LurkNautili

I would like it in terms of the aesthetic and in terms of having a justification for making space even harder to get to, but in terms of what it would do to the flow of the game I'm not on board with the idea. You can raise the delta-v requirement of getting into space even without the crutch if it makes sense from a balance perspective (as in you don't need extra justification in the form of having an easy way to get out of the gravity well). I do agree that the lore is kind of silly in many places. The whole notion of "kyrium can absorb energy and therefore a container made of kyrium is safe to be inside when decelerating at 500G" is silly and definitely not how physics works. Also I agree it's a bit insane lithobraking anything that massive into a planet you intend to inhabit. On Earth we consider those kinds of collisions extinction level events (read: you'd probably prefer a nuclear war to what would happen if something like that crashed into Earth). And don't even get me started on the whole quantum suicide respawning thing (there are so many more sensible stories you could justify respawning with). So yeah, the narrative could definitely use some tweaking, as a lot of the sci-fi is on the nonsensical Dr. Who level of scientific accuracy (though at least Dr.W does it with a wink and a nudge, aware of the fact that it's silly and wildly unscientific) -- however the gameplay it results in makes sense. Having to start from "scratch" matches their vision of emergent gameplay nicely, and you definitely need to have an area you restrict people to initially to cheat a bit of critical mass population in the start of the game. Can't have it turn into a single player NSM-esque experience by making escape from Alioth and the ark zone too easy.

I'm pretty sure French timezone was implied. But like I said, I'm not too fussed about it personally -- so long as the game gets made eventually.

It is technically delayed, actually, since they did say when. But no big deal, really, these things are expected to happen. Try not to stress too much about it, NQ team.

It's not just the Minds, though, it's the lack of the right mix of cultural values, as well as some other things.

There are a few reasons why I feel its unlikely we can recreate anything that has values similar to the Culture within the confines of the game, or even a similar structure "politically", or at least not one that would be stable. Banks' own notes on the socioeconomical underpinnings and background/prerequisites of the Culture are a good read: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm. I found them quite enlightening. But I do think it would be cool to have a structure/group similar to the Culture in game, I just don't see how that would be feasible within the given context.

How is that supposed to resemble the Culture, exaclty? As an avid Banks fan, I'm a bit confused here. I'm pretty sure they don't have a political system like that, or those kinds of goals/values either.

Hoo boy... I don't think I could come up with a comprehensive list even if I tried... There have been far too many. Here are some off the top of my head: - Minecraft - FortressCraft Evolved - Interstellar Rift - Natural Selection 2 - PULSAR: Lost Colony - Avorion - Empyrion - Endless Legend - C&C (Tiberian Sun, Red Alerts, etc.) - Zero-K - Global Agenda - A bit of EVE online - Planetary Annihilation - Firefall - Fallout (all of them) - The Black Watchmen + The Secret World(Do these count? A&B games are somewhere between sci-fi and fantasy) - Kerbal Space Program - Robocraft - Half Life(s), Garry's Mod, numerous other HL2 mods - Space Engineers - Subnautica - Antichamber? Sci-fi? - Supreme Commander - Mass Effect series - Portal series - FTL: Faster Than Light - Metro series - Fallen Earth - Face of Mankind - Anarchy Online - Lots of other forgotten Sci-Fi MMORPGs - Systemshock, bioshock, deus ex, doom, quake, UT.... So many others I must be forgetting as well... Good thing we're narrowing it down to just sci-fi games. [EDIT: Oh crap I forgot the sandbox side of things apart from minecraft... Let's add: - 7 Days To Die - Citadel: Forged With Fire - Dark and Light - Wurm Online - Blockland? - Plus a bunch of sim/tycoon games like rollercoaster/zoo/whatever tycoon - Oh and there's Starforge, too... (tried very hard to forget it and almost succeeded) Do we count Flatout and Liero as sandbox games? What about the Grand Theft Auto series? I played all of them between GTA2 and GTA IV ]

Well, despite being a huge Blender fanboy... For a simple use case like that, I agree with others above who've recommended Sketchup, it's probably striking the best balance between easy and feature rich enough for your purposes. If you were doing more detailed modeling, texturing, rigging, animation, rendering, etc... I'd recommend Blender. But for quick ship concepts for a novice? Definitely Sketchup.

