DevisDevine

Incase you still dont understand, heres an example of what he means, something that happened in Eve. The exact details are fuzzy because it happened when I was quitting the game. Some players found out if you dropped your signature strength low eneough, into the negative, it would roll over the address bytes assigned to that value on the server to a really high value, as it was never programmed to handle a negative number. This gave them an insanely high number for this stat, which allowed them to always track and hit any target. It was an exploit that was quickly fixed, but I think Ward wants to know how will NQ handle the players that utilized this exploit. Eve had some bugs you were allowed to exploit and others you couldnt. Will NQ let it go until the fix it (if they decided to) or ban any player doing it? Some players may not have known. Personally I am for, fix the exploit but dont ban players that utilized an ingame feature. Hell even the Disband of Brothers happened because a game mechanic that was in place but never intended to be used in that way.

Supporting fluid mechanics and supporting voxel fluid mechanics on a multi-instance server are 2 differnt beast. You will have to rework your calculations with every change made to the voxel structure. And you also have to determine the state of all the voxels in the structure as it is ever changing. Imagine having to determine every time a voxel is removed, which block replaces it, and the cascade effect that would cause as it is another update. NQ decided not to have gravity effects when removing the earth from a planet due to similar issues with calculating the effect. Water will be worse as it can flow in the horizontal as well as vertical directions.

How is any of this different than any other kind of intercept. If you are matched in speed and acceleration it is hard to intercept. And differences in these values will be amplified the longer it goes. With orbital, we are just working on a differnt scale. Instead of 17m/s its 17,000 m/s. And remember, they intend for smaller ships to be capable of faster accelerations than large ships or even stations.

That made me think of the Britney Spears vibe. While you could design something to look like your cockpit, the actual functional cockpits and control seats will be redesigned meshes. And currently they are planned to be designed by NQ only as a component you craft and place. On AIs, it is said you can make one advanced enough to make an AI drone, but somehow I dont think voice responses will be ontop of their list of feature to impliment. It would be nice though.

Well a benifit for a moving/orbiting platform is that an enemy cant easily target it. You cant drop out of FTL and know its exact coordinates to target and fire on. I used this in SE once. I built layers of gravity around my base. Inside the sphere was 0G, for 400m there was a -10g outward push to deflect kinetic projectiles, and outside of that was a -1g then a +1g band each ~25m wide (- is out from the center in this case). This band allowed me to set satellites in orbit. I had calculated the rough orbital velocity needed, but kept on the low side, relying on the -1g band to push the satellite back into orbit. These were literally a gun, mass block, and reactor. But i set a bunch orbiting around my base so if anyone attacked they couldnt easily be targeted and constantly moved for new vantage points to take out hidden targets. As for your orbital descriptions, thats not necessarily true. Remember you can always change orbits, assuming you have fuel for the delta-V required. It is assumed our propulsion systems are much more advanced than now. So you could accelerate in a lower orbit and come around quicker, or burn more fuel and stay in the same orbit, just thusting faster and slightly into the planet to stay in orbit. Also your targeting window assumes head on patch, not chasing or matching orbits.

We intend to do something similar, but it will be a small fleet of ships. A massive capital ship, that either lands and acts as the base of operations, or smaller equipment ships for any planetary operations. Miners to go out and harvest asteroids, and a few larger combat escorts with lots of drone ships covering us.

There have been a few post specifically on Life support and environmental conditions. The reasoning against it from the Devs is the resource cost to determine an enclosed space for those enviroments. Sure it can be done, but on a game this scale every bit of resource usage matters.

I like them more for the idea of easily replacing my ships, rather than buying someone elses design. But I intend to have a few designs of smaller ships on the market.

Dude are you kidding me. Can you imagine, you breach the hull of my capital ship, entering the hangar and Bama, theres a giant T-rex waiting for you. After fighting you way past and loose half your men you get into the corridors where I have packs of raptors roaming and waiting for you. Then I genetically modify a massive dinosaur whale for my support ships and they just eat your smaller vessels. But ARK is good, I agree the optimizaion sucks, but its Alpha (or do they call it Pre-Alpha) either way its not finalized. They are doing good things and rapidly adding content. But its still not what DU is going for.

