Dinkledash
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Posts posted by Dinkledash
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1 - CvC (yes this is a point of contention, but it feels like a high priority).
2 - Robust Contracts, scripts that can generate contracts
3 - Cosmetics shop (more income = more features)
4 - Space TU's
5 - map function that includes TU's and territory groups
6 - saddle-mount cockpits (for jet bikes)
7 - flashy doodads, decals, and other construct swag
8 - easter-egg content
9 - non-weapon combat systems (tractor beams, target scramblers, missile countermeasures, etc.)
10 - non-character items in cosmetic shop (alt skin/coloration for ship shields, thruster vapor trails, decals, etc)
Since this game will be player content driven, a cosmetics shop would, I assume, mean that players won't be able to come up with their own cosmetic gear? I mean, will we be able to make our own gear at all? We should be able to make weapons and armor and such out of voxels and elements. Or is character appearance going to be a customization reserved for the professionals?
Space TUs could be enforced by shielded beacons. I assumed that there was a way to claim an asteroid or make sure people can't build tits on your space station without your authorization but if there isn't that's a high priority.
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You guys seem to be missing the fact that you can't miss shooting someone. It's 'lock and fire' PvP.
Basically you pick your target, fire, and based on your own stats, and the stats of the other player will result in whether you win or lose.
It's not going to be a first person aim and fire, and see who the better person is.
It's going to be a lock on a target, and fire and the person with the better guns/stats wins.
Yes and size of the target will be a factor, so shooting a spinal mounted wave motion gun that fires once every 60 seconds at a fighter would be silly. And I'm sure that even though you're locked, if the target gets out of range or arc, you lose your lock on. You can lock on with a big cannon, and if you have max skill and max tech and your opponent is driving a dumb steel slab like the captain of a garbage scow, there's no reason not to blast him out of space with it.
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Perhaps in a world where the slogan isn't "Rebuild civilization together", sure.
games=/=real life
Given that philosophy, why allow combat at all? I understand that given the lack of moral hazard, the impossibility that you could actually die, there are lots of people who indulge in gratuitous violence in games. I also understand that we don't want folks destroying someone's exquisite voxel palace with a suicide brick. But what's the mechanism that will prevent that from happening? It has to be explained somehow, not just say "it's a game" and break immersion without an attempt at worldbuilding and roleplaying.
Perhaps you can have nukes, but they don't work on planetary surfaces because making nuclear dampers is cheap and easy but requires access to geothermal power. So they can work in space and can be used to wreck space stations and asteroid bases but not planetside cities.
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Not entirely sure why a failed stretch goal means no con v con combat. From my lofty perch of no coding experience whatsoever, wouldn't weapons just be a modified builder tool with the parameters set to minus? Set the area effect to big and random for bombs and small and focussed for projectiles?
All criticism is meant to improve, not destroy.
It's not just the design, it's the QA testing in pre-alpha. Alpha testing is generally for things like playability and balance, but the internal QA is going to have to go through any combat system they design with a fine toothed comb. And we're not just talking about fighter vs fighter here, we're taking about multiplayer ships shooting at each other with specific elements and doing damage, presumably, to those elements as well as the hull. And the players would have to be able to repair them, develop skills for using them, create a lot of combat-related graphics (and doing good explosions is a pain in the ass.) So yeah, I thought that a 100K stretch was pretty modest, representing at most two more underpaid FTEs (Full Time Employees.) When you look at the size of the team as it is, 500k euros for 2 years of work is a pittance. These guys are going to be working 70 hour weeks for survival wages and if they can't deliver on stuff they didn't promise based on their funding, you won't hear me complaining.
I'd rather see CvC go through a full alpha cycle too and I hope they can manage it, and I'm going to do everything I can to help them get the best possible game out there at general release.
