KlatuSatori
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Posts posted by KlatuSatori
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Since it's all completely fictional, no, nothing requires anything.
I can make up the fact that warp drives can move ships at thousands of times the speed of light and now I'm right.
This is what I've been trying to say this whole thread.
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Fallen Earth's game space is a single-shard continuous hunk of land.
Ah fair enough.
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I am not against your interpretation if thats they way they choose to do it. But consider this.
I build my Daedalus class BC in Virtual Virtual Reality. Its all working so I decided to build it in the real virtual world. Since it is my first massive ship I obviously don't get it all right. So i decided to upgrade it in the real world. (this will happen often with large creations) Now how could I make a blueprint from this since it is not in VR.
Now I could have modified it in VR, but then what do i do. Do i tear apart my existing one for the resources to make the upgraded one?
So I think having the ability to create blueprints in the real world is required. Some people prefer to work only in the real world. Remember the VR is there for those who choose to use it, not a necessity. But there is the concern of protections.
This is why I like the idea of creator tags. If I start the creation it is tagged with my name in the meta data. This can be compared with the owners tag and if they match it would allow an easy BP creation. That way even if you modify a ship from one of your BPs you can save it easily. However I do like the idea that someone can steal your designs. But I dont think it should be so easy, not just saving when your in the ship. I like the idea of brining it into a shipyard and have it deconstruction piece by piece and make yourself a BP of it. This process could remove the creator tag that would have been embedded into it.
What I meant was that you could create a BP from something you build in the VS or from an original creation you build in the "real" world.
But yes, that does leave the problem of how to deal with creating BPs from modified non-original creations (I'll call them copy creations). The tagging system could provide the answer in this case.
And I would have to disagree with you on the BPC and BPO. Since the BPs are digital you could have them embedded with destructive routines that destroy them after being used so many times. It could also be possible to use this to protect it from copying. Also since we already have the tagging system outlined by the Devs, this could be used to essentially create a BPC. I could sell you the right to use my BPO once or maybe 10 times. Or maybe an unlimited use at 1k credits a use.
The problem is with a BPO, unlimited access to it, you loose your creation as soon as you sell it once. But I would have to say that needing BPOs and BPCs may not be a necessity depending on the creation system and if they utilize embedded tags.
You wouldn't lose your creation as soon as you sell it once. Any BP you sell is one of a kind and cannot be copied. The purchaser of your BP has one and cannot have another one unless he buys another one from you. All he gets is the ability to build as many of those contructs as he likes/is able to. You control the supply of your BPs because you are the only person who can create more of them, therefore you have a monopoly over the BPs. If you have a good product you can sell a BP to lots of different players/organisations, and some will even want multiples so that they can build multiple units simultaneously and in different locations. So the creator is still empowered, but to maximise profits the creator has to keep creating new things.
BPOs and BPCs make sense in Eve because no one designs anything new. You skill up your science and create a BPO for a predefined item, you then use that to create BPCs that you sell to manufacturers. If there were no BPCs eventually everyone could have a BPO for every item in existence so science would be a completely worthless profession. In DU there are no such limitations because there is actual intellectual property being made, and the possibilities are literally infinite.
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Why the concern with population density at all? Earth is only partially land, and some places are more populated than others.
Frankly Earth is overcrowded when looking at a game like this. Do you really want to have to fight to find land and have to pay an enormous portion of what little you can own working in someone else''s company. It would just be another mortgage you would have to work and pay for.
With high density there become more scarcities, some natural some artificial. Having a lower density lessens this burden and gives people the space required to do as they please.
And remember in the dev blogs they talk about tile sets for claiming land. I believe these were said to be ~1km each. So how would you manage land ownership for thousands of people inside there if they all require the same access tags.I think one person per tile on a planet if all occupied will be crowded. Now I dont ever see this happening. It is likely groups will claim a tile clustered around other groups leaving most of a planet unclaimed.
Population density is an important factor for the devs to consider in a game that has territorial control and political/military conflict between player factions. I completely agree that the population of Earth is not a useful metric though. I also agree a 30km radius planet had 100,000 regular players playing on it it would be way over populated, but that is only one planet of many (hundreds? thousands?).
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This is exactly why I introduced the time compression. If the shorter time travel were to be achievied through smaller distances only, the planets and systems would get too close to each other. And please don't forget my last paragraph of the first post. A closest system in 40 minutes at exactly the "speed of light". If you had engine giving ten times "speed of light" you would reach the same system in 4 minutes. Nobody established what the speed limits on those engines are. Right now I am in a middle of thinking about possible theories how to build an FTL engine.
Also keep in mind that star systems tend to have a spherical cloud of space matter where the gravity stops being strong enough to create protoplanets. These would be the perfect place for the "extra content" not related to established planetary organizations.