This would be a pretty interesting idea, and could lead into research and breading of different types of organic matter to use for components. They could follow the same basis as the standard ships being build. But instead of a metal they would have an organic block. It wouldnt need to be blocky, as the design tool being proposed allows for curves and slopes, so you could make any ship look organic. I think the regeneration would be a unique property of it, but that would be a feature that would have to be coded into the game. I would think it would be a large endevor, that while worth it, the devs may not want to touch atm. However, Kick starter stretch goal? I like the thought of that because the same mechanics used here could be used for the nanobot repair system I proposed. Well at least in the coding level, as far as what we would see they could seem to operate differently.

There could always be automated defenses to blow them up. Maybe in in the atmosphere have some set proportional scale based on mass. But defiantly not based on aerodynamics.

Well i dont know so much about weight limits. The Kadpacks have antigrav tech if you read the lore. But they will have a storage limit for compression. And I would assume a limit to how many kadpacks you could hold personally. And it is assumed some BP's would be available form the ark and others found but that is unknown fully. But yes, you will slowly build higher tech items. There was even mention of more advanced ways to mine, presumably faster, by building a drill machine.

That drag from the hydrogen atoms only comes into place at a significant fraction of C. Unless you are in the atmosphere you can assume there is no drag. And for lag sake, I am sure NQ will forgo implementing drag as it will increase the CPU cost to run the game.

That really just look like light glare off the edge of the wing. As for color, yes we are supposed to be able to. I think it was the voxel dev blog that mentioned wanting 2 types of paint systems, fine, hard edged, and more of an airbrush to do blending. Now I recall mention of this actually replacing the voxels, so the question is will I have to use steel for grey and copper for orange? Or will it actually be paint over whatever material I choose.

Well, it may not be as fun, but DU doesnt plan on doing collisions ATM. To resource intensive. I would assume ships would bounce, sort of like EVE, but its said there will be no collision damage. Which sucks for dropping asteroids on peoples bases.

Well remember from the lore the Ark ship didnt have FTL. We dont know how that came about, many of us here suspect the Ark AI was doing experiments and research for the 10,000 year trip and developed it. So that will allow us to travel between system much faster. We dont know how far it traveled from earth, but at sub light speeds, having to enter a system to scan it accurately, It may not have been very far. It at least wouldnt be very many systems inspected. Furthermore the AI states 'minimum parameters met' i n the lore. We dont know what those are, there could have been planets that could support life, but not meet the parameters set by the Earth engineers. From some of the Dev responses, we also dont expect all planets we visit to be habitable. Some may be harsh environments requiring protection. As for types of planets, we dont know. They are procedurally generated, so there will be infinite variety in them. But as far as being say a gas giant, barren rock, frozen ice, earthlike, life baring but alien. We dont know. We also dont know the distances or the travel time by FTL between systems.

Well it was at least suggested a while back that this will be the case. The game is supposed to work on newtonion physics, and fuel weight has come up often when discussing the overall ships performance. As for system travel, there will be at least 2 methods of FTL. One will be an FTL drive on your ship, allowing you to travel anywhere you like (including across a system it is assumed). The second would be the stargates. These are large investment structures that require infrastructure on either end, but offer nearly instantaneous travel. It is not known if it will be a 1 gate to 1 gate linkage or a multi gate network. But I doubt you will see these linking 2 points in a single system.

I would suggest you read the Dev blogs here: https://devblog.dualthegame.com You questions are mostly answered in there and it is a good place to start to get an idea of the game. . But in short. Yes, eve online was an inspiration, as well as Minecraft. Those were the primary 2 given but theres a host of others. There can be wars if you choose, there can be politics, there will be a player driven economy like eve. As for wars and politics, that is up to the players. It is emergent game play, driven by what players want to do. There is no set 'corporation' and 'alliance' structure like eve. Instead there is a tag system that allows you to assign rights, duties, salaries, usage fees, and a host of other things. With the tag system you can create any form of orginization you want, weather it be democracy or a dictatorship. The relevent dev blogs are here: https://devblog.dualthegame.com/2015/05/21/rights-duties-management-system/ https://devblog.dualthegame.com/2015/03/20/organizations-build-your-corporation-faction-nation-or-empire/ As for First person, there will be first person, and hopefully third person view as well. Everything will be voxel based, meaning the terrain will be destructible and mineable. All ships and builds you build will be construct made of voxels. Additionally there will be mesh based components that add functionality to your construct if you choose. If you have played Space Engineers or Planet Explorers, you will have an idea of how the system will work.

