wizardoftrash

I'll respond without needlessly insulting your intelligence. Yes, I understand supply and demand, which is why I specified that obtaining DACs through non-DAC piracy would be feasible when the in-game value if DAC's would be STABLE. I am implying that after the game gets through the volitile stage where all the kickstarter backers have DACs but no spacebucks, eventually there will be some stability in supply and demand and players will be able to predict what they can expect to pay in spacebux for DAC's. The value of DAC's will surely vary wildly during the first 6 months or so while the supply of spacebux increases, but eventually there will be trends, leading to a roughly stable exchange rate. At that point, pirates and other industry players will have a good idea as to how long it will take to earn enough spacebux to buy DAC's. A pirate earning enough spacebux to purchase DAC's from other players is effectively stealing them.

The reality is there will either be an in-game contract mechanic that is enforced, or the system will break down. Anybody here play rust? You know how well alliances and shops work there? Answer is really really poorly. The kinds if players that like that system and will continue to want to play it are the ones that WILL ABUSE it. If you want to play in a world where orders and contracts actually get filled, there will NEED to be a mechanic that enforces it. Probably it'll work as such: there is something like a contract builder. You specify the reward and quantity, where the reward physically is, and the contract holds it until the contract either expires or is filled. You specify the conditions for success, any collateral for accepting the contract (the cost for loosing a shipment for example), and once a contract is accepted, the game itself would track success, failure, and payment. Much like the way the devbog discussed how remote purchases work, the contractor might have to physically go pick up the reward if it isn't liquid cash. Eve has such a contract system, and given that this game conceptually borrows a great deal form eve, we can expect something similar here.

Besides, since eventually DAC's will have a roughly stabe in-game value ammount, being able to steal things OTHER than DAC's ban be turned into in-game funds, and eventually DAC's By that logic, you can continue to fund your piracy simulator through piracy, you just won't be able to steal people's time directly

Do we know for sure that YOU have to be there for your scripts to run? If scripts run if any player is close enough, being close to a turret will cause its script to allow it to shoot at that player. Similarly, script-based space mines would also function. If not, that trashes my idea of a law-enforcement that puts up kill contratcs on people that pvp in restricted zones...

I doubt it'll work the way you describe, but hey, we don't have any official info to back anything up

Theft of PLEX in Eve is much more complex than peiple's items being stolen. Usually when a corp in eve loses PLEX, it is because a double agent in their org was aurhorized to have access to it, and either walked out with it or traded it to an alt account. It was stolen because they had official access to it, and abused that access. People weren't idiots and transporting it in their cargo and got hit by pirates, they stole from their own corp. I'm willing to bet that DAC won't be a physical object, but a currency tied to your account. Like most in-game currencies, you won't drop it on death, its tied to your account. You can pay people with it, you can provide DAC to an org, and an authorized member of the org could potentially walk out with it, but you won't be physically walking around with fat stacks of DAC in your pocket for players to scrape off of your corpse.

And I would say that is probably for the best. For example, in space engineers, ramming and collision based weapons were far FAR more effective than turrets and missiles at destroying structures, and arguably more effective at destroying ships as well. The only real reason to use turrets instead would be to disable a ship or structure to salvage or steal. Ramming was, and is, so effective that virtually every multiplayer server made it a bannable offense. I'd rather not lose my org HQ to people repeatedly crashing into it with starter ships thanks.

Maybe, maybe not. You might find that hitting something at a certain speed might do damage to your ship, but it might be something like taking fall damage in an RPG: its a deterrant that either dings your health bar or kills you, and probably will be a very simple mechanic. It might damage Elements on that face of the ship (side swiping something on the left damaging your left engine, etc) and that WOULD be pretty slick, since losing an engine by accidentally colliding during a dogfight could cause you to straight up crash and die, and that would be pretty slick. I don't have my heart set on it though, i've still got SE if i want a realistic spaship crashing simulator.

I was under the impression that there will be no NPC's in this game apart from the commerce/trate bots that will be around just long enough to get an economy going? If there was a response system to punish aggressive action in a controlled area, I imagine instead it would look something like this. In a controlled territory, where an org has set laws, they would set penalties/punishments for unauthorized actions that are not prevented by game mechanics. For example a TU will probably prevent unauthorized players from deleting chunks of buildings, but if a hostile player shows up and starts spawn killing residents, the city itselt might put out bouty hunting contracts to capture or kill the offender. That would turn any nearby merc into instant law-enforcement, and would allow for a player-driven defense to be mounted.