When I say extra content between solar systems I mean loads of it. Between two solar systems that are 10 hours travel time apart there'd be dozens or even hundreds of locales in the space between and around them - some ideas are rogues planets, rogue gas giants with moons, rogue asteroid belts, brown dwarf systems, abandoned/ruined space stations of alien civilisations, ruined space ships, sites of ancient battles with vast open space filled with salvageable wreckage, random natural anomalies, anything else you can think of.
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40 Minutes from system to system... I certainly hope not.. You are forgetting that the universe is supposedly going to be 'infinite'... I hope it takes 5-10mins at full FTL or less to get from system to system, having to much time required to get from place to place would kill alot of the enjoyment of the game for me. I want to be able to explore.. but i don't want to have to fly for 10hours just to get somewhere new..
Infinite universe and you can have 10 planets / systems all right on your door step... Think if this goes to something like NMS size (or very big)... you could spend weeks just getting a little bit across the universe and then if you need to get back too.. (as stargates are supposed to be expensive).. it would be double...
I hope the systems are accessible and not require pointless flight time to get anywhere...
The problem with these discussions is that we are missing certain vital pieces of information, namely how fast you can travel, and perhaps more importantly, how dense the universe will be in terms of useful content - i.e. locations where players can regularly and purposefully extract gameplay.
We only have a couple of pieces of information here. One is that the game universe will be"virtually unlimited". Another is the planets will be huge. The example planet in the territories devblog has a surface area of over 11,000km2 which corresponds to over 5,000 1km/side hexes. Pretty big. Another is that the devs expect it will be quite some time, perhaps several months, before players manage to make it into space.
To me this suggests that it will be a very dense game universe. If that is the case, then "virtually unlimited" does not have to mean millions of stars, billions of planets, like in Elite Dangerous. A few thousand stars can be a virtually unlimited game universe if that universe is densely packed with deeply exploitable content combined with a relatively slow top speed.
40 minutes to get from one solar system to a neighbouring one is a long time if there is nothing in between the systems. Regularly travelling for 40 minutes through nothingness would get old if you had to do it all the time (hence build a stargate). However, if the space between those systems is packed with content, then 40 minutes is nothing at all.
So really we need more information. The game I imagine is a rich and content dense one, where travel to distant locales (i.e. solar systems at or beyond the frontier of claimed territory) is something left to players who dedicate their game play to that style.
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Pretty sure the single shard continuous universe is unique to DU. Then throw in incredible amounts of creative and destructive freedom.
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Nice post. I'm curious about what kind of political structure you'll have. DU will allow for crazy freedom and flexibility in how organisations govern themselves.
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Yeah I extrapolated when I said 30km was a typical planet radius. I'm guessing that the smallest might be around 5km radius and the largest around 50km and 20-30 is typical, but obviously I don't know this for sure. I would also be interested to see a 5km planet split up into hexes like the one in the devblog.
I agree that distances between planets and stars needs to be very carefully considered but it is not the whole story on its own, because it also depends greatly on how fast ships can traverse space. Your numbers which allow getting from one system to another in ~40minutes without even firing up the FTL drive sounds much too quick to me, but it depends on how many systems there will be in the game. ~40 minutes at max FTL in a small ship might be okay but still has problems.
My hope is that interstellar space will be populated by rogue planets and anomalies so that there is a reason to be out there. Then the time it takes to get to the next solar system without stargates is less of a factor. It can be 10 hours at top speed if you like, and if someone wants to beeline for it that's fine, but most will build outposts in interstellar space at locations of interest and value.
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Well a typical planet radius will be about 30km which corresponds to a surface area ~10,000 times less than the surface area of the Earth. So to have a comparable population density to that of the earth on such a planet would require ~100,000 people. If DU becomes highly successful and has 1 million active players, 100,000 on the starting planet doesn't sound out of the bounds of reason.
However, a planet does not need to have a population density similar to Earth to feel fully inhabited.
Also, the aim is not to have a fully populated universe throughout. There will and should always be unexplored regions of planets and space.
Here are a couple of threads worth checking out.
https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/296-devblog-territory-control/
https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/327-theres-gold-in-them-there-hills/?hl=gold
https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/431-thoughts-on-stargates-and-ftl/
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I believe the answer to this is a resounding "yes" and it should be seriously awesome. This is from the devblog on multiplayer ship crews.
