Dinkledash

I believe membership in organizations and the appointment of legates are ultimately under the power of the founder, so unless the founder voluntarily shares or surrenders control, all organizations are autocracies at the moment. And I'm sure if there are additional options made available in DU for organizational, er, organization, the founder would have to approve that transfer to a new organizational model. Even if legates are able to accept and eject general members, I don't see any way they can do the same with other legates. That raises the question, what happens if the founder stops playing? If the founder fails to log in for several weeks and doesn't return messages from the other legates or members, will DU transfer control of the organization? To whom? What if there are no other legates? Will organization assets be eternally frozen in their accounts? Will the RDMS for objects managed by the organization be forever locked? I hope that NQ has a plan to address the maintenance and inheritance requirements of organizations and provides alternative governance models. I could imagine different models such as Monarchy, Republic, Democracy, Syndicalism, Corporation and Dictatorship having advantages and disadvantages in terms of stability, as well as the satisfaction of the membership in terms of participation in the government. Once the RDMS is in place, we may see Republics and Democracies appearing, as well as the existence of Boards of Directors for corporations, but unless NQ wires control of the organization and its assets to the RDMS, whatever gets voted on can be rejected at the whim of the founder and the only choice members would have would be to vote with their feet. Developing business rules for civil wars could be very interesting too, as well as regional governments at the planetary/system level, or even at the city level. It all depends on how big things get. I can't see one person effectively managing the affairs of a 10,000 member organization.

Union Army General US Grant preferred spies to reporters because at least he could hang spies.

I'm thinking the inertial dampers would consist of some kind of quantum technology that generates a field inside the hull of a ship that bleeds kinetic energy from the objects inside the field at a molecular level by absorbing Higgs bosons or some other subatomic plot device. A liquid filled interior would certainly dampen the effects of inertia but the added mass would make every ship wallow like a barge filled with lead.

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A docking script would be some serious coding... You'd pick a docking target and identify the docking point... basically impossible if the target is maneuvering because he could just roll. But speed and course matching, variable geometries... You could have an Ai script match course and speed, then burn to catch up or fall back to the target, roughly line up your docking rings with your ship in the correct attitude, then let the AI do the final approach with micro burns. So two scripts, one where you identify a ship as a target and one where you identify the actual docking ring as the target.

Inertial dampers are also used in the Jack Campbell books.

Oh, I don't mind trolls, not much.

It's proprietary. If they can get it working in DU they'll probably make more money from licensing that than they will from the game.

https://www.dualthegame.com/technology#cssc "This involves what we call "Dynamic Space Splitting", server nodes are assigned to regions that are more densely populated, and these change the frequency of updates of remote entities to maintain a fluid experience for nearby entities." As a database software engineer, this is what I'm getting from this: When there's sufficient density, players will have a "primary" node assigned to them for rapid updates for them and anyone near them, so if you have 20,000 people in a city, everyone in that city will be on a single rapidly updating database instance. That data will be replicated to all other nodes, but those updates will be less frequent than the "focus" instance for a given cluster of players. Say that the fleet of 2,000 players on instance ABC123 is jumping into a system where the players are focused on instance XYZ789. As they pass through the jump point (or their FTL drive brings them into proximity) their client machines will start sending updates to instance XZY789. The last thing ABC123 hears from them is that they have moved out of that cluster. After that, ABC123 will still hear about the players in the fleet, but they'll hear about it every 5 minutes as a job replicates all updated data from all nodes on the continuous shard to all other nodes as opposed to updates from the focused clients which happen every 10 milliseconds or so. Presumably there will be a designated failover node for any given node on a different physical server, so one of the non-focus instances is getting updates perhaps every few seconds rather than every 5 minutes. If the focus node fails, the clients get a blank screen for a few seconds as they reset to the failover server and pick up where they left off. It's a guess but I think it's a fairly educated one.

Well they're French, so they're stubborn. The louder people yell for CvC the less compliant they'll become... and in this case that's a good thing. We want CvC right, not right now. And JC said it would be available in the 1st update.but he didn't say when that update would come out.