Found some of the unfo on the wiki, and here is how it sounds like it'll work. Territory Units (TU's) are what will allow an organization to claim an area. Once that TU is in place, seems like that org will unilaterally get to decide how that zone will work. Laws, building rights, mining rights, etc. This makes sense from a "we want players to be able to build civilizations" standpoint to prevent random players from walking into your metropolis and turning it into swiss cheese with sphere voxel deletion, or crashing their ship into your base. This also makes it sound as though in a hex with a TU, unauthorized players won't be able to edit terrain at all, so no mining or digging, no greifing whatsoever. But before you pvp folks flip out over this, I don't thing TU's will be safe zones, i bet structures can be attacked and damaged, just not built or edited by outsiders. So you won't be able to walk in and delete the wall to my vault, but i'm willing to bet you could shoot it up and eventually destroy components that can be locked onto. We might see a system like rust where attackers can damage strictures, but it would take a good ammount of time and resources to break through defenses. A seige should take long enough that an all-nighter can't undo enough work to shrek people who have day jobs. Link http://dualuniverse.gamepedia.com/Territory_Control

I'm thinking any mechanical targetable area on a ship will likely be an element rather than a voxel, much like the pre-built elements for the cockpit and thrusters. We may even find that the overall shape od the ship itself may not matter at all aside from what material the voxels are made of, and the functional elements of the ships themselves. Much like Spore's vehicle creator, we might find that everything but the core elements are purely cosmetic, which sounds the easiest to code but also wouldn't dissapoint me. In Space Engineers, players get rewarded for building hideous cubes of doom that don't really resemble spaceships. If the actual arrangement of the voxels doesn't impact performance, that would give people more room to focus on making the ships look near and deform in a fun way.

As a space engineers player I concur. A game can really be either a realistic collision physics simulator, OR be a massive multiplayer online game, but NOT BOTH based on obvious netcode limitations. A game just can't keep track if that many player's mass, speed, and collisions all at once. Plus with a tab-lock combat system as already discussed, there is no need at all for realistic physics, as projectiles simply won't be tracked, they will just be calced as hits or misses. Adding collision and physics based voxel deformation is just not going to happen.

You can expect that if players are mining by hand, that the process will probably go pretty fast and it'll be something like a 1-1 ratio of mined volume to usable volume. People build some huge stuff in Minecraft mining by hand. I play on a SMALL private server (total population of 10) and we built cities, in vanilla. A full MMO game will have cities in a week.

As a fan of similar sandbox games, it always burns me up that raiding people's base while they are offline is the primary means of aggression. Rust, Space Engineers PvP servers, minecraft etc each provide some potection against players looking to raid your base while you are logged off, but it usually is not enough. Some space engineers servers had a rule of not attacking/greifing people while they aren't logged on to defend it, but it often went uninforced. With Rust, you needed either several small huts with your gear equally split up and hidden to mitigate losses, or have a huge team maintaining giant walls 24/7. From an immersion standpoint sure, it makes sense that it would be easier to raid a zone if no one is guarding it, however scifi characters don't physically dissapear from their empites to work a 9-5. In a traditional MMO, your character doesn't exist while you aren't loged on, however with controlled zone, there should be some type of protection. I'm guessing this is where the territory system sets in?

I'm interested to see how tab targetting affects custom ships, and if we see voxel deformation as a product of that!

This is tricky. Turns out, in IRL people aren't created equal. Some people have more time and not much money (usually younger people), some people have plenty of money but not much time (generally older people). Unfortunately there are folks that have very little of either. Having a way to turn IRL money into in-game resources provides a way for people who have money and not much time to get ahead. If there is a direct system ($ -> ISK for example), usually money offers a huge advantage. However, in this case, PLAYERS determine the value of these subscription based on supply and demand. If enough people spend their IRL money and inject it into the market, it ends up not providing much of an advantage to the players who have money to burn. The players with lots of time and not much money also benefit. A system like the one posed here and in Eve helps equalize player groups where there are desparities in time and money.

I'm curious about how damage is slated out to work with ships and structures. Is there a plan for voxel deformation? Will size/mass be central to this, or will structures and ships have health bars based on the polymers or materials they are built from? As someone who has spent a good chunk of time in Space Engineers and Rust, I'm interested how a combat system akin to Eve Online is going to work in a dynamic world.

It would seem to me that the most fair way to ensure that exact designs are not passed off as original creations is not through our idea of copyright, but more through the way the game generates a sell-able or replica-table blueprint. If a blueprint is what allows you to both build and sell a ship or ship design, then purchased ships could simply not be blue printable. Similarly, ships created using a blueprint cannot create a blueprint. i.e. the way a player receives an original blueprint in the first place is simply to create a ship, start to finish, through some process other than a blueprint. An allowance could even be made for the original creator of a blueprint to further blueprint variations of the same ship. Thus people who purchase a blueprint to build a ship cannot make a minor edit, blueprint the newly edited ship and steal credit. Similarly a player would not be able to buy a ship, make an adjustment, and try to pass it off as their own design. This would prevent players from directly copying ships, but would not prevent players from examining a purchased ship very very closely and thoroughly, and building a mimic of it part-by-part. A designer could ensure that their work is not stolen by making it complex enough not to be impossible to replicate. I'm pretty sure this is the kind of thing that will be pretty easy for the devs to manage.