Well, I've already reserved "Bob"... [EDIT: For the 6K reward... My ID card will have LurkNautili]

Like I said in another thread on the same topic, we'll need some actual metrics (gathered in game and probably via polls or something) post-launch to see whether something like this would be worth it to NQ. The model itself seems sound, it's just that we don't know if the solution to the optimization problem it entails includes this kind of alternate model or not, without the requisite data. Arguing based on gut-feeling whether there would be enough call for this to make it viable or not is a waste of time. In principle the concept is sound, and though a couple of valid concerns have been raised, I don't think they're insurmountable. Ultimately NQ's the one who has to run the numbers to figure out if it's worth pursuing.

You're assuming that you can create an alt that can generate a DAC with only a very small amount of play-time. I don't think that assumption is justified -- but we'll have to wait to either hear from NQ or see the game economy live to draw any definitive conclusions.

For games where the play is carefully curated and balanced, p2w is possible to thwart. Take for example a game like counter-strike or something, where every aspect of the game is controlled, and there's no progression/time element when it comes to in game power etc. In these kinds of situations, it's quite easy to prevent RL structures of socioeconomic stratification from bleeding over into the in-game world, and "p2w or not" as well as "is or isn't mechanic X p2w" are valid discussions, whenever you allow people some small avenue of influencing the game with money (cosmetics, boosters, etc). In stark contrast to this, in MMORPGs and the like, I actually believe it's fundamentally impossible to prevent such bleed-over, assuming that it is game mechanically possible to gain power advantages over other players (certainly the case in any game where you can form alliances freely, create almost arbitrarily powerful ships with enough resources, as well as gain control over areas, and so on -- as you can in DU), and that you can arrange to exchange some in-game good for RL money (be that via legal means or not). Arguing whether something is or isn't "pay-to-win" is ultimately just debating (to me) boring semantics. What matters to me is that real-life power and influence can and will bleed into DU no matter what the devs try and do about it, and what the discussion ought to be about is how NQ can make the game enjoyable for everyone despite this fact. If anyone wants more detail on my thought process regarding this RL-to-in-game dynamic, I'll have to find some older posts in which I give some examples etc.

Doesn't that logic apply regardless of payment model? Even with DACs you could: 1. Create an alt (or just use your main) 2. Train that account to become very effective in generating quanta, via trading or whatever 3. Use the profits to buy DACs and keep playing for free I think I'm missing some underlying assumption that's not mentioned here.

They wouldn't need to pay more, though, assuming this payment model would be deployed as an addition to the subscription and DAC based systems some time after launch. If price per game time is determined by the subscription cost per month divided by average play time per month per player over the entire player base, plus a margin to compensate for the loss in revenue from people switching to a more favorable payment model, the people who play more than that average get to keep doing what they're doing with subscriptions, and people playing far less than that average can get a slightly cheaper deal. Like I said, for NQ it becomes an optimization problem, where they have to balance how many new clients they could get by lowering the bar of entry for people with very limited time against how much they'd lose by offering a cheaper deal for the people, who would otherwise have had to pay a full subscription instead, paying slightly less for a small amount of actual hours played. The result of that optimization would determine the pricing of that model, tuned in such a way that it results in an increase in profits for NQ. Whether or not that can be done or not will depend on statistical data that we don't yet have, but in principle the idea is sound, as far as I can tell.

I'm not even sure where to start parsing that series of malformed sentences, non sequiturs and straw men disguised as a forum post. You seem to be implying that a pay-as-you-go type model would somehow result in gold farmers providing access to the game for free to people or something... I'm not quite sure. You're confusing two distinct topics here by bringing up in-game currency. The only people who can produce DACs are NQ, therefore they get revenue for them being produced. The gold farmers, regardless of how they pay for their access to the game, still have to pay for their access. The quanta that they farm can be exchanged for e.g. RL currency (illegal), or DACs in game, but once again, that will only affect the DAC to quanta exchange rate, the price of DAC (in €/£/$) and the revenue NQ gets from them won't be affected by any of that.