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We knew that the end was coming for centuries, and we realized at some point that we would never be able to finish enough arkships for all the Earth's populatoin. The wealthy sought to purchase legacy berths for their great grandchildren, the politicians fought to place their power structures into the design of the post-Earth societies, and corporations developed breeding programs for their employees, paying bonuses to people who married based on recommendations from their predictive genetics algorithms. And the poor despaired. The teeming billions of crowded Earth, suddenly forgotten as the rich world tore resources from the ground and pumped poisons into the air, heedless of damage done to a doomed biosphere.
War was inevitable as poor nations without the technical capabilities to build their own ships insisted that their resources would only be used for arkships built for their own populations. The rich world shrugged and looked upward, tearing up space resources treaties as they tore the moon and asteroids asunder, plunging the third world into chaos as the markets for lithium, cobolt, platinum and gold went into freefall after a massive metallic asteroid inclusion was discovered a few hundred meters under the Sea of Tranquility.
Faced with the near total loss of their populations in a hundred years, nations in Africa, South America and the subcontinent formed an alliance and demanded that space-based mineral extraction be shared equally by all nations based on population. Chinasia, however, with a near monopoly on rare earth elements needed for superconductor manufacturing and their own technical capabilities, sided with Normerica, Europa and Russia, calculating that they'd get more arkships that way.
Desperation knows no morality. When the arkships under construction at Chonquing and Hangzhou vanished in blinding flashes of nuclear fire, Indians and Pakistanis danced together in the streets, while their governments disavowed all knowledge of the actions of the Humanity Front, a terrorist organization that demanded global distribution of arkship construction.
Nobody knows if the nations of the subcontinent were behind the attack, and nobody ever will know, as the resulting regional nuclear exchange reduced the populations of India and Pakistan by 80% and of China by 50%. The waves of desperate refugees quickly overwhelmed hastily assembled UN facilities, and millions died of starvation and from disease.
When the brain plague struck, it was truly a shock to a reeling world. A novel virus, not recognized by the nanomeds that swam in every human's bloodstream, that did irreparable damage to the brain within days. It started in the refugee camps, where millions huddled in misery. The first symptoms were lassitude and depression, so it was hardly recognizable as a disease, until the sufferers slipped into catatonia, stopped eating and drinking, then died. In the Mashhad camp, 70% of the refugees perished within a week. Aid workers returning to their homes carried the disease back with them to their crowded megacities. Before the WHO was able to identify the virus and publish an update to the global nanomed network, seven billion people, more than half the Earth's remaining population, succumbed to the illness. Arkship construction halted as corporations desperately sought out people with the skills necessary to continue the projects, making promises of dozens, even hundreds of berths to the descendants of surviving engineers and project managers.
One of those engineers was my grandmother, Ethel Dinkman, to whom I am forever personally indebted. Most berths were assigned by lottery among those who's test scores and skillsets met the requirements defined by the UN's Colonization Commission algorithms, but I was raised inside the forbidding plascrete walls of the Nueva York shipyard, one of the several million legacies of that desperate time when men and women were able to make the corporations bend to their will. If the AI driving the mighty arkship feels that the legacies have been betrayed by the board, when the time comes for the launch, the ship will just sit there.
So here I am, raised and trained to be a survivor, a legacy stockholder in SilverLight Industries, a berth guaranteed to me and several cousins, no doubt to the consternation of management, who see us as nothing but bodies taking up space that could be used to save better trained, more intelligent, and no doubt more closely related men, women and children. Well, neener-neener. The ship AI, using my grandmother's voice, will do more than scold them if I'm not here when it's showtime, so the company takes good care of me indeed. Frighteningly good. I feel like I'm kept safe in a cocoon of resentful passive-aggression.
I wonder what will happen when we get to our destination. I'm a legacy stockholder, after all. I have a considerable energy share for my resurrection node, the wealth of any twenty random colonists. And anyway, no matter how resentful they may be, the AI won't let them touch me inside the ship shields. And they'll need me. I'm a good coder, a good shot, a well adjusted sociopath with a stifling upbringing, perfect for a weapons designer. I'll keep my eye on the bottom line and show the company I'm value-added. I better, or I'll wind up cleaning other's spaghetti code in a cubicle at the bottom of the arkcity pile. How can I let that happen, when there's a whole universe out there, one without plascrete walls and guardian drones? I'll get the company rolling, and then I'll take my odd habits, my verbal tics and my curious obsession with early 21st century Normerican cartoons and see what's out there.
