wizardoftrash

If DU wants to encourage players to specialize (as they have mentioned using advanced skills would require players to focus on those skills), wouldn't the branches of the tree be more separate and less circular? This is less about what us as players might like and more about what type of behavior the dev's want to get out of the players here. I would imagine a circular skill tree would cause players to be less specialized, so would't that rule out a circular configuration? For example, for a player to specialize in Mining, a linear tree would reward players that want to mine Tier 3 minerals for actually just going down the mining tree. This accomplishes their goal quite nicely, as the game mechanics reward specialization behavior. On a circular tree however, a player might be able to get Tier 3 mineral mining by going the Scanning route until late in the tree and shifting over (there being some overlap between scanning and mining), or by going the weapons route and switching over (there being some overlap between weapons and mining lasers). Even if this method is less efficient, that would be very attractive to a player since yay now we can do more things, but this system rewards generalization over specialization.

Thrilled to see the features that they showed off, I like the look of the new models so far! I'm really not surprised at all about the delay, they are being very straightforward about it rather than just stringing us along with SOON^tm. I'm not expecting a super polished game in alpha, but it does seem like what we will see in September is less of an alpha and more like a greenlight release. The fact that they are trying to get a significant amount of actual gameplay in the alpha rather than just creating a sandbox for building and flying ships is actually huge, bigger than I expected. What I expected the alpha to look like was "here are some building tools and material skins, have fun!" but it sounds like we get to taste some of the player progression and harvesting/processing materials as well. SWEET ACTION. Likely to up to Ruby soon

It might be fair to assume that DU will be using a simplified mockery of gravity and physics in the game itself, since managing so many players all at once will already be a big strain. I'll be testing the heck out of buggy flight mechanics come alpha though!

Also too it isn't as if orgs have any real power in the game based on how many players have joined, there is no faction currency or anything. A fake org might technically be breaking the rules, but the orgs won't have any real resources until they are allocated to the org in-game by actual members and administrators. In Alpha the only real tangible thing an org will be able to collect is Blueprints (info we have for now is that the blueprints will not be wiped in-between alpha, beta, and the release). Beta might have enough content that org resources might matter, but no one will be able to buy and trade DAC's during that stage. It won't be until release that orgs matter much at all, and even then the same issue I outlined above kicks in (orgs have no assets until they are allocated to the org by the legates and actual org members). Right now they are just lists of names with no authority.

Since the devs have mentioned often the need and incentive for players to be specialists, we will likely see a highly segregated linear skill system. From what the devs have already mentioned, a player would be able to pick up basic skills in each category very quickly, but will take much longer to acquire an advanced skill form one category. They also mentioned in the discussion of Alloys that the advanced skills in each category will depend on other skills in that same category, this reinforces that their vision is of a linear tree. We are unlikely to see situations where for example being able to manufacture an advanced Armor alloy will give you access to an advanced Hull Repair skill, as manufacturing/refining will be a different specialization from Logistics/repairs. This will probably be the case at launch, but who knows where they will go from there. Alpha might not include much in the way of character progression, so we likely won't have a firm grasp of this until beta much later.

That's possible, and the devs did want to make it clear that they didn't want players would need to re-supply in some fashion in-between trips. However they could acheive what you suggest with consumables that are not a famed crop that would be more in-line with scifi-theme (like drugs made from alge, or vitamins from ice deposits on asteroids, etc).

I'm personally a fan of building mockups in Starmade (as its a bit more user friendly and less buggy than space engineers these days)

Construct vs Construct combat is getting pretty close now as far as stretch goals go, but I agree with the other posts on this, it will be a good long while before we see any of it. There are no models for weapons yet as far as I know, and they are still working the kinks out of flight mechanics.

I'm looking forward to seeing what types of monstrously terrible ships I can construct, and see if I can resurrect the mighty CLANG (all of the Space Engineers veterans will know what I'm talking about). Gotta get those ship building mechanics all ironed out!

As I've said before, It is true that most sandbox games are also survival games. This is a sandbox game, but it is an MMO rather than a survival game. Needing food for a colony to survive would indeed be a good feature... for a survival game, but this isn't that, it is an off-genre mechanic here. There will be plenty of things you'll need to set up a colony on a planet within the current projected features of the game. Things we already know of... -Territory Unit (supposedly resource intensive) -Containers -Market Units -Communication Arrays (possibly) -Space for vehicle construction -Parking -Defensive implements/fortifications That list seems like enough of a challenge as it is for an MMO. We don't need to be adding food/water/farmland and shelter from weather and temperature there. The main threat in this game will likely be other players rather than the environment.

