Kiklix

Looks amazing. Like I said on twitter, the screenies look crazy good for PRE-ALPHA, some games at launch do not look this nice. I really like the screenshots of the larger ship (not the giant one). The engines look stellar, I can't wait to make a large craft.
 
I am impressed

Well... this is basically what "predesignated palette" means
On the palette diversity aspect, we will try to have a large variety to choose from. We can't tell right now in what measure.
But we know we have to offer a large choice if we don't accept textures from players.
Btw, speaking of alien fauna... There might be something in this field for the Friday Concept Art Research today.
Check out Twitter or Facebook later

Voxelmancy was the term used inside another game. Here in Dual we call it "voxelmorph".
 
Seriously though, I would like to lose the term voxelmancy and not carry it over to this game. 

Thank you Nyzaltar. It makes sense to me. I would have to see the voxel size in relation to a character to fully appreciate the 25 centimeter size (my calculations show that your size is barely larger than LM). But regardless, as you pointed out, we will get to fly these and that adds a ton of playability vs a spaceship that can't move. 
 
The planet size works for me.

Hi everyone!
Interesting suppositions...
 
@Comrademoco and PetdCat: you guessed a part (but there's more in the pipeline!) of what is going to happen next week: the official release of the new website! 
Yes, the new website is already online (we knew this would be a matter of one hour or two before someone spotted it ) but is still in beta. Don't hesitate to report any bug you find! 
 
Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.

For those who don't like Social Media, here is a repost from those scary places! 
 

 
The only thing that was "photoshopped" in this image... is the inserted text!
Do you guess what the countdown is about?... 

Hi everyone!
 
Yes, things are getting quiet here.
But it shouldn't last (at least we hope!) as May will be definitely the month where the first screenshots will be released
I'm indeed less present at the moment on the forum, working on PR related tasks. But I will be definitely there for everyone when the annoucement will be released on the internet! Developing the Alpha Team project (private section and all) is also in the todo list of the coming weeks
 
Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.

Hi everyone!
 
Keep in mind that as much as the dev team is for realism, a limit will be drawn where realism can unbalance the game and/or to where the current technology can push us. While orbital combat is feasible with our current technology, "collision combat" (to ram a ship/asteroid in another ship or a planet) is like a pandora box: we are totally aware that some other games using voxels have made possible this kind of gameplay. But if you look closely, this has always been with small constructs and never in a massively multiplayer universe. This is not a coincidence. "Collision Combat" is very, VERY expensive in terms of calculation power. It's proportional to the size of involved constructs. It can become a lot worse with a growing number of involved constructs.
 
Now, as you might already know, we took the decision to enable players to make huge constructs and let them evolve in one single-shard massively multiplayer universe. These choices implied we had to make the tough decision to put aside some interesting gameplay possibilities... for now. Basically, as much as technology is evolving (and it's evolving fast!) we still have a few technical limits to what we can achieve. But we stay focused on the future. Who knows which calculation power we will  have reached in 10 years? So it's not a "never" answer. More a "not happening soon".
 
Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.

Hi LordSilver and Klatu,
 
In short, the basic mechanics to make possible "planet ground vs orbital" combat will already exist in-game.
The transition between planet ground, planet atmosphere and space is seamless in Dual Universe (no instances, no loading screen).
So yes, this kind of combat is technically possible. However, to really become a gameplay possibility, the team will need to develop specific Elements for this kind of battle scale (very long range and powerful weapons, very large and powerful defenses, stats associated to these elements, game balancing, etc). This won't be trivial to develop (that would be a complete new territory in the MMO field as no one has ever made that before, from our knowledge. A challenge as big as exciting!) and that's not in the first priorities right now. But that could definitely be on the roadmap sooner or later. Maybe as a stretch goal for the crowdfunding campaign ?
 
Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.

A single well-placed shot of sufficient bore could shear the cockpit right off of the Millenium Falcon. So, in my eyes, one of the worst places for it.

I am happy to hear this.  
 
I do understand why other games like Elite Dangerous choose not to allow it.  The immersion of being in 1st person in the cockpit is awesome.  But i've noticed a funny thing that happens with the design of the ships in Elite Dangerous.  As the quality and price of the ships go up the cockpit on the ships extend further and further out from the front to allow for closer to a 180 degree view.
 
On the huge freighters your basically in a little glass bubble sticking out of the front of the ship.  It makes for a much better view but in reality it doesn't seem like a very realistic design.  Putting the pilot out there on the front of the ship like that, one little slip of the controls when your landing and you'd be a pilot pancake.
 