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Damn. That's mental. Writing a whole lot for a game not even in Alpha. That freaks me out totally, the hours' loss I see in there. I agree with the comics because it's art out of itself but some raw lines. I'm not against it, just I don't see the point myself, I mean loads would just come by and see the text Block (wall they say) and go away, not expressing anything about it and barely reading the page, I just say that.
Harsh. But true. I think we need to stick with the story right now. We're humans from Earth who got stuffed into an arkship, freezedried and shot into a planet. That does give me an idea though.
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The most important ships to build in the beginning will be prospectors designed for the home planet. I don't know if we'll be able to mount scanners directly on ships or if we'll have to get out of the ships in order to scan. The design of the ship will depend on the range of the scanners if they are ship mounted. We may also be able to build drone-mounted scanners so you get to a location then you deploy your drones and they run a pattern around your ship and draw a map for you... a lot will come down to the instrumentation we can build, the capabilities of the elements and so forth. I know that mining itself is going to be a human-only activity as they don't want to allow ships or drones do it since that would result in planet-wide devestation.
If we have the option of refining ore using a ship-borne refinery, we may have a prospector-refinery design so we don't want to fill our inventory with unrefined resources. I know that we store resources in our nanopacks but I don't know what the inventory capacity will be. Maybe we'll have room for a whole day's mining on our back. Maybe your inventory fills up after half an hour and you need to head back, in which case having cargo capacity on your prospector ship will be very valuable.
I've read that there will be different scanners for different materials. If these can be mounted shipboard, it may be convenient to have the full array of scanners available in the ship. It may be that a crew of prospectors need to work together, one on each type of scanner, which would result in a much larger ship. Or maybe we'll be able to script the scanners together so they fire in sequence and we can build a scanner map showing different kinds of resources. We may want a ship to run the scans then land and send out vehicles with their own cargo capacities that the miners drive to their targets while the ship moves to scan the next hex.
It all comes down to the business rules are for scanning for, mining, refining (if needed) and storing resources, and what elements are available. Will we know the depth of the resources when we detect them? Will there be deep resources that we have to dig down to even be able to scan for? Will we have to have ships that can drop off a mining camp with basic defensive systems, then run back to base to fill up with security forces, then return with a load of ore... so the ship may not be specialized at all.
Basically I'm saying what's important in my philosophy as a designer and scripter will be building vehicles that respond to rules, conditions, economic realities and the military situation. I think it's important to consider what will be possible and come up with some basic ideas for a variety of conditions so that as we discover the rules, capabilities and conditions, we'll be in a position to come up with efficient and cost-effective designs. I'm going to want to be able to quote a Return on Investment for the equipment I design, for example, so that people will know what they're buying.
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Only 101 backers to get to 8K, but still $54K to get to the stretch goal.
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*loudly eating popcorn*
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IMO there's no reason not to allow massive weapons in orbit, on the planetary surface and as spinal mounts on capital ships. The problem with a big weapon like that is that if you miss, you miss big, it's very slow to aim and very slow to reload/recharge. When it hits, yeah, it's spectacular. It might make sense for use in planetary bombardment, against space stations and against slow capital ships, but such weapons are usually very resource intensive and become sort of a self-licking ice cream cone, as you have to build an entire fleet of escorts in order to protect the Starship Yamato, then you have to build a second wave motion gun to protect the first, and if you ever lost one in battle it would be a massive expense and humiliation, if it breaks down your trillion credit ship is worthless until it gets repaired... so there may be a cool factor to it but if you can get the same job done for less money with less risk with conventional ships and defenses, folks will do that in the long run.