Sorry, I forgot to post this last week. I guess it was luck, or maybe it indicated what we would find out here, but there was a midsized planet with a breathable atmosphere and plenty of wildlife. A bit alien from Earth and Alioth, but scanners show it would sustain us. This planet didn’t have a ring system, but it did contain 2 small moons with very dense cores and a nearby asteroid belt. The sun was a white dwarf, shining 50% brighter in the sky than Alioth’s sun did. Further out there were 2 gas giants that with any luck could provide volatile fuels when we develop the tech to harvest and process it. Drak had taken over piloting the ship again, and we all shut off our VR to watch as he approached the planet for landing. We set own on a vast grassy plains near the edge of a forest, or at least this planets version of one. Hartomo, Kloydeb, Draggos, and I poured out of the craft, weapons ready, as we cleared the perimeter. Rex and Yak headed into the forest to search for possible energy sources. Drak and Dirk began setting shelter up, a small fort like structure with 2 turrets atop pillars and a low wall that surrounded the craft. We encountered no life forms in the area, likely scared off as we landed, but scanners indicated midsized animals that could possibly be aggressive. Once the shelter was in place I returned to the court yard and with Dirks help began crafting my new miner from the VR blueprint I created the week prior. After setting up our fabricators for advanced components drak began construction the scout ship so he could scan for ore deposits ahead of me. Hartomo and Kloydeb reconstructed their fighters and took off to scout and patrol the area as Draggos went back to VR, finishing touches on the next generation fighter. As my miner finished I took off to a nearby deposit already located by Drak and Dirk began building components for a second miner. The deposit was mostly copper, which was needed, but also had some iron and aluminum. The new miner worked well. It was much faster at collecting ore than its predecessor, but operating in gravity was awkward. The anti-gravity worked well for the most part, but when rotating it seems to react a bit sluggish causing the ship to drift down the gravity well slightly. As I mined and dug deeper into the earth I was already coming up an idea for a stationary mining rig for planetary mining that could be mostly automated. Rex and Yak returned dragging the corpse of a cat like creature that attacked them back to camp. It had 6 legs and was slightly larger than a lion but was blue with red stripes. Scanners show it should be edible if we choose to eat it. They had found pools of a substance similar to the yellow goo we used as fuel from Alioth. Several species of ‘trees’ here were also comprised primarily of Nitrites and Nitrates; It should be easy to convert that to a usable fuel. The next few weeks consisted of us exploring and collecting resources, ensuring we had a good stockpile of anything we need stored in the Puddle Jumper in case we needed to evacuate. Rex and Yak, with Draks help when he wasn’t upgrading the base and our processing capabilities, were constructing a large frigate class ship that would eventually replace the Puddle Jumper when complete. It was nearly 50m long and resembled a Cylon Raider from an ancient and long forgotten TV show, except the front end was sloped down into a 4 sided wedge. We discovered several radioactive elements in large deposits, including plutonium and thorium, both on the planet and in some of the asteroids. Currently we didn’t have any way to utilize it for power, but eventually we would. Other materials were pouring in, including a few rare alloys from asteroids, even locating several that were not found in the Alioth system. By the end of our first month in the new world we had 4 frigates and 2 cruiser class ships at about 110m each built. Kloydeb and Dirk were finishing connecting the cruisers systems, with a full array of turrets and shielding systems on each they were a bit more complex than the frigates. One of the cruisers even had a spinal mount railgun for more dps against slower targets. With the frigates and cruisers completed Dirk converted the early fighters into primitive drones. We placed them in orbit above the planet scanning for ships and engaging enemies that weren’t broadcasting our FOF system. I decided it was time to begin construction of the Asteria, the 500m long BC that I had been designing in the VR. It wasn’t completed, mostly all that remained was decorative feature, but the core functionality was there, and it was battle ready. Equiped with 50 flak turrets, 20 mid-sized rail gun turrets, 2 forward mount laser emitters, 14 missile bays down it spine, and fully covered in shielding. All turrets were automated to either be free fire at any unrecognized tag or to target an enemy I specify form my command chair. The systems were all low tech, and we knew from the Ark that there were much more efficient modules but it would do for now, besides we didn’t expect anyone to have anything to challenge us with. Although with only a partial power system, the lasers couldn’t operate in combat. We finally had enough precious metals for all the components, most of which I had been building and stockpiling. Beyond our morphers on our arms we had a very simple constructor setup that would assist in building the blueprint. Still, with all of us assisting it we estimated it would still take at least 3 hours to complete it. We sent our frigates out on patrol once more, scanning to ensure the drones didn’t miss any enemies out there. When we were sure it was clear I began the construction from my blueprint. The constructor was much faster than we were, but we constantly had to feed it more material as the outer hull was made of thick trillium walls. We all assisted in the construction for the first 2 hours. As some of the fuel tanks and turrets were completed in some locations, some of the others began to transfer ammo and fuel onboard. It ended up taking a little over 6 hours to construct the blueprint. The Asteria was a modified Daedalus class BC. It was twice the size with a round crescent shaped bow instead of a downward shaped box. It still had 4 docking bays, the 2 smaller ones housed two 20m combat drones each along with a handful of small surveillance and ECM drones. The larger bays were used for various craft that were needed, capable of easily housing 2 frigates in each. We were lucky with fuel collection, but it wasn’t very high quality and still only managed to fill half of the Asteria’s tanks. Flak and rail gun ammo were easy to come by, but the explosives for the missiles was slow to process so we only had a few dozen missiles total. There was more work to be done but she would fly. As anxious as I was to fly her it had been an exhausting day. Kloydeb ensured the automated turrets were active, sending out a small craft with no FOF tag and watched it get destroyed in a spray of bullets. We decided to call it a night and begin test flights the next day. Afterall, it was the first time our control system was being used on something this large and I would hate for something to go wrong and I crash it because I was tired. But the next day nothing went wrong, at least not anything major. It was a bit sluggish and I noted which axis needed more thrust. There were a few that were not slaved properly, but it was a quick fix. We decided it was time to return to Alioth, mostly because we wanted to show off, but also because we wanted to get some merchandise on the markets early. We intended to sell some of our fighter and control system blueprints. We also had excess of a few ores that were hard or impossible to come by on Alioth, at least they were a month ago. The 4 frigates were docked in the Asteria’s bays and I was flanked by the 2 cruisers as we charged our FLT drive for the jump.

