war

We also may be discounting how hard it may be to physically break into a properly constructed and secured voxel based structure - even one with a downed force field.
 
For example, and ive never done this, firing a machine gun into a 2 meter thick wall could take an hour or three to break through it. Maybe turning that gun towards a door might reduce that time to say 10 min.... but what happens if there is more than one door? What happens if a non authorised person is detected starting up several internal forcefields protecting key assets? 
 
Im not saying any of the above is actually occurring in game, or is planned, idk, however this gives an indication of how tough breaking in somewhere could be. 

Looks like the eve galaxy map lol

meh ... I'm with @Haunty ... Let them focus on the good stuff instead of pandering to our impatience

To be honest ... I don't like seeing advertising anywhere but it's reality these days, and I see no reason why advertising wouldn't be a thing in the new DU universe even though the whole universe is basically being built from scratch.
 
Given that we are all used to seeing advertising if controlled it could be a good revenue stream for NQ.
Given the player led nature of the content maybe this is something players may choose to do in order to generate revenue to fund their own subscriptions.
 
I would say ... make it possible, but not a requirement.
If you don't like someone's advertising ... there' always the "declare war" option right?
 
 

dig dig dig dig dig .... oh look a floating ark ship! 

How about advertising on in game screens.
 
NQ have already talked about screen components and the ability to create programs on virtual computers with LUA. 
They have also talked about how that content is literally HTML.
 
So any existing advertising platforms could easily be ported to run in the game or they could build a new one and sell the advertising space.

Much like in futuristic movies where you see space mounted billboards, you could get "credit" for showing ads to a user on the side of a building you own (like maybe each time a user flies a ship within x number of feet of a billboard you mount on the side of a building you get another 1 minute of rent paid on the land or something and NQ get real money for serving up ads.
 
I'm not normally a fan of advertising but this would make for more real looking game environment (think times square type scenarios).
 
The same ads could be piped in to screens mounted around ships or space stations.
Obviously there would have to be some control on how they reward players to prevent spamming of advertising all over ship designs as cash cows (or would they). 

Not just the game but the server too but you have to consider the build he has right now is basically bare of features so the final version on release day will likely be a bit slower for that reason.
That said ... by then the core engine will likely get performance tweaks to help improve the speed at which the features they currently have run so it could balance out "somewhat".
 
I can't wait ... stable or not ... it'll be interesting to pus h the tech to its limits and break it so we get a stable release version.

You guys should always check the official wiki at https://dualuniverse.gamepedia.com first for questions like this, we have compiled a lot of information.
 
 
Previously Nyzaltar has stated that importing 3D designs from third-party software is something NQ does not plan on allowing/implementing.
 
Wiki: https://dualuniverse.gamepedia.com/Builder_Guide#Combat_Protection
Original Source: 
 
 

I think NQ had it right ... you either have time or money, either way you can play in a P2P game.
If you're saying you don't have time or money, then you shouldn't be making DU a priority in life, you should work on resolving that issue first so you fall in to either the "has lots of time" or "has lots of money" category.

I don't think it's unfair for NQ to expect a small fee to help them run the insane amounts of infrastructure DU is going to require.

Pure gold ... 

You guys seem to think I know nothing about Voxels / rendering.
The fact is even with things like occlusion you still have to compute what's been occluded and what hasn't, and with Voxels you normally render chunks, so if any piece of a chunk is visible then you need to render the whole chunk at a given LOD you can't "quickly generate a single mesh at various LOD's" you generate the whole mesh at a given LOD.

My understanding is that to make the data editable something has to store "the edits", from my own tinkering in building voxel based worlds I've figured out that on day 1 for an entirely generated volume (like the planets would be) you'd effectively have a storage requirement of 0 bytes as you only need to store the changes made that deviate from the algorithm / generator.

With something like a space station though, there's never any part of that that's procedural, you effectively always have to store every Voxel.
You could store only the mesh data but then you need a means to "figure out" the volume data when the mesh gets edited, which is a considerably more complex task than generating a mesh from Voxels in the first place.
The other way is to store "actions" and use things like run length encoding to reduce the storage load ... but that's still a lot of data  

...