The aim is more revenue, since NQ is a business. If having an alternate payment plan captures a wider audience of customers who otherwise would have not purchased the game, it's worth it for them to do it. This is assuming that they're pricing it based on statistics on average hours per month or something like that, such that if people on the right left side of the bell-curve for whom it would be more affordable were to move to the alternate plan, it would increase the revenue for NQ rather than reduce it. As for the argument that having two plans would be too "confusing" for people and that would have a significant impact on player count, I think you're vastly over-estimating that. People aren't that dumb, and even the ones who are have spent their entire life making financial decisions like that. Determining whether paying per hour or paying per month is cheaper for them isn't the herculean task you make it out to be.

That's a false analogy, though, since the landlord can't rent the apartment to anyone else during the time the tenant is away, whereas NQ's business model is entirely different (the goods that are being exchanged are intangible and hard to quantify -- what you're paying for isn't just your "share" of the server costs, you pay more than what it costs them to host your avatar and communicate with your PC over the internet, since you're paying for your access to the game which is an abstraction of the work they put into the developing it, etc.). Ultimately it's more about whether it's a reasonable business decision for NQ or not. I.e. whether they can increase their profits by providing an alternate payment plan, and it's basically a mathematical optimization problem. Like I said, this is something they can only really consider once they have data to work with.

Maybe they can investigate alternate payment systems in the future once they have statistics on how much people play on average, and offer an alternative to those who play less than said average at a price that's somewhat higher than the average hourly rate the people paying a monthly fee effectively pay per hour of game time... I could have worded that a bit more clearly. Anyway, I doubt they'll try anything like that until a while after launch, once they've reached a comfortable level of financial security and can afford to experiment with that sort of thing. There should be an hourly rate that would wind up creating more profit for them by being worth while to a niche market who only play a few hours per month or whatever and wouldn't have otherwise bought the game. Perhaps this conversation should be had again once the game has launched, although it's reasonable to sow seeds for such thoughts to gestate until a time when they're a bit more relevant.

There are some things they could investigate that might work for their application, though I don't think it'll be high on their list of priorities. E.g. a cellular automaton based sim could be fairly realistic (there are some neat examples out there) and it's on the lighter end of the spectrum in terms of computational overhead. You can obviously forget navier-stokes, euler, boltzmann and even things like SPH. The only tech I see having a snowballs chance of making the cut is one based on CAs. Then again, NQ has surprised in the past, like for instance I hadn't heard about dual contouring before I saw their kickstarter video, and that technology is 15 years old -- so who knows... They're talented and knowledgeable engineers, and I have confidence in their ability to overcome technical challenges. I'm far more worried when it comes to some aspects of their game design philosophy, but that's off-topic...

Sure, didn't mean to bring up politics.... In any case, I'd prefer Europe, although I guess it comes down to where most of the player base ends up existing.

If we do some kind of unofficial gathering, I'd rather have it be somewhere in EU, or in general anywhere else but the US. It's kind of a scary prospect to travel to the US as a non US citizen these days, I'd rather have the gathering in Syria or something at this point...

My brother referred me to the Kickstarter page about half way into the campaign a year ago.

