Dinkledash
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Posts posted by Dinkledash
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I watched the recent video and thought JC said 1st-half of the year is more likely but also implied Feb/Mar or even April start date may be too difficult to achieve -- I think he may not want to over promise on this timeline since it carries so much weight with the community.
I like the fact we can test higher tier skills during Alpha testing. How about in Closed/Open Beta Play Testing? Which video can this information be found in?
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.
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I guess you'll just have to build a factory big enough to find out whether its all by hand or you are able manufacture it by automation. But then again, they may deem that knowledge something we need to know and they may bestow it on us.
However, assuming you can automate large ship production, imagine the size of the facilities you would need to have.
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.
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Where did you read that? Core Units are meant to be the initial building block of the construct, not its power source. The Core Unit creates a grid around it in which the Core Unit's owner's voxels can't be edited by other players. Elements are tied to the power source's wattage. Bigger engines, more watts, more stufff you can have on board a construct running. The Core Unit, is just a registry on the server, telling it whome said collection of voxels and Elements in its grid belong to. Dynamic Core Units are Core Units that can have momentum, mass and motion applied to them. Static Core Units, are for things like buildings, which shouldn't move.
Provide quotes or links to your claims. Mine, are in their frigging Facebook page
Please, provide links if possible to your statements.
Thanks.
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?
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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
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All ODY designs are purely conceptual. They are only meant to give a rough idea of the aesthetic design of Objective Driveyards. That being said, the voxel engine of DU is incredibly flexible, and educated guesses can be made about the relative sizes and functions of the different elements based on videos, screenshots, and concept art. Thanks for your input, and I wish luck to SLI on the ship market.
Here's to friendly and non-lethal competition!
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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!
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While i totally agree this would be cool (companies designing engines would be a thing!!!) i'm afraid that it could look very weird and be a bit hard for new players to get in to how they even build a ship. Perhaps it should be like an option so you could just use pre made components or design your own depending on your needs, deadline and skills. I am not sure how you imagined it done but i think the most effective way (and the way most it would get the best look) would be designing your engine in a minecraft kind of way and then depending on the blueprint you create different materials will be needed and the design will be somewhat the same. In space engineers i used the hell of a long time providing my ship with oxygen if a similar system was used for engines in DU i think i would never get started.
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.
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Thing is, one of the main functions of a government is minting and printing currency. I can see that in the beginning of the game we're going to need currency issued by the defacto government, the Arkship AI godmind. However, as planets become independent, have their own military and economies, write and enforce their own laws, they're going to want to manage their own monetary systems as well. Well managed economies will have stable currencies and exchange rates, while poorly managed economies will experience inflation, attempt to enforce price controls, etc.
I think it depends on how many players we ultimately have. If we top off around 20-30,000, we probably won't have enough players to have independent planetary economies, and all banking and currency will have to be managed by game mechanics. If we have 100,000 players, we'll probably have two or three large political units with enough interested players to manage a government bureaucracy, arrange for deficit spending to build large battlefleets, have elections (or not) and manage customs and immigration issues. In that case, there may be enough critical mass for money to be minted by these organizations and the arkship currency can be retired.
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Don't forget we still have the 550k surprise to come yet too
It looks like CvC is out of scope for general release and will be in the first update, but they'll be doing the character customization instead, which will certainly enhance roleplaying in the beginning.
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I am going to see how well my designs carry over from space engineers Ive got a handful of fighters, some freighters ,communication satellites most of my warships rely a lot on how Space engineers works as a game but could still make some nice homages in DU.
Is it worth playing around with Space Engineers waiting for DU alpha to start up?
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Yeah I'm holding back on the cosmetic designs of my ship till I know exactly what a practical ship design will be. Right now I've got a rig ship sketched up (for space trucking
) but its a very basic, boxy design atm. Essentially It's just a sketch up of the basic ship they've shown with a cargo container on back which I've planned on placing our nano pack containers in. Also drew it with a quad engine with 2 fuel cell setup since I figured the added weight would need an extra push. This is all based off that ship building teaser I saw so I'm sure there is plenty of room for design improvement. Like I said though I wouldn't fall in love with your cosmetics for the ships till we have a better idea of whats capable. Wouldnt want the vehicle to move like a brick because of a few fancy prongs sticking everywhere.Form follows function. Unless I'm selling a ship I don't see the point of sexing it up. If wings don't matter, I'm not going to use them. If they improve performance in atmosphere, I will use them.
- elDunco and CptCabalsky
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This is a work worthy of nothing less than exultant praise.