So here's where i'm at ...
As you guys should be able to see from my Avatar ... I'm IN ... i'm taking a gamble ... it's (i think) a risky one but if these guys deliver even a fraction of what i've seen so far I still like I'd get value for money.
So ... @novaquark ... I donated up to Ruby, the money was going to in to my own game project but i've decided to start a new game dev project ... developing LUA driven DU stuff  
I can't wait!

And NQ always had a mmo in mind (which RSI didn't). DU will evolve with very different mechanics and gameplay later down the road than it was at release. You just can't implement everything at start, which is good

Honestly, I don't think your questions or skepticism can be answered here. Any reply will just lead to more questions and "but what if"s. The media released by NQ gives a good indication of what they have now. How it works beyond that is unknown.
 
Are there concessions? Yes. Constructs will not be able to break in half: the two halves will just float together. There are more covered in various locations.

Wow ... some great feedback guys.
Did someone say Unigine! ... I love that engine, their Heaven demo makes me want to build an MMO in that world!
 
I'm not looking to rock the boat like maybe ... BlueDrake42 or whatever his name is ... but I do want to understand what it is that NQ is saying they have here.
 
For example ...
 
Procedural generation 
I know that Voxelfarm worlds are procedural and look amazing but my experience in a shard based world was poor when using a real world MMO solution built on the engine.
The alternative is something like no mans sky that did not meet expectations at all and both didn't save the players chances (no mans sky didn't even allow any changes).
 
Voxel Technology
Oddly enough I have been talking about doing exactly this for a couple of years now but couldn't find enough support from a seasoned developer community to get help with this idea of using Voxels on this scale because I had developer after developer tell me "it's impossible on todays tech without breaking the laws of physics"
...
 
That said ...
 
I am believer in the technology and do feel it can scale, using procedural in combination with static data and compression / bit packing techniques for the transmission brings the scale in terms of raw bytes in to the possible but it does come with a few "negotiations" you have to make. 
 
As I said when I started this thread, the raw numbers of Voxels that represent a large object are just insane and with something like a space station or a large ship you simply can't start from a procedural base so every Voxel has to be considered a change.
 
Given that "fact of how Voxels work" you can then take a data source containing any number of voxels and generate a mesh from that data easily enough and using some pretty common programming techniques known by many today construct meshes at varying "qualities" for use in game.
 
So in short ...
 
My question really wasn't "Using this number of Voxels is impossible right?" it was more something along the lines of ...
 
Given that I as a keen user of the game spend say 2 hours per day for say 10 days in a row editing Voxels I could as a single player build a pretty hefty space station looking at the tooling available here it's reasonable that I could build one of those space stations.
Looking at the raw numbers I presented before, lets assume my space station creation was something like 10 million Voxels, that's 10 million individual Voxels that 1 player has created that the server has to process and store and hand out whenever someone looks the right direction from the right spot on the game.
 
I am however, only 1 player ... so lets scale that up ... add another 999 players and we have 1000 x 10 million Voxels that are all entirely non procedural and could be reasonably constructed on the game server.
even if those ridiculous number of Voxels are not right next to each other that's still a lot of data to be managing and processing.
 
For an MMO that's a tiny number of players and for a single shard that's an insane amount of mesh data being handed around, the previously mentioned "developer community" tell me this is not possible.
 
So how I see it ... 
This is either being massively over sold or there are some "gotchas" that are still being overcome (and I seriously want them to be) but these guys must be on to something that through years of digging around and researching this particular technology (Voxels) I have not found anyone that can do this or anyone who even remotely has an idea how to do this on this scale. 
 
That on it's own raises questions does it not? 
 
I really don't want another no mans sky ... but I do want to know that this stuff really is possible so a little insight in to the tech would be really nice to have if the devs over at NQ are in a sharing mood (just a little technical peek ... please!).

Ok i'm a developer myself, oddly enough this is my dream and I have been crunching this problem for years trying to wait out hardware that can handle the kind of workload involved here so please don't take this as an insult but I'd like to see some rationality here as to how this really works (although I accept that there's some reasonable limits due to IP protection on your part).
 
So gut feeling here ...
Take Minecraft and smarten up the voxel tech a lot adding LOD and lets face it much better volume management (that should help it scale a little bit) and then allow the creation of multiple "volumes" within the game world. 
 
