Kiklix

I work freelance/contractual and I understand greately how when the times are good, they are good and when they are bad they are BAD. That being said, the price of a game sub is usually not much more than the price of 1 lunch. I understand when times are rough that 15 bucks is the difference between eating and starving but I have still found a way to pay for game subs, either through additional work, through a friend paying or through selling off CD's DVD's etc.
 
The bottom line is that, at the end of hte day you like to get paid for your sevices, Novaquark will not be any different. MMO's have overhead, they have bills to pay as well.
 
I say this not to be callous but just to be honest. It's not a luxury companies responsibility to offer a free product to people who do not have the means to pay for it.
 
If Dual becomes a monthly subbed game, then I would suggest when the times are good, you pay for a year up front. People do it all day long in wow and it saves money in the long run.

I belief he meant competitive in sense of "competitive on the market"

K, first let me clear something up
I think that this suggestion of yours comes from the right place. Giving us a preview sandbox would be great to play in. 
And Trihxeen mentioned the legal ramifications of using an exterior editor to import to the game. Now while this is 100% part of my explanation I'd also like to add some more between the lines action.
1. The realist answer. While not extreme in development requirement, working on a complete editor to give us in the mean time while they develop the game, is time not spent developing the game. We're talking about, albeit large for indie, AN INDIE game company. If this were blizzard for instance making the early stages of Hearthstone, I would totally believe it would be possible to see an early development stage prototype for us to test. In which case that's just a Alpha / Beta stage build that is released for public testing.   
2. Practicality. There are a few people out there who would value an early game editor but honestly, If I told my friends "hey you can Kinda play the game right now","Your stuck in a room and all you can do is create voxel objects", "oh and anything you do in there is 100% just going to be a waste of time beyond just getting used to building with voxels". But hey it's early access. Almost all of em would just say its' 'OK' and they will wait till they can play open beta. Better to play a game they can experience the other 90% of what they intend the game to be than just a voxel editor. That and if they do play with it .. it would just be for maybe an hour at most.
3. Now on to the sociology effect. Like in the practicality answer, we human beings can be odd creatures. Give us a small taste of a good thing and we may want more. Some of us would get excited and wait for more, and others would feel sated in what they got and not even bother with the full product. The dev's wouldn't want to risk giving us a basic demo for fear of that issue. Yeah "You" may still buy the game but maybe I wouldn't (I still would =P) or maybe all my friends would get a bad impression and not get the game. Leaving me to play alone. Events like this can happen to over a potential million gamers, each with all their own unique situations. 
4. Legally speaking it is true that taking any assets from your own computer and transferring it to their servers, which in the eye's of the world is a business / consumer product, can have intellectual property rights issues. [space Engineers] workshop mods have this disclaimer, through Steam, to them to prevent the developer 'KSH' from being affected since mods are not something that is shipping with the release version of the game. VQ has stated that the game environment the player will be connected to is that of host client system. Meaning that your client is more or less just a portal to your character in-game that is creating the assets. That and the literal voxels are being created in the game, hosted on their server, owned by them, in their office building. To add conjecture to saying that perhaps make it to where the "demo" you receive never will be able to import the file to their server does solve the issue of them being legally liable for IP rights solves 1/2 the problem.
Adobe makes photo shop for instance, and they have a TON of legal coverage to prevent things created in the "Tool" they provided to you, prevents them from being legally liable for IP rights violations. It's kinda dumb actually to be able to be sued for that but it was a thing for a time years ago and a legal precedent to protect Adobe just didn't exist until then.
 
Final Verdict and Short version to all the Above:
For the Dev's to bother spending the development time making a demo product to reach such a smaller audience, inside of what currently exists as interest for the game, that could be very detrimental to the entirety of the full game, and could completely cripple them legally if they didn't invest in the time/money/coverage to protect themselves, is a VERY BAD IDEA.
On top of that I believe having a earliest outside of game ability to create whatever you wanted would give you an unfair advantage of me.... so   ... xP
 
I promise I'm not posting here to step on toes, I'm enjoying the topic actually, it's making me use my brain for once beyond my normal cave man work peon / wage slave speak. =D

The issue is that there is some progression in the game by building a ship in game with the available tools, if you allow outside meshes to be used this system is bypassed.
 
