Daphne Jones

Chris Roberts recommended the DU kickstarter to Star Citizen backers in an email and post on the SC site. I checked it out. I wasn't sure I would like the game very much, but was sure it deserved to get off the ground and get made, so I supported it at a moderate level. Turns out I like the game much better than I expected. Being able to have any space ship I want if I can figure out how to build it, is a big seller for me.

Hmmm... what I really think of NQ in this would get me banned for sure, so I'll leave it at SNAFU and say NQ, fix our damned city!

Yes. And as joao mentioned, this is the long discussed head-less client issue. NQ has run 10s of thousands of NPCs on headless clients for stress tests, so it can be done, but no one outside of NQ knows whether the cost to do this all the time is practical.

The hard part in DU is that every actor needs a client because almost everything runs in the client.

First, just to address a slightly off topic point from the OP, as a hauler in the Empire, I'm just barely aware that the military can be hired as escorts - it's not well advertised. The one thing I do know about it it that it's more expensive than the most valuable cargo I've ever hauled (which was more gold the the ship I had at the time could safely carry.) Back on point, NPCs and PVE combat have huge game-play advantages over PVP. It's not necessary for one player's game to be ruined for another to have fun. (PVP can be arranged so that everyone has fun, but in open PVP, it can't be guaranteed and usually fails on this point.) NPCs are always available. NPC's capabilities can easily scale to match the player's capability. This makes for a fun and challenging fight. (PVP doesn't scale, so having a fun and challenging fight - outside an arena - is a random, rare occurrence. NPC's are probably the most common money faucet in most games. If the economy needs more money, just dumbing down the pirates a bit so they lose more often (and allowing their wallets to be looted) will do it. On the other side, if you need to curb inflation, make the pirates a bit tougher (and let them partially loot the players they kill). While giving the NPCs a base and having them actually flying around hunting players is the dream (specifically, it's Chris Roberts' dream and Star Citizen is actively working on do this), it's extraordinarily expensive in terms of game resources... and just having NPCs spawn where they're needed based on RNG, gives just as good game-play, maybe better, and is relatively cheap. Why is the RNG better? Full NPC pirate simulation will just end up guarding the same pipes the PVP players are in (which I admit I would find amusing, since they will presumably attack the PVPers too). RNG spawn will spawn in position to attack the hauler whether or not in the pipe. As long as this is balanced (scaled) so the hauler wins or can avoid most of the time, it's good game play. Non-combat ship operators want an exciting risk, but don't want to be fighting a superior enemy on every run. While we're putting NPC pirates in game, let's add NPC haulers and miners too. Those are also good money faucets when that is needed. They should be armed and/or have NPC escorts. (NPC miners probably should not actually mine - depletes game resources and expensive to implement - but should have some ore for looting.) To be clear - this is brainstorming. I'm aware that DU's design is fundamentally unable to implement NPCs easily and this is all a long ways off even if it ever becomes possible.

I think scams are intended game play lol. I guess game play options for total losers are required for modern games. But we got transparent dispensers finally, so this particular scam must not be working so well now.

The thing about the investors is that what they want is the core server tech. That works pretty well. That makes the investors very dangerous since they could close the game, take their tech, and walk at any time.

I think you can learn some math and science from DU, but except for a touch of special relativity, you would be much better off playing KSP for that. But I don't think you need anything but video game skills to play. You can buy ships that will work (even if the UEF ones are a bit under-powered). Our engines are so powerful and efficient that you don't need to be good at space flight to do it - especially if you use warp, which is entirely unscientific and requires no skill at all (unless you count applying the formula to figure out how many warp cells to take with you.) With the brakes we have, you don't really even need to be good at atmo flight - just get over your destination and hold the brake. (btw, the ships I build don't have enough brakes to do that, but I think everyone else does.)

