Ben Fargo
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Posts posted by Ben Fargo
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I agree DU should be designed to avoid isolating designers as much as possible, but I also do not want that to hamper people's ability to design in it. The advantage of designing in DU, instead of separate 3D modeling software, is that it would be immediately apparent if someone tried to design something that was not possible to build.
In real life, designing and building tend to be distinct, but in a game like DU, they can blur together, since the methods we use for building in a game are often very much like those we use for designing in real life. Being limited to scaffolding could make building more interesting, but it would just be a frustration when designing, when a person wants to express their ideas as easily as possible.
One way of preventing people from always using factories to build constructs would be to have a relatively high set-up cost for loading a new blueprint. That would make it very expensive to use a factory to build a one of a kind construct, while it would still be advantageous to use it to produce a large number from the same blueprint.
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I was very happy to see the Building Helper. By giving instant feedback as changes are made, it means designing ships will be very accessible, even though the the propulsion system is complex.
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There is a cost to uploading and storing images, so I would not mind a reasonable charge for that. However, I would not like permitting only certain players to upload logos or making the charge so high it discourages people from having even a sensible amount of them.
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The most harm a damaged heat sink could do should depend on how the script that runs the reactor is coded. It should be able to either lower the output (partially or completely) if it starts to overheat or let it run normally and possibly explode. That would let the player choose what risk to take.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It may be real but it does seem weird. My main issue with the RN is that it saves you by moving you to a new universe, but to everyone else you are still dead. Jim may still be alive in a different universe but to those in the universe he was in, Jim is very dead.
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.
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Gl then with that org when every member has the right to mess with the community page. In-game it would be manageable with rdms, depending what other stuff legates can do. Outside of the game (forum, community page) they can edit and delete everything
That is true. I was only thinking about organizations in-game.
When the game launches, the consequences for the forum and community page should not limit the structure of organizations in-game. Either the rdms should also include the rights for those things outside the game or it should be possible to designate legates/members differently inside the game than outside of it.
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Hello everyone (colonists/arkers)
So I was thinking about the ressurection nodes and how it works. Somehow these things save our qauntum fingerprint and in the event of (unnatural) death it transports your fingerprint into a reality that closest matches your own.
Now purely from the standpoint of my character, it makes me very uncomfortable.
I mean, how would you deal with that knowledge? Everything looks the same but it isnt. To make it worse, your psyche got planted in a many worlds copy/version of yourself.
Psychologically thats enough to drive a sane person insane.
How would our characters cope with it?
Lots of diversion? A sense of nihilism?
Or would we have been chosen to deal with such an unusual way of life? How about natural death?
If reality is infinite so are the possibilities. Does that imply that somewhere natural death is eliminated. Or what about that reality where earth wasnt destroyed?
Feel free to share your thoughts.
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.))
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...What I was wondering is if, when you log out and log back in, your active and inactive tags will remain the same or will you always log in with your personal tag as the only active one?
I think the best way of handling this would be to make it an option so each player can choose what happens when they log in. They could pick either themselves, one specific organization or the same organization as when they logged out. That would be determine who they represented each time they logged in, until they changed the option.
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You certainly don't want all your members to be legates....
Actually, that is exactly what I want. A legate is person who can vote, so that is just another way of saying in a democracy, all members are voters. Of course, in a large organization, having everyone vote on each decision would tend to be impractical, which is why they can delegate their votes. That makes the democracy a republic, but the members would still be legates.
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- Can a true democracy exist when only legates can vote?
If all members of an organization were legates, it would be a democracy.
I have several questions of my own.
- Can an organization prohibit legates from delegating their votes? Can it force everyone to vote for themselves?
- Can an organization set the number or percentage of votes needed to approve a decision? Can it say some decisions require a unanimous vote while others just need a simple majority?
- Can an organization assign a tag to a power and then not assign the tag to anyone? For example, if the organization had an asset that was very important to it, such as a ship, could it assign a tag to the power of selling that asset and keep that tag in reserve. This would mean the asset could only be sold if the legates vote and decide to assign that tag to some member.
- Since organizations can be members of other organizations, can an organization assign tags to them like it can to player members? Would that mean anyone representing the tagged organization would in effect have that tag?
- Sunrider44, Astrophil and Lord_Void
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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.
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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.
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Where did you get the impression people wouldn't be in their ships after they logged back in?
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Both the ship and presentation of it are very well done. With designs like that, I expect your company to be very successful.
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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.
Jetpack alternatives and "safe-designing"
in Idea Box
Posted
This is a quote from the wiki about jetpacks and building.
"Within a building zone, a special jetpack mode can be entered whereby the player has very precise control of their position. Their motion is exact (no drifting), and they can reach all parts of the construct."
A player has to place a core to use the building mode for a jetpack and they will be limited by the size of construct that could be built for that core. I think that would generally make it impractical to use the building mode for anything but building.
An important thing to consider is that DU or any game can not make a player better at building than they actually are. There are many other things were the player's character could do things the player would not be able to do, so limits need to be put in the game. For example, a character could mine a whole planet at once or travel anywhere in the galaxy in an instant, but allowing that would make the game pointless. Building does not need the same kind of artificial limits.
Building depends on how creative the player is, so I do not think there is any reason to make it more difficult. To me, the satisfaction from building is seeing how well I can create something that is hopefully both beautiful and functional. Making the process of building more tedious does not add to that satisfaction.