That just got me thinking about how it might really work in the future.  So we have backup assist cameras on SUVs now, so i would imagine on a spaceship in the future you could have cameras all over the ship and maybe even some kind of 3d composite view of all the cameras that might look and feel a lot like a 3rd person view in a video game.
 
So as much as i enjoy 1st person view sometimes i'm glad we'll have the option for both.
 
I was also thinking that the "Drone Camera mode" could be used for building.  I know initially there may only be a 1st person view for building, which i think will be tough.  If we could enter that same Drone camera mode when we're building with some sort of movable pivot point and no clipping, that would be great.  A building camera mode exactly like that is supposed to be in development for Landmark still i think.

Hi everyone!
 
Right now, we have planned 3 ways to pilot a ship, be it a solo ship or a giant multiplayer battlecruiser:
 
1) When you use a cockpit (generally for solo spaceships):
The character enters the cockpit, then you'll have a locked First Person view similar to those in "space sim" games.
 
2) When you use a dashboard control unit and pilot by looking through a spaceship window (generally for multiplayer spaceship):
Still in First Person View, but you will be able to leave the dashboard, go to another dashboard in another area in the spaceship and perform some other actions. If piloted this way, biggest ships will probably need several people to be properly piloted. But it's juste a guess.
 
3) Using a control Unit activating the "Drone Camera Mode" (usable for any ship, but will be probably useful essentially for biggest spaceships):
Third Person view. You see the Spaceship in its globality from outside the ship. Will probably make piloting easier if a really big ship is piloted only by one player.
 
Beside that, the LUA script customization should remain a factor with great potential on the piloting gameplay.
But it's hard to say right now what will be invented by the players with this possibility
 
Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.

How will piloting function as the scale of ships get larger? Say I want to build a Battlestar or Macross, and have some consoles set up in
 
command bridge to maneuver the ship. Will my pilot(s) have to do that by sight? Or will there be some sort of display on the console for the
 
pilot(s) to use?

It'd be cool to have some emotes pertaining with shipboard stuff. The /datapad emote is one such thing in my mind, but we could also have things like /weld or /console to have characters act as if they're doing on the ship.
 
Just my two cents.

(Posted Friday 29th of April 2016 on the DevBlog) 
 

 
Many of you have been waiting for quite some time to see the first in-game screenshots of Dual Universe! It?s coming soon, but one of the main reasons why we haven't shown anything sooner is that we were working on a very big move: we have switched our underlying game engine from Unreal Engine 4 to Unigine 2. Let me say a few words about this decisive evolution.
  Unigine is a rendering engine that was well known for GPU benchmarks showcasing advanced Direct X11 features. Quoting their web page, ?Unigine 2 is designed to handle virtual worlds of unprecedented scale without limits: double precision of coordinates, supersonic speed of data streaming and huge visibility distance.?. Well, that?s exactly the kind of technology we needed for Dual Universe.   We had been working with Unreal Engine 4, which has lots of incredible features and excellent rendering quality, but some of the things we wanted to do were more complex, or would have required us to branch the source code of Unreal to basically make our own version. Unigine 2 is much more low level and thus provides us more flexibility and computational power. Unigine 2 is perhaps less developed than Unreal regarding the game engine side (level edition, assets integration, etc, even if this is progressing rapidly and should improve in the near future), but as we generate everything procedurally those features are less relevant for us.   However, the freedom in low level modification and the clear focus of Unigine 2 towards large scale open world rendering was a perfect match for us. It also gives us a great platform to develop our own PBR (Physically Based Rendering) shading framework. We have already started to work with our engineers on many other rendering technologies on top of Unigine 2 features, that will enable us to provide really cool stuffs visually.   To give a taste of the kind of rendering that Unigine 2 enables, here are some images from the Unigine website, following the 2.2 release (these are NOT images from Dual Universe!). You can get more images & news from here.                     In the ?coming soon? screenshots of Dual Universe, you will see giant spaceship, mountains, planets and the amazing thing is that everything you will see will be real: you can walk to the top of those mountains, or fly in a ship and visit those planets. We know that since we started to work on Dual Universe, several other games have shown inter-planetary seamless travel, but keep in mind everything you will see is modifiable with voxel technology: You could take a bite out of those mountains, or even out of the planet, and the landscape would adapt from every point within the universe. We are talking about a full gigantic open world with editable content at the scale of planets. There are not many games that can show this today, together with a network engine capable to handle millions of players in the same universe.   That?s it for now. I also want to say a big thank you to the Unigine Corp team that has been invaluable and helped a lot in the transition to Unigine 2. More to come soon!     JC Baillie, Project Lead.

