magnatron

Over the years i have seen piles and piles of good reasons for a game to have voip, i have also seen a few good implementations of voip in games. and in the end the vast majority just use 3rd party programs for comms. i can not even think of a single example of a game that got even moderate use of its in game voip. i think the use of 3rd party programs for comms has just gotten far too ingrained into the general population of gamers. to the point that i think making something like widgets that we could use to interface with our 3rd party programs would be more useful. im sure there is more than likely a mountain of issue's with an idea like that, but it would at least get used by a good number of players.

I logged into mumble and someone had set this website as a channel comment...that was months ago and i still don't know who set that comment.

i think this devblog covers that pretty well.

i find it hard to see anything positive coming from being able to take slaves or prisoners. im pretty sure the people who got captured would just log off until after they where released. in the end any mechanic that makes the player feel like logging off is the most entertaining option might not be the wisest choice to make. also now that im thinking about it, being enslaved or put in prison by the players might just feel like a worse punishment than just getting a ban from the GM. and we all know that we cannot trust the gamer population as a whole with that type of power, some of the worst humans alive are within our ranks.

im a big fan of survial games, i even go as far as to mod the food system to be more unforgiving as i like to torture myself. that being said i just do not see using the food mechanics that survival games do in an MMO as being a good idea. its just far too large of an audience that all has to play the game on the same settings if you will. what i would like to see is complexity and industry, and i do think food has a place here. perhaps there can be some semi complicated recipes for food that can be used as buffing items, or restoring health like some other games. but what if when a player city reaches a certain size or complexity that food becomes one of its fuel requirements as if it has an unseen npc population. then people could build big ol farms and the processing plants to go along with them. i would think it would be easy for any organization large enough to build a city to find a few people who want to play farmer to handle their food production. this way only the players who want to deal with a food mechanic would have to. they also could just buy the food from the market as well, if other players have manged to produce it a bit more cheaply.

if other games can be used as an example, people will bicker with each other over why they lost then rebuild and start a brand new war.

i could get behind this idea as long as we have the ability to build smuggler ships. just work it like real life and make hidden compartments, if the inspector doesn't find them well you just won the smuggling mini game. here is a question though. what happens when you get caught smuggling in illegal things?

so the rag doll idea i find just totally amusing. can you guys imagine how many lifeless bodies would be lying around the safe area around the ark 5 years after release. it would look like a zombie apocalypse game, in fact im sure some us would be telling new players to watch out for the zombie attacks. in all seriousness though i think the most fair decision to make here, would be to use a combination of vanish and cryobed. if a player logs out in the field it would trigger something like a 30 second timer, if any action what so ever is taken or you are attacked during that 30 seconds the log out is canceled. if you go to a cryobed to log out you log out immediately and get a very small bonus to skill training. i think if you are aboard a small single player ship that ship should vanish with the player if they are in the cockpit, if you are not in the cockpit when you logout the ship should stay in the game world. and large crewed multiplayer ships should never disappear from the game world. if you log out aboard a large ship and you want to still be aboard when you log back in you should need to go to a cryobed. as i think it would make things easier for the server to track what cryobed to spawn you next to in a moving construct. but something needs to be in place to handle what to do with players who are logged out on a crewed ship that has been destroyed. i guess sending them wherever the rest of the crew who was logged in got sent would do. at least that would be better than logging in floating in the void with no ship in sight.

nice yamamushi i just can across the same graphic was coming to toss it up in this thread. this seems like a good way to deal with combat multi boxing as spotting a fleet of multi boxed ships is pretty easy.

honestly i think it looks more like a weapon of some sort than a rocket engine. but your right the heat wave in the gif is pretty cool.

that holo table looks pretty cool, i wonder if its going to be interactive. and i wonder if has to be setup on a planet or if we can put them in our captial ships and have it display what ever planet we happen to be orbiting.

pretty sure about the only thing the devs could really do is set the client so only the maximized and focused client could receive control input. this would make combat an untenable workload just to work two clients as you have to actually alt tab between them. aside from that is there really any sort of way to not support multi boxing? its not like any of the games people do it in actually wrote a single line of code to support it in the first place.

my worry about the ark tokens is really proliferation, sure up front they are said to be "rare" but how about 5 years down the road. would we see entire sections of the starter planet arkified by players who are taking a break or have moved on from the game? for this reason i just don't really like the idea of ark tokens an individual or organization can use. i think we would all be better off if a planet had a small chance to spawn some form of POI like a crashed arkship or alien ruins. once the players find this POI a large scale restoration project can begin where we can either repair the damage or provide the resources required. once the repair is done the POI returns to active status and a new ark zone like the starter planet has is born. with this method its very easy for the devs to control just how much of the world is arkified, ark zones would be for public use so as people quit playing those of us left can continue to use the arksite. if the resource requirement is high enough this would be another step towards bringing civilization to a new system like star gates will be. it would also make these sites very rare on the outer fringes of the space we have collectively explored witch would ensure there was always some form of "wild west" where pvp is the way of life. just my two cents, but i agree we need to find a happy medium between safe and unregulated game area's.