Welp I went to Steam to look at it and the reviews are pretty horrible. Apparently it was very good before they introduced planets and destroyed playability. The constructs in the videos are also kind of ugly, to be honest. Gravity looks good, and the collisions are cool, but for gameplay purposes here we won't do collision damage (see 37 other threads.) One of the things I like about the architecture DU seems to be adopting; it's firmly multiplayer and it's starting with planets and the kind of stuff they want to add appears to me to be foundationally sound inheritance-wise from an object oriented programming standpoint. Ships are still ships, elements are still elements, we're just going have them zap each other when CvC comes out. If we can't figure out how to do something with voxels, elements and LUA, we just won't do it. The one concern I have is isolating the LUA scripts so they can't divide the universe by zero and crash the whole game, but I'm sure we'll put LUA through its paces in Alpha.

That's a great notion. It's sort of like how in world war 1, for the first few months, pilots actually shot at one another with pistols. I can see a ship with groups of people with little personal turret points shooting their hand weapons at enemies... it will make for weird combat, that's for sure! But imagine the pirate ship chasing the freighter, toughs in space suits shooting the engines out as they close, then just getpacking to the helpless ship, breaching the hull and getting inside... It even makes sense in game because we can only make stuff with our nanocannons, and without the blueprints for railguns and such, we have to improvise. Warship design will be very interesting indeed.

What, you don't hide behind 7 proxies?

That's some subtle trolling right there.

That's why this is on kickstarter and not steam. Alpha will be some time in the first half of 2017 and beta 2018. It should be available for general release second half of 2018. Alpha players will experience a lot of issues and we'll probably restart our characters many times as the world is reset. We'll literally be playing a game to test components of it that we know don't work 100%, and we'll be trying to figure out what conditions break the game so they can fix them. Beta players will also experience bugs but the crashes there will probably be due to load and optimization issues more than logic errors. Alpha and Beta players won't get to keep their character advancement or stuff, but we will know a lot more about how to play the game when general release comes, and it is satisfying helping someone debug their code by deliberately flying your ship into a sun at FTL speed to see what happens.

Maybe the advantage the Alphas will have is that we'll actually have some input into the core business rules and maybe have a deeper understanding of them, having experienced the development of the system, while the betas will just experience the implementation. Alphas may know where the bodies are buried...

If the purpose is to create a civilization with emergent politics and economics, the training wheels will have to come off sometime.

Where do you live?

Beta testing is usually about load testing and performance more than mechanics so they probably won't just level people up for a test event. In alpha we won't be playing straight through for a year, more like 2 or maybe 3 days a week for a few hours a day, and they'll set up parameters for our characters so we can test different parts of the code. We're going to try to find their integer overflows and malformed dynamic SQL so they'll have us test maxed out characters, fly ships into the center of a sun, that sort of thing. In beta we'll probably just start as basic characters and if we can level up in the amount of time servers are running then you can try the high level skills and keep your character progression at least until beta finishes. That's where we'll be trying to fill up transaction logs and create deadlocks, though of course in beta with 8000 users we'll have more opportunities for novel player interactions with the environment and other players and some things will happen that they weren't expecting.

That's why I'm thinking shipyards will have factory units for sections that get moved by a tug to an assembly berth and welded together by hand. This is going to look badass when we're building megastructures in space.

I've been chastened on discord already. In my defense, they were hooking the engine up to the DCU with some kind of driveshaft or conduit so it looked like a power source. Is there a document that has the current information about construction or is it all over the place in posts and interviews right now?

So the dynamic core unit provides power to up to 6 elements using conduits? That could make design very interesting. Is there a fuel tank somewhere? Would you need multiple DCUs to provide more power for weapons and shields? I realize that this was just a pre-alpha skeleton they were putting together but I had that thrill go own my leg. That was beautiful. So would we ever mass produce large ships with blueprints and factory units? Or would that only be for say, sections, that would be assembled by hand? I could see mass produced fighters, but large ships... I assume that we'll have dozens of different style engines, and we'll also be able to cover them with cowlings that will armor them. I'm just jazzed, keep the content coming! Better yet let backers have the pre-alpha client and we'll make content for you! xD

Here's to friendly and non-lethal competition!

They're very pretty pictures but without knowing what sizes the elements are, how much energy is produced or consumed, how big fuel tanks will be and all, how can you say you're designing ships? Are you showing people what you want your ships to look like and that you'll make them look like this regardless of efficiency and cost considerations? Form follows function. Let's see what the functions are, first. Buy Silverlight!

Engines do look weird: It only looks cool when it's under a hood. I think eventually we'll be able to create our own elements, which will be submitted for approval and if approved, you'd get a blueprint for your element. We know they want us to do the work of designing stuff so they can focus on the game engine, business rules, balance, etc.