I work with 3D software (Cinema 4D mostly, some maya under my belt) and I can see the appeal. The issue is progression will be skipped, instead of people working from small to medium to large to capital ships, someone could just plunk down a death star...this would cause major imbalances in pvp and would essentially break the game.
 
Secondly. The game will have an in game market where the best designs (aesthetically and functionally) will sell, allowing for a mesh import would leave those who do not know 3D programs at a disadvantage. This would not be good for fair or balanced game play.

Novaquark is making their own in house voxel engine. They are not using voxel farm, they looked into it but determined it would be better done in house.
 
I believe somewhere on the dev blog you can read this paper  on Dual Contouring
 
​Novaquark is made up of a very tech diverse group of people, it makes sense to me they would code their own in house voxel engine. Although complex, I don't think it's as complex as we might believe, forcing them to use a 3rd party for better results, rather it seems they will get better results doing it in house.

In a way, we should be able to change the size of something like a triangle.  But on the small end it can only really go as small as one voxel cut in half diagonally.  You'll probably be able to make a triangle almost as large as you want too, but it will technically be made up of many voxels.  
 
You can make a voxel smaller then the standard grid too.  But because everything is on a grid, you are also making all the surrounding voxels larger, or at least moving one corner in closer to make the central voxel smaller.   In reverse you can also make one voxel appear larger, but to do it all the surrounding voxels have to move to make room.
 
Working at the highest detail level with voxels can be pretty tedious in other games, but i think their aim for DU is that we will be doing much less tinkering with voxels on the smallest scale and more building with pre-made shapes at a larger scale.
 
edit: Here is a little piece of someone's tutorial from the game Landmark.  They're basically explaining two different ways that a triangle can be made.  You can see in either example it requires other nearby voxels to be altered too.
 

Based on my building in another voxel game building will be both simple and complex.
 
Basically, it will most likely be simple to build and lay down shapes to get thigns working...but for more asthetically pleasing designs it will take more effort on your creativity.
 
See my signature to a link to my twitter, browse through my photos and you will see some voxel spaceships. Hope this helps give you an idea.

It feels a little early to be concerned about anything. I'm impressed by what I've seen and heard so far from this pre-alpha game.

Well... It will be always our word against his.
But here is our side of the story.
 
Just the facts:
- We posted two comments on his second video asking why he was deliberately spreading disinformation and diffamation about our game.
- In both comments was a link to our video proving the big spaceships were voxel-made.
- They weren't validated to become public, despite the fact that comments posted after by other posters were.
We don't exactly know how BlueDrake42's channel is configured, but if comments require validation to become public, that means he sees every comment before chosing to validate one (or not). It seems to us really unlikely that, in this situation, he hasn't seen the comments who were pretty straightforward and posted with the name "Dual Universe". Maybe there is another explanation but from our side, we don't see any.
 
In the end, with his video "GG Dual Universe", BlueDrake42 showed he didn't mean to misinform (despite the fact that the result was exactly that). We personally recognize we were wrong in thinking he had ill intentions toward our game. Sketpicism in his first video was totally ok and we perfectly understood that (as not much about our game has been presented yet). Presenting personal assumptions as the truth (saying our ships were just meshes bought from turbosquid put in our game and not voxel-made spaceships) in the second video was where a line was crossed.
 
There will be soon a blog post explaining our unexpected presence at E3 (that wasn't even expected on our side a month ago) and how it came to make some choices that seem weird from the outside. We also totally agree that there have been several mistakes in our communication like the fact we should have pointed out that the big spaceships design weren't home made but available on Turbosquid. There was no intention to hide it. We truly didn't see it as a problem a few weeks ago, as the teaser was meant to present what players would be able to build, not to present what the players will find in game.
 