I have to agree with that poster that DU is kind of a paragon of what not to do... but the main things they're doing wrong are 1. having investors who don't really share their goals (for the game) and 2. trying to meet the investors' timeline. Everything else falls out as a consequence of those. (And it would have been really hard to avoid those two errors.) But that said, it's very rude for an outside game dev to say that in public. Hope it doesn't get her blackballed from future employment lol. It does make me less likely to try Starbase.

DU has aspects that compete with Star Citizen, Starbase, Space Engineers, KSP, Eve, ED, and Entropia of the games I know of. And there was another one I played briefly - kind of Civilization in space - but I can't remember the name of it.

That is explicitly in the lore - that we don't have Aphelia's tech. AFAIK, Aphelia also doesn't feel she need to explain why.

What's breaking the game atm is a combat system that rewards gankers with auto-wins and provides no means for us to defend ourselves. Warping around combat is a necessary compensation for a broken system. Warp is not the problem. It works as is should and eventually, the warp exit points will not be in safe zones. I hope combat will be better balanced when that happens.

NQ mentioned that someone flew out a considerable distance in alpha and had to be rescued - beyond all the planets. I wonder if they plan to model all the space between systems. When you get far enough from the origin point coord systems in computers start having huge round-off problems. That's the main reason for limits on level size in most games. I expect each star system will have its own origin point and coord system and they will some how "fake" the space in between. Once you get out to space that would take a year or more to get to in normal flight, there's really no need to model it, because no one will ever be there.

As I understand it, the plan is that your account gets you a main and two alts. I'm not sure what distinction you are making by "just three different avatars." I would guess that you won't be able to multibox with the alts attached to a single account, but they will be independent (i.e., your second alt will log in where it logged out, not where your first alt logged out). But I don't know that NQ has addressed those points.

I believe that's the plan although I can't remember for sure when NQ said that. It has not been implemented yet. I would expect this will come with head customization after we can take our helmets off (that was a stretch goal, so definitely confirmed.

Basically, it's PVP in a safe zone. I assume there's something about that in the TOS or EULA. It's also just generally despicable behavior, being both an empty camp raid and an attack that can't be defended against by any means. I do hope they ban you for it, cause you should know better even without an explicit rule.

We figured it out last year and NQ prohibited it (and supposedly fixed it, but I think 0.23 undid the fix.)

It is more likely that you just aren't trying to do what I'm trying to do, so what you do works.

It is possible that NQ is targeting me for bugs since I'm not in their cool kids club lol.

Nothing bugged except docking afaik. Landing on a carrier just doesn't work. It doesn't dock. Doesn't matter which ships I do it with.

What works just fine? Docking? Not since 0.23 dropped. At least not in gravity. I'm not about to try taking off from my carrier in space and losing the parasite ship because it can't dock and I can't fetch it.

Not just unique ore, but there should be some high tier elements which are much easier to make on one planet than another... like one planet has all the ore you need for that item. That (and unique ore) will encourage hauling other than bulk ore hauling.

Recently, we've seen a lot of cases of the old bug where parking a large ship near a small one causes the small one to dock to the large one. This happens accidentally all the time at space stations. I don't know of it happening on the ground, but that doesn't mean it can't. Why do we have this bug when it otherwise requires using the maneuver tool while standing on something static to get docked? Docking is currently both useless for legitimate player (i.e. carriers) and a truly annoying exploit used by griefers. NQ, please remove docking until you can get it working reasonably.

Already exists. There was that whole puzzle in which the clues are alien constructs that ended with a single node of a new T5 ore on Lacobus. There are hints that Teoma was placed where it is by aliens. I expect they will eventually develop the alien contact story line, but they don't exactly have a lore team to develop it yet.

Completely agree, but brainstorming is good for the brain... and the soul... as elements? So we would make them in a factory and script their (conversational) behavior in Lua? I like it. We can already kind of do this (requires god-like voxelmancy skills lol), but it would be better with a selection of character elements with appropriate lua methods included.