Now, imagine combats. Besides the specialized weapons allocation to various crew members, the fact that the ship is a real object and not some formal 3D image allows for incredible things: partial structural damage that must be repaired (crew members racing to fix this broken hull - FTL anyone?), but also even more exciting is the possibility to board another ship after having cracked open its hull. In my opinion, from an emergent/strategic point of view this is a very interesting alternative to the classical way of completely destroying any enemy ship during combat: instead, board it and take control! Note that we don’t know yet how much of this will be playable in the alpha or beta stage, but it will definitely be something we will support in the long term.
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I'm sure I read something somewhere that describes friendly fire being a core part of massive battles because it adds to the 'counter-balance' of fights where if you have the bigger numbers you also have the bigger chance of destroying your own fleet and what knot... Something about firing shots will 'travel' to the target and can be intercepted by any other ship so this gives friendly fire a possibility...
But that's from a old old post or a DevBlog or something so I wouldn't be able to say anything about its current accuracy..
Haha that's from my thread which is the one Saffi linked above. Nyzaltar's reply:
- About "Friendly Fire" and "Manual Targeting":
We would like to implement that. We really would like. But there a very high chance we won't, at least for now (maybe with computer technology evolving, it will change in the future). The fact that massively multiplayer single-shard sandbox games like EvE Online are able to reach several thousands of players at the same place and the same moment is possible due to some compromises (and while we are aiming to higher flexibility in this regard, we're still subject to compromises too): combat system using Targeting/Locking/Firing mechanics in this kind of game is not completely unrelated to the ability to create massive battles, as it's an efficient way to lighten a lot of real time combat calculations. -
My interpretation is that the virtual simulator will provide everything builders need to protect the time they spend creating things. I think it would make sense to have save functionality in the VS. Players can save anything and everything they like in the VS and use those saves to build "real" Blueprints in the actual game universe. In this way a player never lose their own creations - even if their BPs are all stolen/lost/sold they can always create another BP from their saved creation in the VS.
In the "real" world I'd say BPs can be made only from original creations - i.e. something that was put together manually, voxel by voxel as opposed to something that was built using a BP. So if you steal an original creation you can create a BP from it easily. If you steal a production line creation made from a BP you'll have to reverse engineer your own version and make a BP from that if you want to build more of them. The only problem I see here is how/whether an original creation made in the real world can be saved to the VS, and if not what incentive is there to do so, especially outside of protected areas.
Personally I don't like the idea of BPCs and BPOs. A BP is a BP and can be reused ad infinitum to build the creation they represent (assuming the materials are available), but a BP cannot be "copied". BPs can only be created in the ways I describe above. I think this has far better immersion and gameplay prospects. BPs for the best creations will have a higher price tag. It also incentivises creators to release newer improved versions of their creations. This way creators are creators and have all the strengths and weaknesses inherent to that professions. The BPO/BPC system makes sense in Eve's predefined universe, where there are no true creators, but in DU I think it would be counter-productive.
EDIT: Just to be clear, my post is my interpretation, opinion, and ideas. NQ may already have their own solid plans for the creating/building/copying system and it may be completely different to what I have posted!
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Looks like Saffi beat me to it in linking you that thread
I think allowing clients to perform the hit detection algorithms would be vulnerable to cheating. Something so important needs to be done entirely server I think. What would stop clients transmitting hits at a 100% success rate every 0.1s or something?
What I would really like to see is a system that incorporates the possibility of friendly fire, but Nyz has said it is highly unlikely. But as you guys say there is already an issue with location of a hit on huge vessels. That would require some kind of pointing/line of sight mechanism, so perhaps the solution to that would allow for FF.
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Well, there's nothing that was removed from the forum as far as I know. What kind of stuff were you looking for specifically?
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"Warp" is just a convenient word to describe a kind of FTL travel that is not akin to teleportation. You can call it whatever you like and be as specific or as vague as necessary in describing how it works for the purpose of creating a game. I'm sure resurrection nodes are unlikely to ever exist either but they will be a fundamental part of the game.
One of the foundations of the game is that it will be a continuous single shard universe and one of the very first devblogs was about this very concept.
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I wouldn't say this conversation is entirely moot. The devs have very clear ideas on some aspects, but I believe others are still work in progress and my impression is that they take on board ideas and considerations they like.
I personally see no problem with a warp drive being able to transport at ship at 70kc. To me it is just semantics to say that a warp drive can make you go at 70kc getting you there in an hour and a stargate can make you go at 10Mc to get you there in a few seconds. You can create the game mechanics and then make up the lore around it.
One idea is that you could have "gears" for FTL with each gear providing an order of magnitude more propulsion than the last.