You did a wonderful job here, Dinkledash.
Have an excellent day.
"
Thank you, you're a gentleman Aetherios.
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What's happening?
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Yeah, he's a pretty congenial asshat.
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It's a single-player Hovercraft so i think this thing will have shape kinda like a Motorcycle, so it can't carry much
Maybe we can strap four of them together with voxels to make a cargo carrier.
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Really now? AK 47s are banned? I guess China holds illegal guns then, cause the Norinco Type 56 Assault Rifle is a chinese rip-off of the Ak-47 and last I've checked, it's not banned. In fact, al lthe AK-47s in the world are actually type 56 Assault Rifles. Russian never sold to terrorists, if you don't know (and you DON'T KNOW ), Russia fought the Taliban in the 80s (back when America aided them :V ). Guess who sold the Taliban their AK-47s. 'Murrica, who bought them in the black market and smuggled them into Afghanistan.
So, the US who aided the Taliban in the 80s? Yup, CIA SMUGGLED weaponry to the Taliban. That's what SMUGGLING is.
Smuggling involves blockade running as well and meneuvering around embargos.
If Faction A has no Titanium and is in war with Faction B, that has titanium, if YOU as a trader, go and buy titanium from Faction B, to sell it to Faction A, and have to overcome blockades near Faction A's borders by Faction B, you are a smuggler.
Oh wait, you thought smuggling will be easy??? You thought smugglers are traders for drugs? LOL. You are so not made for this. There won't be NPC factions and you will be scamemd on hauling contracts hard. xD
"Sure Ripper, go through that dark area of space to get to my hauling contract's destination. No, there are no pirates in that area, trust me and no, the insurance number on your contract is just for shits and giggles, I won't rip you off, at all!"
Yeah, you are that kind of guy, the kind of guy people scam.
Smuggling is for real hardcores, not posers, take my advice, stay out of it.
I spent some time in Afghanistan and the Russians weren't fighting terrorists, they were exterminating villages. There are ruins and graveyards everywhere, people using parts of rockets and shell casings as grave markers. The mujahadeen were mainly northern Turkmen and Uzbeks we were supplying with weapons, including Stinger missiles which we smuggled in. The Taliban are mainly southern Pashtuns supplied by Pakistan.
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Does it come with scanners? Can you do prospecting from inside your ship or do you have to get out and hump? How much material can I store in my nanopack? Does the hovercraft have a cargo capacity (or need it if we can store tons of material in the nanopack?) Will we get it in alpha and beta as well as general release?
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You want smuggling? You'll have to do it the hard way, where you'll have to figure out what a hostile faction doesn't have that their hostile factions have, buy from them, sell much higher to the others. That's smuggling for you.
Why it's different than trading? Because they are hostile to each other, thus they do not trade with one another.
There's also evading customs duties. It could be that trade is only allowed through approved ports on certain planets, and that duties are charged when offworld goods are brought in. And it could be that certain items, powerful weapons for example, aren't allowed in the borders of a particular planetary or interstellar government, and smugglers would sneak or bribe their way past customs officials. Of course, who would really want to be a customs inspector? I bet there are going to be some jobs that people get rotated through and paid well for simply because they aren't a lot of fun. Piracy is probably pretty fun on its own, however.
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Among the suppliers for the european Arkships was the Volcanov Mining and Trading Inc., a company founded by my grandfather in the wake of discovering maybe one of the largest platinum deposits in this solar system.
The closer the earth drew to its death, the more immoral my father, who lead the company in the final years, became. Acquiring every speck of metal, valuable or not, from the african continent, often with the help of mercenaries, he was one of the reasons why so many died while the european upper class could enjoy their luxurious Arkship quarters.
He lost every last bit of my respect as he resorted to large-scale weapon trading, equipping the Humanity Front with specially coded nukes that would target chinasian Arkships living quarters, while leaving the factories and most of the valuable metals intact, so that he could salvage them. I earned my keep on the Arkship by exposing my father, the company and all of his wrongdoings to the UN, in the hopes of preserving at least one Arkship from his greed.
In the new world, I will found a new Volcanov Corporation. A better one. And I will right my fathers wrongs by never taking a side in any conflict again and always trying to do what is best for humanity.
I'd like this if I had any likes left today.
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Duplicate post oops.
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"because science" is always a good reason. I've been pushing "0 friction shielding" as a reason for collision damage to be a non-thing, but I've seen to many people wine about immersion breaking game mechanics that I made a false assumption about your stance.
