Traceur
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Posts posted by Traceur
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I think it's a great idea to bring up this discussion now. One of the greatest struggles the Space Engineers team is dealing with currently is that their custom VRAGE engine was not originally designed to cope with "multi-entity" moving part machines. This has led to a lot of limitations when dealing with rotors and pistons- arbitrary speed limits and intense physics bugs among other things.
I think Dual Universe has the chance to succeed where Keen SWH had failed: in anticipating the popularity of mechanical contraptions and moving parts early in development and accommodating for it accordingly. Something like relative physics reference frames for "anchored" voxel grid entities (ala KSP) would be absolutely awesome. Admittedly I'm not a programmer and have no idea how hard something like that would be to implement in Uniengine 2, but I feel like the ability to design and build working, stable mechanical contraptions might make it worth it at least considering.
Also Space Engineers tried to do it within the physics engine accounting for each part as it's own physical object. Based on the server architecture description in the mmorpg.com interview, I suspect dual universe might need be a lot more careful on how and where it applies physics (or anything that tends to create syncing issues in servers, like ragdoll, soft physics destruction, etc). That would give them the leeway to go with something closer to the starmade solution, which functions quite a bit smoother.
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Exactly the news that brought me here. It worked
Would have been nice if someone screen captured and uploaded the video of it working with those few thousand players though.
Here's an appreciative if skeptical reaction of some of the main Space Engineers youtubers:
I find it odd that this game is getting more vaporware-suspicion then No Man Sky did, but I think in part NMS did it by showing some of it's promises straight off the bat, and the other part they did was a lot of video's interviews that humanizes and gives a face to the development team. Both might not be bad ideas for dual universe.
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Better yet, have a file with all the strings used in the game so that we can translate it to any language. Spanish, Chinese, Klingon and most importantly: Pirate speak. welcome onboard t' ark matey.
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My wish list:
Rails (Otherwise known as the piston without limits)
Handles (Something that allows you to grab onto a struct and move it around or be moved by it)
Tethers (When the thing your grabbing onto is trying to fly away)
Sensors (Environmental variables accessible in LUA)
Rotors (Spinning wheels of doom are fun for everyone)
Welders (Or some way to automate the construction of blueprints)
Space whales (Or some way to poke fun at Hello Games)
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2. With FTL travel and the speeds we're traveling, there's no need to plot an intercept angle. You can travel from the moon to the planet in seconds.
Speed kind of makes a lot of things more difficult, not easier.
If you'll look at games like star citizen, one of the things they had to place was a speed limit in order for fighter and ship to ship combat to be plausible, so that you can actually have the situation where everything happens in an environment where you can respond to things in human response time and at distances where you could actually see your target. Take the basic action of docking with a space station: in star citizen you can do this quite easily because your not going to be going that fast relatively to anything. In KSP you are going to fly by each other a few full trips around the planet before you are anywhere close to it.
That is a tough gig to balance out in terms of gameplay.
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Not sure I really follow. That's just sticking plates on a character. I'm not talking about medieval suits here, I'm talking about fully powered exoskeletons and larger. They're people shaped vehicles, not fantasy medieval armor.
Have you played Fallout 4? When I say exoskeletons and powered armor that's what I'm talking about. They're a completely separate entity from the player's avatar.
Generally there are two ways of doing this:
If what you want is something like a gandum style mech, then your basically building a large robot with a pilot seat, in which case.... Yes, LUA and mechanical parts would do fine. And don't get me wrong, that alone would be awesome (My first thread was asking if these are planned).
But since you mentioned fabrics, I am guessing you want a powered armor suit that your character can wear, which means you need a way to attach structs and elements to the character model and skeleton for the animations to work (That in turn could be useful for other things as well - custom weapons, custom jetpacks, and obviously - a helmet with revolving policecar lights).
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It wouldn't be enough to have mechanical elements, if you want an exosuit you'd also need something like this:
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Interesting. Currently the creator of VoxelFarm (otherwise known as the EverQuest:Next engine), is trying to tackle this very problem:
Given that in Dual every struct is it's own clipmap, I'd imagine they have already built the game to tackle this difficulty, and since they are using procedural world generation, having the location as a function of time should be possible.
The other part of the question is... Do they want this, and to what extent. In Kerbal Space Program even something as a randevu with a space station in orbit is an art, and for the average player most trips in the star system are only plausible because of the ability to accelerate time (I don't know about you but if they needed supplies my Kerbels would have died long ago...More then they usually do). Now, this is an MMO, so making piloting difficult isn't necessarily bad, it just means most of us will be reliant on someone else doing it. Perhaps f=m*a can work in the game favor as a balancing mechanism, making piloting smaller ships easier but larger heavier ships would naturally become more dependent on circular momentum to stay in orbit and reach their destinations, depending on how thrust and different engine types and their energy consumption would scale. Another way of doing it is cost-effectiveness: You could have anti-gravity for those playing without, but the energy consumption relatively to the mass it cancels out could scale exponentially. This would also help explain why the arkships have big empty propellant tanks for you to roam: Those beasts were thrusting with good ol' fashioned rocketry.
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Theres going to be thrusters right? Why not just crash the two together? Im sure you will get some pretty cool lag effects and mysteriously join the two together :3
Well I suppose you can always try to use the good old collision engine for your mechanical interactions, and.... Move very very carefully... But just saying that feels like us threatening the front-end game-play designer by taking a baseball bat and pointing it at whoever is doing it the server architecture, and you know, that's the very same person who needs to work their thrusters off trying to create a world where we don't need instances and don't have size limits on what we can build, we need their brain intact.
This is from very early on in development (earlier than the date shown) https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/39-props-generating-interaction-between-constructs-idea-from-estevan/:
I definitely recommend reading the devblogs to get a good idea of what they are doing with this game. However on the building side, here's a very brief overview.
Voxel-based Elements (voxels for short) are basically shapes made of some material.
Mesh-based Elements (elements for short) are pre-designed, functional components.
Constructs are player-made designs made up of voxels and/or elements.
Distributed Processing Units (DPU's) are LUA programs that define what elements can do. They are almost all pre-written, except...
Control Units are elements with a modifiable DPU. You can write LUA functions to respond to other elements broadcasting events and then call functions from other elements. As the name suggests, you can design a control system for your constructs.
We're not sure yet how the "anchors" mentioned in the quote will work, or even if they are still planned. I imagine that something like that is still in the works but there's no info on it as far as I know. I would be very surprised if there was no way to connect player constructs.
The anchor design is interesting, seems to work more as a hinge with limited movement then a full rotor.
I'll be honest: I am arriving here from Space Engineers, a game that severely lacks in providing context for your spaceship builds because pretty much everyone else is a builder, given that it's the only thing the game is about. So far from what I've read and seen, After seen the trailer and by now catching up on most of the devblogs (I am now down to on august 2014). The only advantage left - the only part of SE that everything I know of Dual's design doesn't completely suppress - is the ability to tinker with mechanical contraptions, which often ends up as my main activity in SE. It would be a shame if they don't, given that LUA is a much better suited for programming mechanical contraptions then C#.
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Just saw the e3 trailer... And I have one question:
Will the game feature moving parts that allow us to connect multiple player built structures?
I don't just mean animated prefabs like turrets and doors, but more along the lines of Sliding rails, rotors, hinges, and everything that connects one voxel structure to another? If so, is there any word from the dev's on how the game is going to handle it in terms of physics? Will we be able to script the contraptions using LUA?
I've heard the lead developer came from the field of robotics, will he be bringing robotics with him?
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A phone app to connect to the game could also be fantastic for in-game markets (And by fantastic I mean dangerously addictive).