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Will TUs consist of the entire hex? I can understand in the countryside having 250 acres as a standard unit of territory, but in cities I would think those could get divided into smaller plots at some point. We'll have about 1000 hexes under the shield, so really the first 1000 people off the ship will have an enormous advantage if the TU is minimum 1k. Imagine owning a square km of downtown Manhattan - you're a multi billionaire. But can you subdivide a hex?
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You know the skill training system is right, when me and TrashWizard agree on it.
Fair enough
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The devs won't be adding weapons of mass destruction because the focus of this game is building, and players could lose too much too quickly. This has already been addressed pretty much.
To dish out a ton of damage, you'll need a ton of players, a ton of time, and a ton of weapons-fire (once Construct vs Construct is a thing). That way deconstruction is as labor intensive than construction (or more labor intensive).
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You sure can. Which is why you don't yell "HEY, LOOK AT ALL THESE FANCY IMPLANTS I HAVE!" You might be thinking "man, I'm so cyberpunk", what a guy like me sees though, is a pinyata.
Moral of the story, don't advertise how much mney people will make by killing you.
And sure, implants do make a difference in combat, but in turn are expensive due to all the skills involved with making them, then material costs, then shipping costs, then market taxes, yadda yadda and on top of all that, they can drop or be destroyed when you die. It's a balanced system.
And boy, we didn't even go into drugs and how much of an advantage and disadvantage they can be.
I'm playing Witcher 3 and my toxicity is always in the 70s.
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You allocate attributes at the start, depending on what you want to invest in skills, then, if you want MORE on a stat, you get implants (which drop on death, so... yeah, they are costly).
And that gives a real incentive to not die. But do the implants have to be personalized? Can I kill you and grab your implants or do they only work on you and are only valuable as salvage? Could I sell them back to you after resurrection? Lol... that could make from some interesting conversations.
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what?
well I personally would love to see the extinction though....
Endgame before the launch of DU 2.0: unstoppable berserkers show up and kick all of our asses, we pile back into the arkship, freeze up and get the hell out of Dodge and fly into a wormhole and an entirely new universe populated with alien races, weather, survival, all the stuff people were looking for that couldn't logically be added mid-game.
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Not really, no. Attributes dictate how fast you can train and how effective skilsl are. If you got 0 perception, you won't be getting any benefit from Heavy Guns Master level,because your perceptino is low.
Will there be levels then? Will you be able increase attributes through experience? Will you be able to enhance at attribute with an implant or a cybernetic replacement? I mean say you get a cyborg arm that gives you +2 ST and a -1 CH.
Problem with attributes like IQ and CH is that even though your character may not be smart or a good leader, the player could be and that's what matters.
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See? Now we are being honest! You are patronising, and I am a brat! That's how heated exchanges should go, not throwing age, gender or credit balance as factors in the discussion!
Still, the skill system ffrom EVE is tried and tested. It leaves you with the opportunity of playing the game and your skills upgradng regardless., of course, the skill system is so interwoven, that it take careful studying and some math to figure out the best build that suits one's playstyle. It's not a skill "tree", but more like a skill web.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with a skill web. I like the idea of a classless character system. I also don't want the skill development to be grinding, though if you shoot down a battleship with your frigate, maybe your character deserves something for that feat, I dunno. I know you shouldn't be able to kill people for XP like in a single player or instanced RPG. Though I think there should be drops and salvage and such.
Hmm... nothing to do with skills, but imagine if 4 years into this when there are wars raging all around, a berserker robot fleet shows up at our doorstep and we have to cooperate or face extinction. Someone discovers an artifact and it's actually a signal beacon that wakes up the berserkers... I don't know why that thought occurred to me.
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Realistically, you could just overwhelm the crust with so much energy that the stresses smash it into pieces. Stripping the planet of its crust will make it pretty worthless for a few hundred million years.
A Star Wars style complete destruction is probably the realm of fiction, or at least a Type III civilisation.
Having it in game is a little over the top. I mean, do you want millions of voices to cry out in terror, and then be suddenly silenced? It's too potentially devastating to completely wipe out a whole planet (and potentially destroy an organisation - what if the only other resurrection nodes are the Arkship, halfway across the universe where they own nothing?). There aren't even nuclear weapons in the game (apparently). I do hope we have high-powered weaponry to bombard cities from orbit though.
