech,  purchased most 3D assets, and leased server capacity in AWS.   
 
Now granted, CCP initial development window was in the period between 2000-2003 so it would be just fair to adjust the budget for inflation which puts it just to little above 4mil in 2020 money.
 
I rest my case
 
As i've mentioned in my previous posts, i have no regrets about forking out for being alpha backer, i did get my money's worth out it. It is but a pity that it did not go much beyond that.
I still hang around DU for tiny slim off-chance NQ gets its house back on track,
But I will not be throwing any more money at DU unless NQ can, through their actions prove, that they can get out of that development ruth they've been stuck in for past 2 years and i would caution against newcommers commiting to paid beta access until they do. There simply isn't enough value on the table for the time being.    
 
 

Yeah, its old and fundamentaly flawed thing, that can be escalated to absurd.
 
Like you buy some food and its intolerably salty. And you like, muck, can they add little bit less salt? It means you need now to be some mucking Gordon Ramsay to have valid opinion on what can be done to make thing better? Or maybe open your own cafe to have right to judge food that is done shitty way? Do me a favour.
 
No one seriously said they are experts.
 
It is not takes 300 IQ or some professional background to spot, that videogame is deeply flawed. But granted, IT profesionals spotted that NQ doing bonkers much earlier. So it helps.
 

Yeah, its old and fundamentaly flawed thing, that can be escalated to absurd.
 
Like you buy some food and its intolerably salty. And you like, muck, can they add little bit less salt? It means you need now to be some mucking Gordon Ramsay to have valid opinion on what can be done to make thing better? Or maybe open your own cafe to have right to judge food that is done shitty way? Do me a favour.
 
No one seriously said they are experts.
 
It is not takes 300 IQ or some professional background to spot, that videogame is deeply flawed. But granted, IT profesionals spotted that NQ doing bonkers much earlier. So it helps.
 

Yeah, its old and fundamentaly flawed thing, that can be escalated to absurd.
 
Like you buy some food and its intolerably salty. And you like, muck, can they add little bit less salt? It means you need now to be some mucking Gordon Ramsay to have valid opinion on what can be done to make thing better? Or maybe open your own cafe to have right to judge food that is done shitty way? Do me a favour.
 
No one seriously said they are experts.
 
It is not takes 300 IQ or some professional background to spot, that videogame is deeply flawed. But granted, IT profesionals spotted that NQ doing bonkers much earlier. So it helps.
 

I doubt very much if there is even a development team left. Even with zero guidance or incentive a group of coders and concept designers would have come up with more than we have seen since December. The game now is to release previously shelved, low importance content at a fast enough rate to keep capturing a few new subscribers. But it's obvious that no one is doing any new work at all.

All it took was to quit the game to see things more clearly. At this point my only honourable move is to say I was wrong, foolish, smitten by the charm of my own fantasy of what the game could be. You guys were very much right.

This is a very high profile abandonware project from all I can tell now.

 

No one here has ever called himself an expert. I don't do this professionally, but have been in the modding scene since UT99 (Unreal Tournament) with the Unreal Engine 1.5 at the time and then a few years later with the Unreal Engine 3 as a level designer. I made a few mods for games like Ark, Skyrim, Space Engineers (wrote own programmable blocks in c#) and then ran a modded Minecraft server for a very long time, where I wrote the plugins myself. I was even more shocked when I saw that NQ tolerates calculated mining on PTS, because the ore seed is the same with the live server, which you don't want as an admin. 
 
But speaking of making an own game, funny, that you mention that: I am indeed making a game for a few weeks now on a irregular time.
It is currently a prototype that I am working on. The game is a roguelike in a randomly generated universe.
 
What I have so far:
- randomly generated and scalable universe in size
(More specifically what I can decide and place how I want it:
-> game area,
-> planet count as well as variations of biomes,
-> asteroid count,
-> space station count as well as variations of space station types (space city, laboratory, military base, pirate hideout)
-> npc ship count as well as variations of ship types (hauler, pirate, celebrity, space police, military, bounty hounter, diplomat)
-> obstacles like interstellar clouds (placeholder sprite with IC))
- Time calculation (Every movement costs you time, which I can bind individually as a method to actions and at the end I can calculate it back and store it in a separate date system)
- Dice system à la d20 (As with the time calculation, each action is stored with an argument to call the method)

I have added a screenshot of what the whole thing looks like at the moment. Maybe I'll open an offtopic thread to document the progress, we'll see.
 