I don't argue just for the sake of it. I just don't want anyone not versed in the topics to be lead astray by misinformation, so I do my best to correct things. I have nothing against you personally, I just want to clear up a few things. I'm not saying you cannot draw an image in the manner that you speak of, and you could even consider it an abstracted version of rasterization. What I'm trying to point out that if you don't design something that performance intensive with the right data structures, you're not going to have anything close to real time rendering. To make clear some implied assumptions that you appear to be missing, I'll make them explicit here. Firstly, since we're dealing with a system that draws vector graphics, a dot would likely be represented by a small circle. The point of vector graphics is that it doesn't have an explicit size based on resolution, but rather it's a mathematical expression that describes the shape. You can think of it as a recipe for baking a cake, rather than a cake itself. In practice, you'll need a data structure that stores x, y, and radius at least. An "actual" rasterizer would build an image into memory. You can think of it as a contiguous block of memory containing an array of color information per pixel, e.g. VkImage with a memory backing via vkAllocateMemory & vkBindImageMemory -- of course this is simplifying a bit for the sake of brevity (it's assuming VK_IMAGE_TILING_LINEAR, for one thing, which should rarely be the case), but the point is that we're storing the image in an optimal form, rather than as a disparate collection of abstract dot/disk objects. I mean it's not impossible to store those in a fairly optimal way, but the point is that you need to access whatever data structure they're in once for every faux-pixel. Secondly, since we're still talking about drawing vector graphics via an implementation of an SVG reader/drawer of some kind, the drawing algorithms need to be considered. Where an actual rasterizer differs from the type of hack you suggest is also in how they draw whatever they're trying to create. If you want to draw a 1024x1024 pixel image on screen via vector graphics dots, you'll have to call the dot draw function 2^20 times to draw all the dots, which is also slowed by the fact that you have to fetch them from where ever in memory, several bytes (r, g, b, x, y, r) each instead of just an R8G8B8 (24bit or 3 bytes) value or whatever. And again, in the case of an actual rasterizer it's one chunk of memory that you push via the swapchain onto the GPU in one I/O operation, and then tell it to draw it. The only thing you seem to be considering is the part where you figure out which dots/pixels need to be what color, which is the same algorithm for both systems and runs on the same GPU, though in our case in DU it'll be Lua rather than C/C++ (slower, even if only by a factor of between 2 to 10 in a pretty good implementation). This is only a part of what rasterization entails, however. So yes, on an abstract level you can consider them equivalent, but you can't assess the performance of something based only on such a high level model -- the performance is determined by the implementation details. It's similar to how an ADT differs from an actual data structure. My point being that if all Novaquark gives us is a function that draws an arbitrary spline path or basic shape primitive (ellipse, rectangle, etc.), it won't allow you to write anything close to real time graphics by "rasterization" despite the fact that the abstract model of the process is nigh equivalent. Correct, it's conceptually fairly simple. But as someone who's written renderers in OpenGL and Vulkan, I have to disagree with your assessment about the feasibility, given our initial premise of drawing that through an API focused on drawing vector graphics. Again, I'm not coming at you personally or anything, and I don't argue just for the sake of it. I'm more than happy to own up to mistakes if/when I make them, but in this case I just haven't been convinced you've thought this through. Either that, or our underlying assumptions differ somehow, despite me trying to be as explicit as possible without being ridiculously verbose (I mean just look at the length of this post, for one -- explaining in detail takes way more words than people have time to read). I hope this clears up some of the confusion/misunderstanding or whatever it is that's going on. As for the 3D logo project... Again, totally possible for pre-rendered stills, but I'm curious to know how you plan to go about animating it. Given that the vectors that define the shape are defined in two spatial dimensions, as a perspective projection onto your screen, essentially, and the 3D-ness of it isn't available in the SVG file, it's non-trivial to manipulate that data to e.g. rotate the logo or something. There are a couple of ways to "hack" it, that I can think of, given the set of functions I'm anticipating to see from NQ, but none of them are very appealing. I'm sorry if I come across as crass/rude/confrontational, I really don't mean to frustrate anyone (people skills aren't really in my forte). I just don't like leaving things unresolved, it's like an itch I'm compelled to scratch.

In shaders you can move verticies around and color things. If all you can do is pull data from SVG and draw that as is, it's not really possible do what you assert. E.g. if you have a circle in an SVG file, how are you going to rotate that in 3D space and draw that on screen? At the very least you'd have to be able to mess with the aspect ratio of the curve, and that wouldn't be flexible enough for general purpose graphics. Drawing individual points as vector graphics dots is not the same as a software renderer, that's not how rasterization/rendering works, even if you run it on a CPU instead of a GPU. There's at least one extra layer of abstraction there. Even this isn't entirely accurate. It's not the slowest, but just about everything that's interpreted and running on a VM is going to be slower than a language that compiles into native binaries. Java is about the fastest you can get, and it uses a whole bag of clever tricks. And even that's slower than C/C++/asm. It's not going to be as big a bottleneck as the hacky rendering workaround, but it's not negligible either.