Well for that there will have to be internal stresses to actually break the thing apart. I doubt that will be impliment in the near future as it is highly resource intensive. So even if gravity extended out and didnt just have a cutoff. Id expect the worse is an uneven gravity pull, shifting the whole thing into the planet if anything at all. It is likely the CG would be what is pulled, which wouldnt have much of an effect.

Well you will definatly be able to put something in orbit, its a question of will it actually orbit or will it just sit there in the location you put it. A few of us have discussed the possibility of much larger ring worlds as well. I figured someone would try to recreate the halo ring eventually. .

Ofcourse you would say you plan to honor it The problem with this is you are trusting one person. Now if the token had a value of its own in resources you could break down, maybe. if its a fiat currency then no one would trust one guy. Now this could work with large trusted alliances later on, or even an alliance currency to be used between members. Eve had trusted entities like Eve lottery that did similar things. But once you have an alliance large enough to be trusted it is expected the would have the in game credits to use as well. Unless it is specifically an in alliance token or maybe given out for special events and prizes. I do have to say Id love the possibility of making your own currently, but they dont plan to implement it. Unless you do something like this

1. There isnt supposed to be a limit. The repercussions would be a bigger target and more thrust required to move it. Now with this said we dont know if there will be orbital mechanics or will it just sit there in space. (im under the impression there wont be but thats not confirmed) 2. No clue, we know theres water but dont know the nature of it. And it is assumed you can grow crops, thus plant them on a station, but its not confirmed and the mechanics are unknown. 3. See 2, we know water will exist but dont know the nature of it.

There was just a post on this, it is confirmed we will have liquid water, but the exact details are unknown. I had a few ideas for that as well. Infact, if you read my story 'Alpha Base Discovered' you can see one simple method.

No problem man, eventually youll spend your days on the forums like Nora and I to suck up any peice of info you can find. I agree it sucks, but I understand the reasoning. And maybe in a few years they will have a more realistic system when CPU clock speeds are higher. Until then it will be no different than EVE. I am with you there too, I have been dreaming of a game similar to DU for a long time. Even discussed developing it with a game programmer once, but neither of us had the skills to do it then. I am glad DU took on the challenge.