Star Wars is more of an SF fantasy than real science fiction. You can certainly devastate a planet with enough non-fantasy weapons to make it uninhabitable without building an ultimate weapon with the requisite 2m wide exhaust port. Heck, all you really need is a nice big rock and enough time and rocket power to drop it on your target.
How could there not be nuclear weapons though? I could see there being a prohibition against using them on planetary surfaces, one which could be broken by a sufficiently evil organization of course. And an organization should be vulnerable to extinction, especially if they put all their eggs in one planetary basket. But if you can make a nuclear reactor you can make a nuclear weapon.
Besides if they made a planet wrecker, whats to stop someone from using it on the arkworld? Would the shielded arkship be all that's left along with a 20 km wide hemisphere of mined out soil?
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Market
Take a look here. It's got plenty of information about how NQ is planning on doing player markets.
But regardless of market handling, I agree that we should have some ability to store databases of information. I currently have no preference to having a Storage element vs having access to an external database. I'm curious what NQ is thinking.
OK so the Market Units and Trade Service Units are predefined elements so the db connections for the economy are inside sealed classes, which is not to say totally unhackable but I'm sure it would be a whopping violation of TOS if someone figured out a way to directly access the trade database.
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After you shit yourself.
Now that would be a great sfx in the game, lol.
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I like this system
You have skills with points you allocate in and skills with no points. The skills with points in are what you are good at to begin with (the 'what role i think i want skills in').
The 0 skills can still be learnt, but the practice time between 0 and 1 is a long one, just like in real life, but then it gets easier until later knowledge.
It would be good, also, if skills could be linked to the scripts for the ai so that it doesnt become a two speed game (like space engineers) for coders and technoanderthals.
You want a scripting skill? You want the arkship to give you better default scripts for your gear when you use that skill? Don't forget that the coders are going to be spending time that they could be spending prospecting, mining, raiding etc writing code.
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As said before:
It wouldn't be wise to allow grinding as a training factor for skills. Why would you want to piss off players with little time to play the game, while a powergamer can train 20/7 - THAT would suck.
Carefully balanced skills which are trained offline have one major advantage: the introduce time. The devs can then roughly estimate when certain skills will be available to certain players. That ensures that big, badass ships/weapons, technologies won't be available from beginning, but with a delay.
Skills aren't the only thing needed to produce those big badass ships; we'll need tech development and rare resources. And why do people seem to think that spending 10 minutes a day using a skill to get a training bonus is grinding? It would not be required and it just speeds up a process that is happening anyway.
Sure, the devs are veteran EVE players. They're going to want to make their game different from EVE, fix the things they didn't like about EVE.
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Ye, you're braindead. EVE's lore is driven by players. Players build moon bases, factories and control the market. Deal with it, the Devs are veteran EVE players, they know the system rocks. And they will implement it
Deal with it. And FYI, I don't scout the age of everyone who disagrees with me, I don't base my arguements in arbitrary factors. But hey, keep stalking profiles, lol.Also, I plan on scamming a lot of people in-game. And the devs won't ban me
. Because they want that part of EVE. Yes, I am a capitalist whose motto is ''greed is good''. What nobody ever said tho is ''man I wish I could RP as my CSD major's years at the uni''. EVE has this system of skill training and it got an in-game org, EVE University, that teaches new players the ropes. Research it, or deliberately elect to be ignorant.
Bu-byeeeee!
I only did that because you called me son while acting like a brat.
If you could prioritize DU features...
in General Discussions
Posted
OK, so the tech and crafting skills and availability of necessary resources will be our contribution to crafting, and perhaps there will be some basic customization of the standard designs such as colors and maybe faceplate opacity, but for vanity gear you pay real world money. That's fine by me. Now that you mention it, letting the Harambe Corporation design their own custom codpieces may not be such a great idea.