Thokan
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Posts posted by Thokan
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Why walk when you can ride?
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So, if implemented, maybe slowly over time, you lose this "mana" or calories, and everything you do takes longer. You are slower to move around, you mine slower, and build slower. It never kills you, but slows you down. A lot of survival games have fast hunger/thirst loss. I feel like in a game like this, it would be very slowly so your game time doesn't revolve around eating and drinking water. The more you do in a short span of time though, the faster your mana drains.
If this becomes a thing though, it should be far down the road, focusing more on the bigger aspects like building and exploring. Put this up on the fridge and fetch it later when thinking of new levels to add to the game.
I like this.
If the devs ever feel like adding a stamina bar, why not just make the food affect the stamina regeneration in a minuscule way.
Say, if you want to perform stamina-draining tasks at a high rate you'd want to eat, say once every or other hour, and get a food buff to your stamina. And if you feel like eating food must be a requirement, then make the stamina regeneration slowly drop without food until it reaches near-zero after say 24 hours or something.
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You seem to assume logistics should not be a part of the game... at all.
You plan on going for a roam and PvP with your buddies? Pile up on supplies.
You can't call a game a "crafting sandbox". Is like calling a swiss army knife a bottle opener knife. It's an oxymoron.
You confuse emergent gameplay with "things I like". Emergent gameplay means something may be there for one use, but players utilise it for another. Agriculture makes green worlds preferable for farmers. It also makes agriculture a part of creating an underground base, as it provides survivability without dependency, like for outposts for PvPers and refuelling / resupplying outposts. It also means that people can choose to set up plantations near a trading zone, so that trading zone becomes a food producttion center. That's Emergent Gameplay.
What you consider your "their visiion of the game" is your vision of the game. But hey, I guess people who operate refuelling stations in the game are idiots as well, since they don't fit your vision. People who run logistics for a staging base of an org? Idiots, they don't craft, they use excel all day to figure out how to make supplies last until the next attack by their enemies. Traders? Idiots as well, they don't craft at all, they just run excel sheets to figure out margins of profit.
As JC said in his interview to Markeedragon, the game is about Risk and Reward. That means that if you plan on going for exploration to find a planet that is full of Unobtanium-1337, then you risk dying by survival elements. Fuel is one of those elements of survival. Like it or not, the armor a player has also will run of power for its functions , AKA, no infinity oxygen or infinite jetpack. If hunger is tied to the lore part of how the nanoformer works, I'll be fine with it, it only means the game becomes more risk and reward. You go away from a place where you can find food easily? You took a risk and you'll reap the rewards of it if you succeed. if not, you'll lose everything you got on your person.
It's that simple really. That's what Emergent Gameplay is about.
I do not assume anything about your logistics. If they implement mechanics and features that emerge logistics then goodie. I'd rather not see mechanics prone to logistics implemented just because logistics though. You seem hell-bent on wanting to implement features forcing people to perform gameplay you like, un-emergently. Kind of defeats the point in my opinion.
Emergent gameplay is about a set of simple but effective gameplay mechanics that give players the freedom to develop own functions and norms in-game and in the meta - not "annoying mechanics I like".
Have you any concept of mechanics potentially being a hindrance in a sandbox MMO? 'Cause that's all I'm saying. Implementing too many annoying mechanics and features is the opposite to emergent gameplay.
Quite the opposite, my dear man. They are not locked in, they NEED to venture out there to find food and pile it up. They NEED to go out there to find/craft fuel and pile it up. Then they can move on.
If you don't have such mechanics (doesn't matter what kind of resource runs out) then it leads to camping a base/stargate/traderoute 24/7 without the need of, as tweak said, supply lines. A reasonably large org across all TZs can do that with ease. If they need to worry about supply lines, you maybe got a less defended objective (freighters with supplies) to kill in order to hamper their efforts.
Such a mechanic can be a credit sink too, to handle inflation. There are not many sinks in a game like DU so the few we got need to be worthwhile
As I've stated several times, I do indeed welcome mechanics fitting to the theme, vision and game genre. I do however deplore the implementation of mechanics just for the sake of implementing mechanics in a game with a vision of emergent gameplay.
I do look forward to broad mechanics for fuel and oxygen giving emergent gameplay.
Also, as a sidenote. It can be argued that resource-based supply system has little to no effect on large organizations. Depending ofcourse on the implementation of said mechanic, it might even give large organizations an advantage considering they have larger access to resources than other entities in-game. But meh.
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It's a sandbox MMORPG. It's as much about crafting, as it is about anything else.
Food and depletion of it, means that griefers gotta bail back to their base. It also means that an organisation within a safezone can be sieged and forced to surrender (aside from other factors, like possible renting of space within safezones).
What, should the game also have no fuel for a ship? So people can perma-camp an area 24/7 ?
You need to think those aspects as well. Having a depleting bar of hunger, only makes the game more dynamic - and adds variety in gameplays.