Feature.Creep. that is a reason to leave them out. Feature creep kills projects. There have been few successful sandbox MMO's, and nothing quite like what they have already shown us. This doesn't need minecraft features that don't fit to be something other than a typical mmo. Saying it would be better for them to cram more mechanics, textures, and features into the game prior to release because it might be harder to add it later is folley. Time and money are finite resources in a company. Any time they spend on these "maybe" features is either time they don't spend on the real features, or time they delay alpha, beta, and release. They have yet to get enough funding to add construct vs construct combat. That would be a gaping hole in what this game should be like on release. Should we make this hole wider to satisfy feature creep? Now once the game is actually out and collecting revenue, then the situation changes a bit. They will have to decide how to use that new revinue, and what to develop. If we assume we have Construct vs Construct at that point, wouldn't it be better for them to work on stargates? new worlds and materials? new equipment and ship building options?

YEAH RIGHT LOL so did you program any sweet single shard sandbox mmo's lately? As a tabletop game designer, I can say from experience that balance is incredibly hard. Perfect balance is boring (as a creator, then every decision would actually be irrelevant), and asymmetrical balance has to be weighed very carefully or else the metagame is solved too easily (as soon as a certain type of weapon blueprint is the best, then there is no longer any real choice once again). In the realm of video games where balance is no longer just a matter of dictating the rules, it gets even harder. The human part of the equation becomes a part of balance, and then you get skill threshold dependent options. Plenty of AAA studios struggle with balancing FIXED GAME ELEMENTS little lone an engine for creating customized ones.

This will all depend on whether or not certain infrastructure features will be station-only. In games like Space Engineers or Starmade, a player can live entirely out of a ship because you can build almost everything for any play style into a ship. There are some serious limitations though, for example in Starmade, you only benefit from build protections for pvp purposes in your home sector, at your home base, and any ship docked to it also gets that protection. You can't actually protect an undocked ship, so for a nomadic lifestyle you would HAVE to set up a tiny station to dock your ship to, and claim whatever sector you are in to get home base protection. Space engineers makes it possible to have a mothership style base with role-specific ships that can be unlocked for certain activities. I had toyed around for a while with a ship design like that, a large "jump ship" station with almost no propulsion, but with medium-sized miners and fighters attached. The mother ship could handle all of the actual industry tasks such as refining and assembling without a station. For this to really work for Dual Universe, there needs to be a way to protect a ship from pvp while AFK, or you'll need to be dropping your ship off in safe zones while afk, and from what we've seen so far from the devs, it seems like getting into space PERIOD will take a while. I think having a nomad lifestyle will actually be easier late-game than it will be early game, as time goes on there will be more infrastructure in space that will allow for shelter, and there may even be an update in the future for space territory unit safe zones that can shield nomads. For now though, it seems like most of the early game play will be terrestrial and permanent structure focused.

I hate to break it to you, but the features you just listed there (weather condition damage to structures, food/starvation, farm animals) are all off-genre features and are unlikely to EVER make it into the game. This is an MMO, the features you just listed are all SURVIVAL game genre features. Not a single one of those features are a part of the core gameplay that they have proposed so far. The main features they have pushed up until this point have been about Building, Exploration, Economy, Orgs, and PvP up until this point. Not a single one of those gameplay elements ties directly into the features you mentioned in this post. A smart dev team would focus on what they already have proposed without even considering off-genre mechanics. If something is in popular demand AND can be added later, then it would be a possibility, but of the features you have listed so far, the only thing that seems like it has a snowball's chance in making it into the game is the environmental damage mechanics. Mainly this is because if added in a future patch, they can create dangerous weather zones exclusively in new sectors. So my guess is that if the devs responded with "probably not at release" it is a polite way of dismissing requests/demands without losing your support and interest. They are doing a smart and polite customer service thing by keeping an open mind and not telling you flat out "no", even if that is the truth. So yeah, probably not at release.

STARMADE HOLY GEEZE, this hidden gem is effectively what you would get if you had something in-between Minecraft and Space Engineers, except it has stable multiplayer and support for huge ships. I would even go so far as to say Starmade is almost what a larget voxel lower res Dual Universe would be like. On the flip side, Starmade has some NPC functionality including pirates, and soon will have NPC factions (that behave like an RTS). Plus you start the game in space, with more than enough parts to make a decent small mining ship, and WAY more credits than you need to buy just about anything else. I haven't messed around with the AI too much, but there are fleet combat mechanics in Starmade that I can't wait to mess with.