Our Art team has grown significantly since the beginning of the year, both in seniority and by the number of dedicated artists. This has impacted the development on two aspects:
 
1) Harmonizing the Art Direction
 
Recent artworks and 3D models (still work in progress) published share a common style:
- Heavy weapon turret 3D model
- Cockpit Concept Art for solo spaceships
- Decorative Props for city streets
- The new reactor 3D Model displayed in Marmoset later today
 
 

 
 
You can see in these visual assets the art style (work in progress) we plan to use to represent the "United Nations" and human technology at its peak before embarking in the Arkships (keep in mind  it might evolve quite a bit between today and the official release or even the Alpha phase).
 
2) Including their knowledge and their skills in the first screenshots
 
We had planned to post some screenshots sooner, but we felt it would be a missed opportunity if we didn't include some of the massive improvements, relatively quick to implement, coming from the new guys. No doubt this will have a significant impact on how the game will look & feel. These first screens won't contain the final quality of the playable Alpha, but it will give some ideas of where we are heading.  So brace yourselves for the first in-game screenshots in the second half of May!
 
Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.

It sounds like things are going well over at Nova Quark, and its understandable that you would hold off longer to wait until you can include the improvements as well. 
 
I'm looking forward to it. It looks like you have a very talented art team.

You all knew me as Hylios, but I've grown tired of that name. So I've done a complete overhaul of my profile images and name.
 
Hope you guys like it!

/Alienparagon ......interesting! 
 
I like the /datapad one. Techy emotes would be cool.
 
/laser (laser beam)
/scan (scan targeted item)
/confused (scratch head)

Sounds cool, and also the title change makes sense because of the combination of topics for different emotes/animations.
 
I like all of the above emotes, I wonder if a /sit (on chair) and /sit (on ground) would be feasible for us lounge lizards that also like sitting on grass or other pretty places.
 
Some of my fav emotes from an older game I used to play: /flirt (flirtateous pose)  /faint (faint on the ground) and /kiss (blow a kiss)   It's surprising how many situations can warrant a /faint.
 
I'm one of those people who'd never say an emote isn't necessary, because I love emoting. 
 
Other potentials: /angry (shake fist)  /drunk (sway drunkenly) 

/bow (to bow before someone, like Japanese do)
/talk (talk to someone)
/conversation /convo (talk to someone in an infinite loop)
/Alienparagon (transform into a short but skinny big headed grey alien)
/eat (eat food)
/eating (eat food in an infinite loop)
/drink (drink something)
/drinking (drink something in an infinite loop)
/datapad (pulls out a data pad and reads it/interacts, like a tablet)
 
I would not expect these at launch, or ever...just throwing out some fun ideas.

When I look at the tools DU is making and I add in an envisioned sci fi material palette mixed with a bit of what I have done in another building game with the ultimate idea that I will be able to make that construct move....I just get all kinds of excited inside

@SpaceMonkeyCongh:
 
You will be able to create as detailed of an object as the voxels allow. In DU, I believe a voxel is around 25 cubic cm so you could make a pretty good amount of detail with just the base blocks. Of course there's always voxel tools that allow for further manipulation and detailing, so in essence, yes, fine detail is achievable. Certainly detail would be better than that of Minecraft. How you would go about "voxelmorphing" these objects is still in development to my knowledge. As you have noted, 360-degree modeling and manipulation is a potential method of building, but I think Nyzaltar would be better suited to answering in that respect.
 
~Astrophil

I would like to see a mix of /sit emotes as well as a way to make an object (chair-either prop or voxel) clickable and have the character do a sit animation and sit on th chair.

?The reason I would like to see the ability to click on a chair and have the character sit is so the art department can position the character on the chair appropriately. I know its a small detail but I cant stand seeing a character sitting on the edge of a giant chair. One of the most immersion breaking aspects of building games is the failure to scale things appropriately. In Landmark I see people making counter tops that come up to players shoulders. Stuff like that drives me up a wall. The chairs I make in that game are famously liked and enjoyed because I design the chairs around the characters sitting animation. This way when someone sits, it actually looks like they are sitting.

 

When I look at the tools DU is making and I add in an envisioned sci fi material palette mixed with a bit of what I have done in another building game with the ultimate idea that I will be able to make that construct move....I just get all kinds of excited inside