Just because you like crafting doesn't mean that everyone else's gameplay should be ignored. I don't give a damn about spaceship battles, I don't claim "the game is about ground combat, we don't need spaceboats".
Von Oben.
It also means "pirates", explorers and lonewolves are locked to their bases. A mechanic doesn't add positively to the game just because it is a mechanic. More layers of mechanics doesn't equal more depth. How can you create emergent gameplay if you are constrained by mechanics?
As I said I would much rather see mechanics, such as oxygen, fitting to their vision and this game genre in general.
I'm not even particularly fond of crafting. I just recognize DU to be a sandbox, crafting MMORPG, not a survival game. My point is a food mechanic would either be an annoyance to the broader populace or an unnecessary mechanic to the minority who wants another bar to fill.
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Food meters are for survival games, not crafting MMOs. If I have to just once stop what I am doing to go fetch food then the mechanic is nothing more than an annoyance.
Fine if it's just buffs and giggles, but is it really worth the effort of implementing a food growing mechanic then?
I'd much rather see NQ focus more on immersive mechanics for oxygen.
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A pirate is just a themed PvP:er. It has nothing to do with if the person is a douchebag or not, or if the PvP victims finds the person griefing - with the exception of abuse of mechanics, exploits, bugs, et cetera.
This thread puts a lot of effort to glorifying simple PvP:ers. The game mechanics, the majority of individuals and the majority of guilds/orgs in-game will not judge you differently for your theme. I just don't see the point.
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I do thoroughly enjoy the idea of players building antennas enabling communication via chat in the large vicinity allowing people outside the organization of that geographical area easier communication for trade and whatnot. Simply that is all the emergence you need and is in itself brilliant.
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Is there any advantage of building objects which don't fly?
A tank may look cool...but a ship is faster, probably better armed and very much superior
Yes, indeed, air superiority will surely be the most important factor in large scale combat. However, there will as surely be places where a flying ship can't go, and surely people will try to counter the air superiority. Ground vehicles will have their place, but most assuredly not in the way ships have.
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On top of that, at some point people will just get too far apart and no longer interact with each other. You see that a ton as well. Even down to small ecosystems like a minecraft server. People move out really far from the center in order to find some security and a nice looking place to build. Soon everyone is so far apart it's too much trouble getting to each other anymore. In a game like DU, people are going to naturally stay closer to each other due to markets and trading. So more likely than moving really far out to live, they will colonize near the markets and then move out to mine, bringing the resources back to their more centrally located bases. This will create a large dead zone around the markets of fairly trashed planets. You'll then have to move even farther out to find resources and it just increases the time sink. I'm sure this is where warp gates will come into play, but really, depending on how that whole system works all you're doing is buying a temporary reprieve each time to make a gate. People will colonize near the gate for ease of travel and then lay waste to a ring around it.
What do you base this on? Organizations will value resources more than proximity to trade. There is really no telling if there'll even be "market-hubs" naturally erupting instead of just big organizations trading with eachother and inter-neighbour trade. I personally highly doubt the former in favor of the latter ones.
To balance that (keeping in mind that it is off course really hard to predict anything at this point), I can see established players or organisations ferrying new players out off the starting area/planet for a couple of reasons:
-New players, would be one of the most valuable resources for competitive organisations, and these would surely invest into a couple of recruiters and "space-buses" at spawn areas to snatch up new recruits. Depending on the population of the game, and the level off competition between factions, new players could be faced with a very large choice of organisations and frequent departures of ships to these destinations.
-For the same reason, as the game matures, and given the right game mechanics the starting planet's economy might develop to be centered on new players, with accomodation, jobs, storage, as well as organisations dedicated to the interstellar/interplanetary transport of new players once they've earned enough money to pay for the ticket, but not enough to pay for their own space/jump worthy space-craft.
-Some charitable people/organisations might help out new players by handing out starter ships, or organizing free transportation though I wouldn't count too much on it.
This is not necessarily the case, in the real world for example ground resources in Europe are pretty much depleted, but it is still a main hub of activity as it has stable governments, high population, a lot of infrastructure, and can easily import what it needs raw material wise from abroad.
If the right mechanics are in place, the same thing could arise in this game as well. As long as there is enough value in land and the infrastructure already built, and the cost of buying raw materials is not too high (depending on the ease of ferying materials from the ressource rich places to the resource depleted ones), people are not going to abandon depleted places.
If all the mechanics are well designed, having depletable resources could create different places specialized in producing different things, which besides making the game world more interesting would be a great thing for trade gameplay, as it will be profitable for merchants to ferry ressources from the fringes to the core, and on the return trip to bring back manufactured stuff like ships, weapons, components, food or whatever is in need on the fringes due to the lack of efficient manufacturing/farming there.
And more trade would mean more piracy, which in turn will provide a need of policing/protection of trade routes by government or mercenary forces, and the list goes on.
All this to say that places can still be important hubs of activity even after the depletion of their resources, if the gameplay mechanics are done right. And to be done right, the mechanics need to ensure that the cost of importing raw materials is not too high and that there are big incentives for people living in depleted areas to not move out.