You'll probably see a few really big orgs emerge once construct vs construct pvp becomes a thing, and inevitably there will be some alliances now and then and possibly some very large battles. EVE sees this kind of thing now and then, there is a huge battle that is entirely emergent. I think it would be fair to assume something like that will also be happening in DU now and then. too soon to tell what that might look like.

This type of system would be ideal. We will probably see something like this at some point, but it might not make it into the Alpha for example. On the flip side, it might be OK to have disconnected parts of a construct part of the same grid. It really depends on what kind of Sci-Fi we are expecting here. Having "floating" parts is acceptable for high-scifi, since a theoretical SOMETHING is holding everything in place. As long as it was consistent, it would give builders some neat tools to work with. I'd use it if it were an option, though I'd prefer it not be since it could affect ship and station construction in an odd way.

I expect most people interested in this game are into building. SOME of what people will want to build will be tools of war, many will have defense systems, but probably most of it will be to look cool and serve social/economic functions. The game's slogan IS "rebuilding civilization together" after-all. That's got to attract much more of a cooperative mindset player than a murder-hobo style.

The way we will likely see this implemented, is in the construction process, each of the elements of a construct will have to be connected. On the other hand, if a part of a construct is damaged "severing" it from the rest of the construct, we will see one of two outcomes. 1. The "severed" section is still effectively connected to the rest of the construct, and moves with it despite the voxels holding it on being destroyed. This is probably the most likely outcome, and even though it will be visually jarring for the elements at the end of my wings to continue functioning despite having lost a slice of that wing, it will allow players to construct ships that don't look like cubes or cylinders without fear of losing key components to minor damage. There is a break in immersion, but it can be explained away by having shields maintain structural integrity. 2. The "severed" section vanishes as part of the damage. Repairs will be a matter of restoring a construct to its "complete" form, so rounding-up damage like severed parts could work by simply considering anything no longer attached to the core unit destroyed. I don't think this is the likely solution since it'll require more work server-side, since the game will have to check for disconnected parts every time damage is applied, and for rapid fire weapons (like a scatter lazer or gatling gun), that will be a lot of checks. This kind of mechanic would heavily influence ship design, we might just see a whole lot of cube-of-doom ships like in Space Engineers. 3. Another possibility when CVC drops is having the damage allocation not fully destroy any voxels, only distort and damage them unless the elements attached are also destroyed. For example, lets say I've got an arm on the underside of my ship where my landing gear and Gatling gun are attached. If the arm receives damage, the voxels in that area would get bent-up and twisted (to show that they are damaged, and would-be destroyed) but they don't vanish entirely because the gatling and landing gear are still intact. Then when the arm is hit again, the system re-assigns those hits further down the arm (adjacent to the destroyed voxels), damaging the gatling gun and landing gear. When the gatling gun and landing gear are both destroyed, the whole arm vanishes, as there is no longer any healthy voxels or intact elements left.This idea of re-assigning hits to intact areas instead of severing sections would maintain immersion.

NOPE, BP masters are stored in your character's library. They are NOT an item (strictly digital, like currency), BP copes however are.

Ah, but with hover racing, players might decide to actually attack and shoot at the racers! the track itself might have automated weapons, or land mines. Plus this is more into F-Zero territory here.

Why not 36 hrs? 24 hours won't feel like enough time to respond for anyone who works full time and might not be able to log on each day. 48 hours will feel too long for students or anyone who works part time/on vacation. Since this isn't a game marketed towards kids, the target audience is going to skew older, so more than 24 hours seems like the safest bet. On the flip side, if they can manage to set up mobile notifications, it could be as short as 24 hours. If I get a text when someone declares war on me, or an Email (which I can turn into a notification), then that would give me enough time to make time for a defense. If your only chance of knowing that someone has declared war is to log on, then 24 is deff to short for anyone who works.

No clue! I do know that in Space Engineers, the distance you could jump with a jump drive (and the ammount of charged energy spent to jump that distance) was based partly off of the mass of your ship; The more mass your ship had, the shorter your max jump distance and the more of your stored energy it takes to jump any distance. I'm willing to bet that FTL and jumps will have something to do with mass, but too soon to guess. I'm willing to bet FTL will take a lot of power, ruling out very small ships for FTL travel, but there will likely be downsides to being very massive for FTL. Possibly it'll take longer to "accelerate" to jump (and to decelerate).

However if your character's name was "Deecon", that might be enough to create some confusion and for some people to fall for it. I'm cool with this either way, I think players trying to copy ship designs is fun! Plus it incentivize ship builders to use very complex voxel shape combinations as part of their design, that would be challenging to replicate.

indeed, I already did the legwork on that