Lets put some real numbers in to this to exlain the problem I am facing ...
Take the moon (that's 3474km in diameter), now lets assume that the voxel data is the same as Minecraft's where "each voxel is 1 cubic meter" so you need a volume of 3,474,000^3 which is a total of 41,926,580,000,000,000,000 voxels to represent the moon (ever seen a planet that small? ... hmmm, no i heaven't either).
 
Lets be reasonable about this ...
Even at 1 bit per voxel that's a lot of data to crunch but the reality here is that you would need more than just 1 bit per voxel, with the bulk of voxel engines I've seen or written using at least 1 byte usually 2 per voxel.
 
Taking a "non uniform object" example ...
In one of the videos you guys said the space station was 4km in size (so that's a cubic volume of 64,000,000,000 voxels asusming I did my math right), even that seems to raise a few red flags for me but that volume is mostly empty space so i'd estimate you're using maybe an 8th of that or less but that's still a station with actual values for maybe 8,000,000,000 voxels.
 
I just bought a brand new nVidia 1080 GTX graphics card and even if I have that crunch the numbers on each of its 2.5k+ gpu cores it's still going to busy for some time handling that amount of raw data for a whole scene so it's unlikely any client ever sees that raw data instead there must be some magic going on on the server to only send "mesh data" / some form of "view data" from a given view of a volume at a given LOD.
Doing that though, puts a hell of a lot of computation on the server farm when you have say 1,000+ players all editing stuff in a small area all that computation is going to get pricey, and farming that load only adds network traffic and the need for more copies of that data to reduce data access overheads!
 
...
 
Speculation:
A view of a "planet" is generated by using a fractal algorithm that describes the shape at varying levels of detail depending on how close you are and then any changes are applied to that using some clever "this 1 Voxel change isn't visible here but that 1,000 Voxel change does X" type algorithm.
 
The raw Voxel data is only stored when edited / player created ... but that could get expensive over time as Voxels are easily editable and very fast raising the question is this a sustainable platform or is there some plan to "retire old data"?
 
Large "ships" / "stations" are beyond me ... you can't "algorithmic-ally compute" those so how does this all work without going beyond the laws of physics for computing the data or network load?
 
...
 
The raw numbers are massive but computers are good with raw numbers and large data sets so the problem appears to be "interesting" to say the least.
 
The closest we have seen to this is something like Everquest Landmark and the failed Everquest Next project, those games were built on the Voxelfarm engine. 
http://www.voxelfarm.com/
 
I once had a discussion with the Creator of Voxelfarm by email when doing some research in to Voxel engines (I was debating writing my own or using one someone else wrote to build a pet project) and 2 key points came out ...
  1. Small or big, apparently doesn't matter if your search algorithm is smart enough you have a fixed cost (but that lost me)
  2. Physics is where it gets hard not simply drawing!
 
I tried landmark out but it suffered from some serious limitations ...
  1. The sharding issue (to handle the network load) which you have somehow solved (or claim to) yet not even the eve team with it's years of experience has cracked that particular problem (simulations don't count).
  2. The game ran slow, even on a high end PC typical frame rates were poor <30 fps was normal (although I admit I was playing with it in beta)
  3. Persistence just didn't happen ... I would dig a tunnel, walk away from it, come back ... and the hole is gone! ... and why ... disk space is expensive when you need that much of it.
  4. The raw numbers here just don't add up unless you have massive voxels (like greater than 10 cubic meters) or you have a chunking algorithm that can spread the load over many servers (something landmark didn't do), the problem there of course is network load leading back to point 1.
 
...
 
So i'd like to ask for more details on how this actually works as looking at raw numbers for Voxel data clearly is not helping me and you guys must have some answer to this raw scale problem!
FYI: I wanted to pledge during the Kickstarter and this is the reason I haven't yet ... really hoping you guys can put my mind at ease as I'm seriously considering pledging enough to get me alpha access (if that's still an option).
 

Ok i'm a developer myself, oddly enough this is my dream and I have been crunching this problem for years trying to wait out hardware that can handle the kind of workload involved here so please don't take this as an insult but I'd like to see some rationality here as to how this really works (although I accept that there's some reasonable limits due to IP protection on your part).
 
