Dinkledash

Man... imagine what kind of competition there will be to be the first player to go through a stargate.

From what I understand, the original plan post general release was for 1 month of play until the first orbital flight and 3 months to interplanetary flight (I think that's using in-system FTL.) I don't know how long until we can build stargates.

It's that way in real life too.

If everything goes dark and they all run off to Grand Cayman with the money at least we'll have a hell of a story to tell.

I'm sure you could code casino games with LUA.

When you're nervouscited!

I assume at some point you'll be able to map your keyboard any way you want.

There are going to be ads... for in-game products made by the players.

I think there should be mining tools and possibly vehicles, but not drones. A human should still have to actually do the mining. If you're a professional miner (I think everyone will be a miner to some extent) then you'll reach the point of diminishing returns of your mining skill fairly quickly. Tools should be available that will allow you to mine materials faster, and of course scanners to allow you to detect deposits, which will have elements that effectively multiply the effect of your skill. That way a professional can make an investment to improve their productivity and you can continue to develop your specialization. But we don't want to see hordes of Van Neumann planet eaters denuding entire solar systems.

I'm glad to hear that the ore needs refining. That makes the mining business a lot more interesting.

I am sure that there will be at least a broad brush worldbuilding so we can write in a shared universe that is released with the formal announcement of the fanfiction contest. I'm also curious about all those other arkships that were mentioned. Is there a chance we may bump into another arkship civilization? I know that even if there are hundreds of ships that had been launched, we'd still be thousands of lightyears apart after 10,000 years of travel at .99C. But how far will we be able to travel?

It will probably be easier to have backup ships near the arkship early in the game, but when the arkzone gets crowded... it might be profitable to make highrise parking garages for backup ships. I expect that there will always be a profit in passenger services from the arkworld to other major hub systems. When you die you keep your money so if you're wealthy enough you could just buy a ship, but you'd have to wait for it to be manufactured.

Check your inbox when you get a chance.

Pehaps I'm not reading this right, but I'm pretty sure there's a difference between alpha testing and stress testing. Unless you have a link to some interview that states otherwise in your bag of Twerky Tricks, it is my impression that stress tests are run pretty late in the development cycle. In alpha, I would expect that they're going to be testing the logic and playability, not so much the performance. They'll probably try to run closed beta on relatively few servers, putting all the players on one when they want to test performance of a single server as opposed to testing the shard for seamless player clustering. I think when they're close to general access, they'll hold open beta events for 15-20K players, starting with all the backers who don't already have early access and offering open beta keys to the general public on a first-come first-serve basis, so they can test the single shard server farm under load. Spawn 10,000 players on the surface and 10,000 more players on a vast starliner and have it come in through a stargate to see if that bogs things down when the load on the geographic server is doubled in a second. Put everyone in the market and have the NPCs offer a big sale on hoverscooters to test the economic subsystem under a heavy transaction volume. Give everyone a TU and a little spaceship and tell them to go explore at the same time, also letting them know they can get a second TU if they come back to the arkship during a one hour window. Have everyone join an organization, disband it and see what happens to permissions. There are probably hundreds of tests they can come up with to stress the different ways the runtime code interacts with players and the databases. Simulating even 100,000 players on the server is not the same thing as stressing the network with 20,000 simultaneous real players being swapped around the shard servers. And there's a limit to how many remote clients you can simulate without some very expensive load testing software like Mercury, and writing all those possible combinations of tests would be massively time consuming. Much better to just let players be players and jack things up for you.