Sounds like you've got a good explanation there though
It's always "because science" or "because magic," isn't it?
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Nice slippery slope argument (only the 5th time I've seen that exact rebuttal in this forum). I don't even feel the need to answer this one anymore, since combat is already a planned feature and collision damage is not a planned feature. And yes, it's just fine to use "it's a game" to break immersion, every game does that. How many games force your character to go to the bathroom or sleep? "it's a game" is a great reason for a dev not to include a feature that just shouldn't be there.
The devs want this to be a game where we focus on building and exploration. They do want pvp to be a thing, but they have already explained the reasons why they don't want weapons of mass destruction to be a part of it. It is too much damage, without enough warning, without enough to prevent it, in too short a time.
Players will be able to destroy someone's excuisite palace, but they'll have to do it with lazers, railguns, and missiles. They will probably need several players, dedicated battle ships, and some time to kill: long enough that someone in the palace could send out a distress signal, fire up automated defenses, or warn org-mates to log on and man battle stations. Balanced PVP allows for that.
It kind of sounds like this is the game you really want to play, rather than DU
Dude, I'm not saying that we need WMD and CD in the game, I'm saying let's come up with a rational explanation as to why it doesn't exist.
How about this: everything we create will be coming from matter compressed into a K3 manifold. When it is projected into spacetime, it is assembled along a kyrium scaffold, which remains behind after the object is instantiated. This properties of the scaffold include remarkable inertial dampening, to the point where two ships built on kyrium scaffolds could be rammed into one another at near relativistic speeds and they'd simply bounce off one another.
Nuclear weapons won't work because kyrium also serves as a damper to runaway fission reactions. An implosion chamber created using kyrium scaffolds would absorb rather than reflect neutrons. And dropping rocks from space won't work because the AI is actually aware of what we do with the objects we create. The AI is programmed to prevent the use of WMDs, but it does allow other forms of violence, as humans are by nature an aggressive species. And it is entirely possible we could run into another aggressive species out here in the unknown, one who can build and use weapons of mass destruction, a species we will need to be able to counter through violence. Therefore, it is necessary that humans retain the capacity for violence, even though the worst sorts of violence are forbidden by physics and the programming of the arkship godmind.
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1. CvC obviously
2. Expanded range of building materials (variety of woods, metals, stone) and associated rare gather-able materials like marble being a rarer luxury building material.
3. Waypoint system, let us create waypoints and then be able to give them or sell them to other people
4. Player customisation, let us take of the space suits and wear "normal" clothes for RP purposes and emersion.
5. More survival aspects, food gathering and cooking mechanics
6. Player "graphic" elements, let us upload images and put them on the side of constructs as logos or to make signage to direcrt other players
Player graphic elements could get rather graphic indeed. I'm sure we want there to be freedom of expression but not to the point of creating a hostile game environment. There should probably be a process by which you submit graphics for approval (perhaps requiring the approval of community mods.) We can't stop people from building flying penises, I suppose, but letting them plaster the sides of those penises with hardcore gifs might be a bit much.
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Hey guys, lots of interesting viewpoints in this thread, thanks.
Now after the latest interview with DM21 JC did say a couple of interesting things.
He said there will be a bounty system wich we all knew. But he also said there would be other systems in place so that there would be consequences for attacking a peaceful player.
JC used the words " challenging to attack other players without warning or reasons"
So what would that mean? The way I understood him he is talking about a system seperate from the bounty mechanic.
Any ideas?
(Around the 48 mins mark)
How would the game engine know if someone has a reason to attack someone else or whether that reason is a good reason? Maybe the reason is he doesn't like the color of his helmet, or maybe it's because they're both running to stick a claim beacon in the same resources-rich hex. Or maybe they had a nasty argument in a bar. What reason is good enough for wanting to kill someone if not self-defense and how could a game engine determine criminal intent? If someone is aiming a weapon at me but hasn't fired yet, am I allowed to shoot first?
If he wants emergent politics, I think he has to allow emergent law and order as well. He'll do what he wants of course, but I think safe zones and arkship AI-enforced property rights are a sufficient foundation for civilization. Beyond that, if the AI is setting and paying bounties for the bad guys, then the AI effectively is the government, and I don't think he wants that. By definition, a government is the only entity allowed to legally employ violence for any purpose other than self-defense. Any organization that can only do so under conditions determined by the AI godmind won't be a government.
New video: Multiplayer Ship building in spaaaaaaaace
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Where do you live?