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Ben Fargo

Alpha Team Vanguard
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Everything posted by Ben Fargo

  1. I am completely against anything to limit or discourage people from uploading logos because someone might make one that is inappropriate. The ones who upload the inappropriate images should be penalized, not everyone else. If constructs do not need to be preapproved, there is no reason to require it for logos.
  2. I would never wear some of those types, but if some people want to, that is fine with me. I do not consider any of these immersion-breaking, since our present is the game's past, so ideas we have now could affect what is worn then.
  3. It sounds like the developers are getting close to the final versions of some elements. When they are done, I hope they tell us the length, width and height of each one. That information would be helpful when designing constructs that use them.
  4. I like the direction the artwork for the elements has taken. It has a good balance between suggesting new, unfamiliar technology and seeming designed to be functional.
  5. The description of the RN does not actually say it moves you to a new universe. It says the RN will "switch one universe with another." It could just be another way of saying you move to another universe, but it seems a little odd. It would be something like saying when you walk, you remain still and the earth moves underneath you. However, it then says you are dead in one universe and in the RN in the other, so it sounds like you are part of the universe that is switched. To me it implies it "deactivates" one universe and "activates" another, although as I understand the many worlds interpretation, no world is more "active" than any other.
  6. First of all, the many worlds interpretation is just that...an interpretation. There's really only one reality, but it's a quantum mechanical wave and we can't experience it in that form, so our minds have to interpret it as something we can. At one time, people thought consciousness was sort of like a particle that followed a path in subjective space determined by the shape of the reality wave. Since it followed one specific path, a person would only experience one of the possibilities the reality wave represented. They referred to this as collapsing the wave, but the wave itself didn't actually change. Eventually, we found out consciousness has both a wave-like and a particle-like nature. The consciousness wave spreads out to follow the reality wave, so we do experience all of its possibilities, but each one distinctly. They're separated not in time, but in a completely subjective dimension. We call them different "worlds", but they're actually just different sets of sensations. If they were different worlds, there would be different people in them, no matter how much they resembled us, but there's only us in this one, very complex reality. The idea behind quantum immortality is that a conscious wave can always continue in some directions even if the reality wave blocks most of them. Say I'm on my ship and we're boarded by pirates. I come face to face with one of the pirates and we're standing there pointing guns at each other. Of course, in a situation like that the pirate's probably going to kill me, but there's a small chance I kill her first. The probability of that is probably only a fraction of a percent, but it won't be zero, so there's a place where my conscious wave can go on. If that happens anyway, why do we need resurrection nodes? Well, think about me and the pirate. We both experienced killing each other, so our conscious waves are now going in completely different directions and can never interact again. We're living in different "worlds". What the resurrection node does is create another possibility, one where even though the pirate kills me, our conscious waves still go in the same direction so we can meet again and I can try to get back the stuff she stole from me. It wouldn't be easy, but if I had a good enough argument, I might be able to convince her. A resurrection node creates a copy of a person's body, which opens another direction for their conscious wave to flow. Since it does that, people sometimes wonder why they can't use them while they're still alive, so they could for instance become the whole crew of a ship by themselves. That doesn't work because the conscious wave would need to double up on itself to allow the same mind to exist more than once in the same "world" and that just can't happen. ((This is my example of how one character might think about quantum immortality and resurrection nodes. It does not necessarily represent either real life science or Dual Life science accurately.))
  7. There is a small contradiction between the lore bible and the devblog. The lore bible was written latter, so I suspect that is the current intention. There was another entry in the devblog that said the following: "Everything else in the universe will be left unchanged, where it is, including your partners, your inventory, your ship or whatever your were doing before you “quantum-died”: everything remains on-site, and you wake up naked in a RN." Whether we lose everything, or almost everything, it seems this will be a game where people will need to take death seriously.
  8. Actually, according to the lore, someone who dies does lose everything. This is a quote from the lore bible: "The amount of matter to switch increases the energy cost of the operation, so RN teleport only the minimal set of mass to get the desired effect, which is... your naked body."
  9. I think the size of the crew should depend the number of elements that need to be operated, not the size of the ship. Elements would include not only weapons, but things like sensors and shields. It would be reasonable for a very large freighter to require fewer crew members than a much smaller warship.
  10. I got this impression from something JC said in the video of the GDC meet-up, but I think I misunderstood what he said. At about minute 42, he talks logging out, then logging back in and finding yourself drifting in the middle of nowhere. I listened to it again tonight and now I think he is talking about the whole ship drifting away, but before that I assumed he meant you were left where your ship had been. Part of the problem was the audio was not the best, but most of it was just the way I reacted to the words. In my mind, if I'm on my ship, I'm in a special place, I'm home, so when I heard "middle of nowhere", I jumped to the conclusion that meant not being on a ship. Sorry for the confusion. It seems I have a solution to a non-existent problem.
  11. As I understand it, when players log off, their avatar will disappear. When they log in again, their avatar will reappear at the same location. If they were on a ship and the ship moved away while they were logged off, they would no longer be on it when they log in. This is a serious problem. Either the ship can only move when the entire crew is logged in or it may need to frequently go back and pick up those who were left behind. This will be trouble even for small crews, especially if they live in different time zones, but it could make large crews impractical. A solution would be to give the players the option of leaving their avatars in the game as a physical objects when they log off. Then the avatar would be carried along with the ship as it moves and still be on board when the player comes back. Since the avatar was still present, it could be attacked and it would be basically defenseless with the player logged off, so players would only want to do this in places they felt were relatively safe. Logging off in this way could put the avatar into a sleeping position, so anyone seeing it would know the player was logged off. It would be desirable, but not necessary, to design ships with designated sleeping areas where the sleeping avatars could be kept without getting in the way of other activities.