So gut feeling here ...
Take Minecraft and smarten up the voxel tech a lot adding LOD and lets face it much better volume management (that should help it scale a little bit) and then allow the creation of multiple "volumes" within the game world. 
 
Lets put some real numbers in to this to exlain the problem I am facing ...
Take the moon (that's 3474km in diameter), now lets assume that the voxel data is the same as Minecraft's where "each voxel is 1 cubic meter" so you need a volume of 3,474,000^3 which is a total of 41,926,580,000,000,000,000 voxels to represent the moon (ever seen a planet that small? ... hmmm, no i heaven't either).
 
Lets be reasonable about this ...
Even at 1 bit per voxel that's a lot of data to crunch but the reality here is that you would need more than just 1 bit per voxel, with the bulk of voxel engines I've seen or written using at least 1 byte usually 2 per voxel.
 
Taking a "non uniform object" example ...
In one of the videos you guys said the space station was 4km in size (so that's a cubic volume of 64,000,000,000 voxels asusming I did my math right), even that seems to raise a few red flags for me but that volume is mostly empty space so i'd estimate you're using maybe an 8th of that or less but that's still a station with actual values for maybe 8,000,000,000 voxels.
 
I just bought a brand new nVidia 1080 GTX graphics card and even if I have that crunch the numbers on each of its 2.5k+ gpu cores it's still going to busy for some time handling that amount of raw data for a whole scene so it's unlikely any client ever sees that raw data instead there must be some magic going on on the server to only send "mesh data" / some form of "view data" from a given view of a volume at a given LOD.
Doing that though, puts a hell of a lot of computation on the server farm when you have say 1,000+ players all editing stuff in a small area all that computation is going to get pricey, and farming that load only adds network traffic and the need for more copies of that data to reduce data access overheads!
 
...
 
Speculation:
A view of a "planet" is generated by using a fractal algorithm that describes the shape at varying levels of detail depending on how close you are and then any changes are applied to that using some clever "this 1 Voxel change isn't visible here but that 1,000 Voxel change does X" type algorithm.
 
The raw Voxel data is only stored when edited / player created ... but that could get expensive over time as Voxels are easily editable and very fast raising the question is this a sustainable platform or is there some plan to "retire old data"?
 
Large "ships" / "stations" are beyond me ... you can't "algorithmic-ally compute" those so how does this all work without going beyond the laws of physics for computing the data or network load?
 
...
 
The raw numbers are massive but computers are good with raw numbers and large data sets so the problem appears to be "interesting" to say the least.
 
The closest we have seen to this is something like Everquest Landmark and the failed Everquest Next project, those games were built on the Voxelfarm engine. 
http://www.voxelfarm.com/
 
I once had a discussion with the Creator of Voxelfarm by email when doing some research in to Voxel engines (I was debating writing my own or using one someone else wrote to build a pet project) and 2 key points came out ...
  1. Small or big, apparently doesn't matter if your search algorithm is smart enough you have a fixed cost (but that lost me)
  2. Physics is where it gets hard not simply drawing!
 
I tried landmark out but it suffered from some serious limitations ...
  1. The sharding issue (to handle the network load) which you have somehow solved (or claim to) yet not even the eve team with it's years of experience has cracked that particular problem (simulations don't count).
  2. The game ran slow, even on a high end PC typical frame rates were poor <30 fps was normal (although I admit I was playing with it in beta)
  3. Persistence just didn't happen ... I would dig a tunnel, walk away from it, come back ... and the hole is gone! ... and why ... disk space is expensive when you need that much of it.
  4. The raw numbers here just don't add up unless you have massive voxels (like greater than 10 cubic meters) or you have a chunking algorithm that can spread the load over many servers (something landmark didn't do), the problem there of course is network load leading back to point 1.
 
...
 
So i'd like to ask for more details on how this actually works as looking at raw numbers for Voxel data clearly is not helping me and you guys must have some answer to this raw scale problem!
FYI: I wanted to pledge during the Kickstarter and this is the reason I haven't yet ... really hoping you guys can put my mind at ease as I'm seriously considering pledging enough to get me alpha access (if that's still an option).