So there is no hypocrisy here.
 
To avoid feeding the troll any further, this topic will be locked now.
 
Best regards,
Nyzaltar.

Criticism is perfectly fine, as long it is used in a constructive way, to improve a project. Diffamation on the other hand is absolutely not tolerated for obvious reasons. Could you clarify if you are here just to cause trouble in the community or to participate in a constructive way like other members?   Best regards, Nyzaltar.

My favrote part of that video is when JC talkes about his enthusiasm for Sci-Fi, and his background in robotics, AI, computer science etc. I think that information helps to quell some of the attacks on Novaquarks vision. Novaquark is not just some random new company, its a company made of passionate, educated people who are very good at what they do. We see it in their demanor, in their transparency, in their art, in their design and ideas. Everything is done professionally, but maintains an air of humanity. Everything they do is done with seemingly solid intent and passion.

I'd be all for it personally, as long as it made sense for the overall game. I could see some interesting things being done around an eating mechanic.

Bingo. I wouldn't mind organic materials to work with that might have certain properties and look (healing, requiring food, a "digestive system" element to connect too, etc), but I don't think this is a game about the dev's creating cool ships for us, biological or otherwise. They give us the tools to create our own. 
 
Come to think of it I am surprised Star Citizen - which is almost completely financed by selling ships to players - hasn't yet tried cashing in on a Moya.

Scale with Tech....YES!
 
It makes no sense to me that a fighter could sustain a 3 hour warp, but a serenity/millennium falcon type ship should. If really great distances will exist, then I think larger capital ships should only be able to go that far.
 
One thing I have noticed in games is that whenever the travel is sped up and it takes less time to get anywhere, the immersion drops, the fun drops..it becomes all to easy.

My signature has a bilological ship I made in a different game (dont get too excited, the ship cant fly or do anything, just sit there and look pretty). But the biological aspect is that the hull of the ship was made from an alien carapace of unfathomable strength, but there is nothing living about the ship outside of the AI that helps to run it.
 
I think from this standpoint, we will easily be able to make biological ships in Dual, and create our own back story for them.

To me, If the game is worth playing month after month, its worth paying a sub to do so. I love to lose myself in the game world and free to play games often times, in order to support themselves no problem with that, have game play or other  mechanics that slice into that immersion. 

I'm happy with a subscription. As much as I might like F2P or B2P, they, in and of themselves, don't keep me around. The games I pay for on a monthly basis, are the ones I keep playing. The ones that rely heavily on cash shops are the ones I might dip into now and again when I see something nice, but my time in them is fleeting.
 
Give me a good solid, quality game with a monthly sub. It gives me assurance the playerbase will be mostly comprised of equally committed players too. 

HAIL HYDRA! Ohh wait, wrong forums.
 
​I am going more the route of mercenary/smuggler/pirate/bounty hunter. But I am more than ready to make alliances, as long as it's profitable.

Hrm, well I suppose I'll stick to the Library subforum for now, in hopes that a better option will open up. 

I don't think we have one yet. I remember this discussion coming up and I think Nyzaltar was looking into it. It would be nice to have a place to share stuff in preparation for the game.

Dual tweeted out a gif of a Mini Rocket Propulsor firing. Can't wait to attach one of these to a construct

https://twitter.com/dualthegame/status/689154627120558080

Thought you might like it 
 
I also actually like Theed from planet Naboo. I love the conbination of fantasy/period styles with sci fi.

I like the Los Angeles from Blade Runner! Good one.
 
Blade runner was my first DVD when the DVD format came out. One of my favorite movies.
 
As far as what city I would like to see...Elysium. Bespin. Tokyo 3.

I generally prefer new ideas, but Los Angeles from Blade Runner would be pretty cool. 

I have not been keeping up with no mans sky. So, you are saying they do not have an online multiplayer option? Ya, that is a huge turn off and would take me from "possible playing" to "not gonna waste my time".