  12. One way of implementing roads would be to make the amount of energy a hovercraft uses depend on the height it hovers at. Hovering at ten meters would use more energy than hovering at a few centimeters. It would be difficult to hover that low on rough terrain without colliding with the ground, so it would only be practical on flat surfaces. This seems realistic and it does not require any special elements or materials. Roads would just be long, flat voxel constructions. Since they would save energy, there would be an economic incentive to build them on frequently traveled routes.
  13. I am satisfied with the once a month videos. I think it is enough to let us know what is going on without taking up more of their time.
  14. I was fascinated by the pattern the connections create. Is there any significance to the length of the connection between a person and an organization? For me at least, they correspond well to how closely I feel attached to the organization. Thanks very much for doing this.
  15. Both the ship and presentation of it are very well done. With designs like that, I expect your company to be very successful.
  16. I think the transporter should be able to steal the cargo, but there should be consequences for doing that. The consequences, however, should be determined and enforced by the social structures the players create, not by the mechanics of the game. To me, this is primarily a game about building a civilization. That means the game must allow problems like this to exist, so players can try to find a way to solve them. The conditions of the job, including who takes the risks and what happens if the cargo is not delivered, should be determined by the transporter and the customer, or by the organizations they belong to. Having the solution built into the game would probably be more effective, but to me, much less interesting.
  17. My expectation is that instead of a few large organizations, there will be a multitude of small to medium-sized ones, each with its own specialty. These will not be connected by a hierarchy, but by a network of commercial transactions. They will interdependent, so none of them will really dominate the others. If I am right, organizations will not have the resources to build whole cities. There will be organizations that govern cities, but the buildings in them will belong to many different organizations, who will usually hire other organizations to design and build them. I do not know if this has happened in any other game, but I expect Dual Universe to be different than anything that has come before. In particular, it will have a very powerful system for defining organizations and with it, I think the organizations will resemble those in the real world, more than those in other games. Companies are outsourcing functions they formerly had internal departments for. Cities that were built around one huge factory are now surrounded by industrial parks filled with many different businesses. It is just my guess, but I think we will see those same trends in Dual Universe.
  18. I think trying to add all of those features initially would be a bad idea. Even implementing them poorly could add a considerable amount of time to development. Also, bugs do not necessarily limit their effect to the routines that contain them. Rushing in some additional features might cause some core systems in the game to fail. While we should respect the developers' decisions to delay features, I think that should not discourage us from suggesting the things we would like to see in the game someday. I have found that if I do not have time to implement something now, having even a vague idea of what I might change later makes it easier when I do. On the other hand, changing something that is implemented the wrong way can be much more difficult than adding something that is not in the software at all.
  19. I like variety, both on each planet and between planets. Planets should contain a number of different biomes, and every planet should be unique in some way. I hope to visit all of the biomes listed and more.
  20. Congratulations to the winners and thank you all of my fellow contestants.
  21. If food is introduced to Dual Universe, it should be done in a way that is as unobtrusive as possible. It should be something people only need to think about when they do not have enough of it. My suggestion for doing that uses three new kinds of elements: dispensers, preservation units and preparation units. The purpose of a dispenser would be to ensure people were fed. Each dispenser would have a capacity and a range. Capacity would be the number of people it could feed and range would determine the how close people had to come to it to be fed. Eating would be what I call a background task, which means it is something we assume happens even when it is not depicted in the game. As long as people periodically came within the range of an available dispenser, they would be considered fed and would not need to do anything else about food. Dispensers with greater capacity and range should require more resources to build. The smallest range would be only the construct the dispenser was built in. Dispensers in constructs with larger cores would have a larger potential range and so be more costly to make. There would also be dispensers that could cover a whole hexagon/pentagon territory or even several adjacent territories. Like any element, dispensers would have rights associated with them, so they could be designated to only feed certain people. Each dispenser would need one or more storage units attached to it to hold the food. Food that was stored too long would spoil unless the storage had a preservation unit connected to it. If it did, the food could remain in it indefinitely without spoilage. An alternative would be to have elements that combined preservation and storage in one unit. A preparation unit would be an optional element that made food more effective. It might let the same amount feed more people, it might make the period of time people remain fed longer or it might have other benefits. Small capacity units could look like kitchen appliances while larger ones would probably have a more industrial appearance. If some was going to be outside the range of a dispenser for an extended period of time, they would need to carry or find food and eat it occasionally. In the wilderness, how much and how often a person eats should require a conscious decision and be a deliberate action. This also applies if a settlement or a ship is attacked and its dispensers are disabled or destroyed. For role playing purposes, eating should be an optional action even when dispensers are available. Producing the food and the effects of eating or not eating food are also important considerations, but I consider those different topics.
  22. Congratulations, Kurock. I really enjoyed your story.
  23. I agree an organization should be able to designate someone to buy and sell for it, but as I understand the RDMS, that kind of right would be given to a member, not a legate. For example, if an organization was modeled as a corporation, the stockholders would be the legates. Even though they owned the corporation, they would not have the right to buy or sell its assets. There would be certain employees (members) who could do that.
  24. Pirates attack people to rob them. This distinguishes from, for example, someone who is defending their territory, although both would be PvPers. I consider someone's motive extremely important. Knowing it may help me negotiate with them if they attack or even avoid the attack completely.
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