I normally find comparing a game with simple mechanics to the global economy of the real world with all of its complexities yields nothing.
or some sort of npc mission to build a basic ship
Bam! Jackpot! You hit the nail on the head sir. This won't just only bypass the need for the starter area having to sustain new players but it also, with the simplest of mechanics, gives the new players a mean to travel from the starter zone and actually start playing the game. Make it slow, dumb and useless but make it fly.
Suddenly there is no need to regenerate any minerals at all.
And hey, just because the resources are finite doesn't mean they will ever run out.
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The reason why despotic leaders are the norm for player groups in MMOs is firstly because the groups are smaller and it is generally easier to just run it despotically. Secondly, it takes effort to maintain a democracy. Within a run of the mill player group with one person in charge it takes one person to make a decision. For a democracy a majority of the player group must care enough to put in an effort to even have a viewpoint on matters.
Most people play games to escape responsibilities, some will bother to pay attention to the game's guild versus guild meta game; very few will bother to care about guild meta.
That being said, my heart ticks for democratic player groups. I do hope some cool meta structures appears for some organizations.
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To simply add another voice to the choir before the devs rightfully decides to lock this memefest.
I do not see the point of using DACs for "emergent gameplay" for the sake of it - whatever the consequences it would lead to letting it be lootable. The whole game idea and vision seeps with "emergent gameplay". There is no point of throwing DACs in there too.
The DACs is a wonderful idea, allowing players to buy game-time with in-game means thus rewarding players and tying the in-game economy to the real meta one.
However, I do not see the point of making DACs lootable. "Emergent gameplay" is about enjoyable game content, created by players - for players. Not punishing players, least of all with losing real life money and investment. I myself am perfectcly, more than, happy having the DACs in my inventory as unlootable objects.
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For water to behave like in real life it takes a heavy load of calculating and development. With the team's main goals in mind I don't think we will see any intricate system for water/fluids any time soon, or at all.
Keep in mind that the server performance will be heavily burdened calculating players and objects/constructs in this open world of theirs.
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Believe it or not, most people fund crowdfunded games because they identify with the creators' visions, not because they want to hop on the early access forums and make random ass suggestions - or explain to people why ultra-realistic mechanics and Guitar Hero systems arent always good ideas for that matter.
All early access forums are pretty much alike since they share a concept. One thing they all certainly have in common is that the sociable early access members are a minority.
That doesnt mean this community is bad, or small, or anything - just that it's unrealistic to demand all funders to be socially active on the forums.
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Probably not. How would you balance something like that? It would be a useless addition that would cause only grief.
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Almost certainly not. How would you do third person mode on a multicrew ship and you're the engineer? The great thing about DU is that it'll make spaceship battles with proper, large ships actually different to fighting with small ships. It's not just "click on opponent, fire". You've got a large ship, with a lot of potential blind spots - you need ways to get around it and work out where your enemies are, whether that's via LUA-coded radar or looking out of lots of windows and telling the bridge.
Indeed. Especially since in the beginning we will mostly all have small single-seated vehicles. 3rd person is a lot better from that aspect.
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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?
TUs will contain a whole hex, and you cannot subdivide a hex - only the other way around, as in you can organize multiple hexes together into one unit with same Rights and Duties.
What you are looking for - to organize a number of different people in one geographical position, like a city - is the Rights and Duties Management System. ( https://devblog.dualthegame.com/2015/05/21/rights-duties-management-system/ ). With the help of different tags and hierarchal tag trees you will be able to organize a large quantity of different people to different objects, duties, roles and such.
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Yes indeed. "Protective bubbles" will protect your home from attacks, and is designed to be affordable even for solo players.
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I have a hard time seeing people building cubes in a tactical sense since the only tactical value more voxels bring is more, inefficiently placed, ship health/armor. It would be far more tactically sound to just build another ship and have twice the fire power than having to conform to building in a certain object shape.
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You'll have two things in our favor, One, this is a voxel based game on a MMO scale and thus building will require a lot more resources or, probably rather, gathering time making it inefficient to trying to "troll" someone.
Secondly you may purchase/craft a Territory Unit and simply claim a Territory Tile as your own and set rights and duties accordingly - deciding who may build on your tile. This will most probably be the goal of every lone wolf or small group of people wanting to set up a place of their own.
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They have outlined in dev diaries they aim to make the elements as realistic as possible i.e even the most careless shipbuilder would have to follow some principles of logic.
Seeing as ships will take some time to build atleast smaller aircraft and vehicles will probably mostly be of sleek design because of thriftiness. It would take considerable more resources to turn a one-man aircraft from a sleek design into a penis, for example. Very inefficient.
Who knows what organizations of childish people and crafty teenagers will come up with though.
Windows or a way to making voxels transparent
in Builder Forum
Posted
Meh, what's so wrong with faking windows with the old camera-to-screen solution. Windows outside orbit doesn't make much sense anyways.