if they are going to be sold to any player who has the money to buy them they would need to be temporary. say like 30 days tops, this way keeping it up indefinitely would be outrageously expensive. and if people quit playing that territory would open up to attack so redevelopment can take place. i don't think it would be good for anyone if years after release the whole starter planet was claimed and arkified by people who no longer play. i think a better option would be to have each planet to have a chance to spawn some sort of "ark site" like a broken crashed arkship or alien ruins. once the players make repairs or fulfill a resource requirement, whatever mechanic they decided to use for star gates would work here. then that area becomes a safe zone like the ark ship on the starter planet. the key is to make this resource requirement huge, so it has to be a communal effort to complete. this will leave something for any player who lives in the area to use and not just rich people or the most powerful organizations. i would say to put a limit of one site per planet or even solar system if any planets in that system even spawn a site. i just think any territories that end up arkified should be public use. a perfect defense should come at its cost, in this case its the social cost of not being able to totally isolate yourself from noisy and annoying neighbors just like real cities. this would also serve to foster population centers as public arksites like this would end up being trade hubs as no one likes flying cargo ships to unsecured area's to load and unload.

interesting idea to get more inspiration to the devs, sadly im not sure many modders would create mods that no one is going to use. in end im sure most would just write a post for the idea's forum and go back to playing. also isn't the code they write obscured or encrypted to try to cut down on hackers and cheat programs? if the cheats got too wide spread im sure it would negatively effect the player base and result in an exodus. although i freely admit i am ignorant to software development so i could very well be completely off base here.

id love to have a capital ship with a bridge completely surround in displays showing different camera angles from outside the ship.

sorta sounds like the shields on the player own structures in EVE. witch i have to say i HATED dealing with those things in eve unless we where flying with 100's of other players it felt like you just sat there for hours shooting at a bubble in space. i don't think it should be mind blowingly easy to take things, but if no one comes to defend it shouldn't take hours of sitting there shooting a shield . maybe a fuel requirement, and if no one is around to keep the fuel take topped off the shield will fail rather quickly. let say a shield has 1 million HP and 20 minutes worth of fuel. if there are players to defend they can keep the fuel tank topped off and the attackers will have to burn through a million HP while dealing with the defenders attacking them. if no players show up to defend the shield systems fails and falls offline after the fuel supply runs out after 20 minutes of heavy bombardment. also perhaps use the idea of reinforced mode from eve where once the attackers take the shield down the territory goes into reinforced mode for a set period of time, at witch point the system will notify the members of that organization what time they need to be at the base to defend. once reinforced mode ends the battle is on and the player will have the final fight to determine who will own that territory. also allowing people to pick a time slot for what time of day reinforced mode would end could be a nice way to stop people from preying on those in different time zones. as its rather hard to defend when you need to be in bed sleeping for work the following day. this way a group can always be sure that they at least don't have to worry about people taking territory while they sleep, and it will be the burden of the attackers to play outside of their typical schedules. as far as turrets and point defense, i say the more the merrier approaching a well defended territory that is hostile to you should be very dangerous in my opinion. but at the same time expensive on mats ammo and power, would be a nice trade off that way it take a lot of infrastructure to run a truly large array of static defensive weapons. well i guess thats enough food for thought for the time being, i would like to point out these ideas have come from other games.

1. all ships will be made by the players and presumably editable by players seeing as they made them with voxels and elements. no idea on the maximum number of rendered ships in an area yet, not sure on how voxel destruction is going to work. 2. this is going to be a single shard MMO, i assume no player cap. 3. not a lot of info yet, we assume mats will be gathered by digging in the ground or mining asteroid after we get to space. 4. seems there will be unlockable stuff, as its beens aid it will take us months to gain the tech to make spacecraft after release. 5. not sure on PVE yet, but i think its safe to assume there will be at least some. 6. this is going to be a sandbox MMO, you play co op if you want to or lone wolf if thats your thing. 7. yes, world is divided into 1 km hex's and you can install a territory unit to gain control of a hex. you will also be able to attack other peoples territories. 8. not really sure yet, havent seen a whole lot on that topic yet. 9. yes plenty of content for play without your ship...seeing as they said they want it to take over a month for people to progress to the point where they can build a ship. i would assume there will be something for us to do before we can build a ship. 10. im sure there will be someway to set your spawn point to the base you have built. 11. havent seen much info in comms systems yet. 12. not sure yet. 13. sort of sounds like they are thinking of going with a system similar to eve. if i where i would take some time to browse through the devblogs as they go into a lot more detail on these topics.

The Citadel from mass effect would be really neat to see, although i guess it was a gigantic construct in space so i'm not sure if that counts. now that i'm thinking about it though, would building cities and stations from copyrighted games and movies produce legal problem in the future? and lets say EA files a lawsuit over someone creating The Citadel and the ensuing publicity the screen shots would receive. if the judge or jury side with EA, what gets done about the construct that started the whole thing. deleted, or time allotted to modify its appearance if possible.

So i was watching the E3 video and i couldn't help but notice the rate of speed it seemed that the ships where moving at. I'm wondering if the entire video was accelerated or will we get that sort of sense of speed when we are piloting our ships? Currently i have been playing around with a game called Empyrion Galactic survival. it and duel share some similarities except Empyrion is more like a space age minecraft survival game and less of an MMO. but one of my biggest beefs with that game is how slow the ships move, top speed in a planet environment is 40 Meters per second(or 144 KPH , 89.4775 MPH). it just feels like you crawl everywhere when your going further than next door, seems to me that if a craft is capable of getting to space it really should go kinda fast. i have a home built aircraft that's made out of aluminum tubes covered in cloth and uses an engine smaller than my motorcycle and it can surpass 40 M/s without much difficulty. I understand that you can only allow a ship to move so fast before rendering things fast enough becomes an issue, and if its a limitation of modern computing then obviously there is nothing to be done about it. but here's to hoping i can build something so fast its hard to keep it under control.