But to make the leap to DU: XS Space tanks. Since we have atmospheric tanks that are xs, it's not like those stats or attributes don't exist. That doesn't take years. Scale space tank down, take same values as xs size from atmospheric tank . Afaik there are no difference in the values looking at space tank and the equivalent atmospheric model.
 
 
So instead of trying to deflect from the issue here, which is backed up with valid arguments from people who are familiar with the fundamentals of the process of modelling and programming, you shouldn't try to defame them. I want to encourage you to help make DU better. But with your statement, you only continue to fuel the problem that ails DU .
 

Most of them ironicly jumped train long ago, you likely never see them again. So whole trainwreck show now its mostly for few connoisseurs.

Why only pewpew? There is stuff beyond pure instance scale PvP dimension.
 
Shipbuilding in SB objectivly much deeper and interesting from functionality/interactivity/immersion standpoint, promising capital ship mechanics with really large ships (end game for large groups). Industry planned to be again with focus on interacitivity/engineering challenge (conveyor belts with programmable robot arms etc).  Some exploration/expedition elements (hostile enviroments). There will be obviously more healthy population (at least -- initialy), so politics and social/diplomacy things -- at least on level of average MMO with factions/clans wars.
 
Granted, SB have lesser scale (ambition), then DU and quasi-one shard, there is still fun with voxels vs premade parts, but competition actualy more complex, then simplified pewpew against so called civilization building. With all this I still hestitant to super hyping SB, because its jumping from one rough Alpha to another bit less rough one, with own share of problems. There will be people dissapointed about SB too. 
 
But what is fore sure -- FrozenByte seems to be leagues ahead more responsable with what they doing and communicative with players.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Reason I think quite simple and nothing to do with "complex technology" or "studio size".
 
JC lied for years about actual state of game, both from technical and disign standpoint (something that become painfully obviously from latest post-JC blogs). Generaly he gone into Beta with completly (saying in card game terminology) empty hands, bullshiting us about "no red flags". I kinda repeat myself on this, but can't stess enough how its answers most of problems around.
 
In this situation, its obvious that they just can't do "honest" weekly updates without compeltly unmasking what kind of mess going on inside, with years long tech debt and no clear understanding of road ahaed. Actualy I think most of time they work not with things we expect (like actual new features), but trying to fix falling apart backend or something. So this why we can only have very rare and rather small updates about stuff they kinda less fearful to actually show. Its like you mucked up exam preparation and desperatly want to talk only about bits you somewhat know.

Reason I think quite simple and nothing to do with "complex technology" or "studio size".
 
JC lied for years about actual state of game, both from technical and disign standpoint (something that become painfully obviously from latest post-JC blogs). Generaly he gone into Beta with completly (saying in card game terminology) empty hands, bullshiting us about "no red flags". I kinda repeat myself on this, but can't stess enough how its answers most of problems around.
 
In this situation, its obvious that they just can't do "honest" weekly updates without compeltly unmasking what kind of mess going on inside, with years long tech debt and no clear understanding of road ahaed. Actualy I think most of time they work not with things we expect (like actual new features), but trying to fix falling apart backend or something. So this why we can only have very rare and rather small updates about stuff they kinda less fearful to actually show. Its like you mucked up exam preparation and desperatly want to talk only about bits you somewhat know.

Reason I think quite simple and nothing to do with "complex technology" or "studio size".
 
JC lied for years about actual state of game, both from technical and disign standpoint (something that become painfully obviously from latest post-JC blogs). Generaly he gone into Beta with completly (saying in card game terminology) empty hands, bullshiting us about "no red flags". I kinda repeat myself on this, but can't stess enough how its answers most of problems around.
 
In this situation, its obvious that they just can't do "honest" weekly updates without compeltly unmasking what kind of mess going on inside, with years long tech debt and no clear understanding of road ahaed. Actualy I think most of time they work not with things we expect (like actual new features), but trying to fix falling apart backend or something. So this why we can only have very rare and rather small updates about stuff they kinda less fearful to actually show. Its like you mucked up exam preparation and desperatly want to talk only about bits you somewhat know.