Having said that, even in the case of travelling at ~100,000c, travelling for an hour through completely empty space would lose its appeal pretty quickly. There needs to be something out there in interstellar space to break up these journeys. If there are points of interest for mining operations in interstellar space that can be encountered relatively frequently, then the time it takes to FTL between solar systems is somewhat less important. It could be 10 hours for a straight journey between two neighbouring solar systems that don't yet have jump gates set up, but if there are dozens, even hundreds of points of interest between them, spaced out at <20 minutes travel time or so, then it doesn't matter so much. Points of interest could be rogue planets and moons, rogue asteroid belts of varying size, abandoned/ruined alien space stations / capital ships, or anything else you can think of.
Regarding sizes of engines and force applied - that is of course true in newtonian physics. An Alcubierre Drive doesn't actually apply any propulsive force though. It warps the space around your vessel, which rides the space like a wave (in my primitive understanding). Regardless, it is probably a good idea to have both acceleration and velocity limits in a game.
Don't get me wrong, I agree there probably needs to be three modes of travel - "normal", "warp", and "jump" - it is just the implementation that I think should be done a little differently than normal, and I think that "jump" should be limited, costly, disruptable, and entirely player-led.
I've looked around briefly and couldn't find anything from Nyz on this topic though I am certain there are snippets out there.
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I think it would be awesome
I also think it would take a lot of people and a lot of time. Not to mention a lot of defences. It is something a lot of people would get behind, but it is also something a lot of people would want to destroy.
Where there's a will there's a way!
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Travel time is a very important factor and one that should not be leapt into without thinking. In an arena/area of control style game, quick travel by large numbers of players and hardware is game breaking, or at least game changing. It also devalues or completely removes true exploration and scouting as professions. NQ have only touched on these issues in the past but you can get an idea of where their heads are by reading the devblogs and some of the threads.
While some form of the standard/warp/jump system seems probable, check out this thread for some other ideas (including my own
).If I recall correctly, I don't think there will be any pre-made stargates. Only player-made stargates. I believe the idea is that FTL will be the only form of interstellar travel to begin with, but then players who travel to neighbouring systems will be able to settle there and build stargates to link to where they came from. I think this would be a great system and it is in keeping with progression from starting out on the ground, building settlements, building ships to get into space, etc. Progressive exploration and improvement. As a side note, however, I think it is important that stargates are extremely limited in range - depending on the size of the game universe, of course.
Regarding warp/alcubierre drives being "too big" to fit on small ships, I couldn't disagree more. These are fictional engines, so the limiting factor is only in your head. These should scale and balance in the same way that "normal" engines do, i.e. the bigger the drive, the faster you can go, but the heavier the payload/ship, the slower it goes. Hence great behemoth ships should need massive FTLs and would still be relatively slow. Light-weight explorers could go much faster with a much smaller FTL.
Check out this devblog thread to get an idea of the direction NQ are thinking and for an insight into the importance of not making fast travel too easy. Oh and this one too.
Forgot about choke points, which is a really important point. Forced choked points are not necessary. Simply ensuring that there are exploitable assets in space, in solar systems and on planets is enough to encourage conflict. However there is also area control, player ambition and politics at work. That is more than enough to make players fight each other.
Player-made stargates are actually an example of this at work. If an organisation of players built a stargate for fast travel to a neighbouring system, they must have had a reason to do that. Exploiting resources, controlling a region/planet, trading, something. This is something to fight over.
However, I think that macroscale terrain in space that affects how ships fly, engines work, and weapons operate in varying ways and degrees is a way to create choke points in space in the way that they are created on the ground by terrain such as hills and rivers that we are more familiar with.
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Finally get to see some screenshots and they do not disappoint! It all looks very impressive and awe-inspiring. I mean, we've discussed huge structures in space, but seeing that space station just puts it into perspective - stuff like that will be player-made brick by brick! For some reason the forest pic really stands out for me... something about exploring the untouched, unknown terrain...
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Awesome! Looking forward to the screenshots!
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Beautiful
. Looking forward to it! -
/backhander (strike and challenge to a duel)
Thoughts on Stargates and FTL
in The Gameplay Mechanics Assembly
Posted
The power to teleport to a distant location is so great that it needs to be very strongly tempered if included. Invulnerable stargates should never exist.
Building a small stargate from one end of a solar system to another could be relatively easy. Building one to a neighbouring system, very difficult - lots of materials, time, and energy required to build it. The further you want to go the bigger and harder they should be to build, in a kind of exponential relationship. But they should always be destructible.
Risk/reward is an important factor in a game like this that needs to be considered in every mechanic. If you're running a trade route between two neighbouring systems, you can go by FTL and be virtually assured of safety, but have lower cred/hr profits, or you can take the stargate for increased cred/hr, but risk getting jumped by pirates. Or you could have a friend watching the gate so you know whether it is safe, but then he needs a cut of the profit. If you have indestructible, no-pvp stargates then it's a no-brainer.