Caprikel

So I looked through the discussions and couldn't find any topics on terraforming, so I decided I should start a discussion about it. So far we know we can break and collect the natural terrain, but so far we've only seen the placement of geometric voxels. I'm assuming we'll be able to place natural terrain at some point, but I have no idea when, or whether they already have.
 
Anyway, I think it's very very important that we're able to place natural terrain and create our own natural structures. First of all it's very important for fixing errors and patching up ugly player-made terrain abominations. Without being able to place natural terrain a griefer or noob would ruin nice looking terrain and we wouldn't be able to properly fix it.
 
It's also very important for making our own beautiful terraformed structures. When I used to play Minecraft, one of the best parts of the building process for me was using the voxelsniper plugin for creating mountains, rivers, oceans, caves, ravines, and whatever else imaginable. Having the ability to create beautiful environments allows for much more creativity in what we can do. 
 
In order for us to terraform effectively, we'll need many different tools for it. We'll need a smoothing tool, a flattening tool, a raising tool, a lowering tool, etc. We'll need the ability to place trees, shrubbery, those little rocks, water, grass, and other terrain elements. What other tools do you think would be useful?
 
I'm curious as to the difficulty of implementing terraforming. It seems weird that we haven't seen any of it yet (aside from breaking terrain of course), so I'm assuming it might be difficult to implement. Hopefully it gets into the game soon, since it seems like it's a pretty important aspect for the building part of the game.
 

I'm really excited for the kind of Politics and complex interactions that will be created within DU. I've never played EVE, but I've been somewhat curious about it. I never really ended up trying it out though, partly because I didn't want to join a game like that where I would be late to the party essentially. 
With Dual Universe though, not only will I have the opportunity to get a start on it early on, I'll also be able to enjoy the building aspect of it, since I have played a ton of Minecraft. 
So in other words, I'm just really hyped for the game!

True, I didn't consider how their whole economy is based on war. DU should be light-years ahead of EVE in its variety of activities and player motivations.

Raise your shields as soon as you hear the prox alert cry ... And have a Gunpowder tea.
 
@Saulretav: thx for the link.
 
To me, EVE is basically a corrupted economy of war: it's a Nash equilibrium. The gameplay aim to use free market as a weapon between corporations, which run the market as cartels willing to reach hegemony. But free market theorycally reject this. The Ideal goal of a free market is to find prosperity with "free" competition and fair prices.
 
As the only economical activity inside the game is war, the ultimate goal of all industries is to build bigger warships and more powerful weapons...Finally it doesn't make any sense to me.
Even if EVE hype is built around the sweet "bro in arms" hype, it's only the tiny piece of gold in a sad dirt hole. Every group trying to prove it has the best strategy and the smartest stat tool... Social behaviours on EVE medias are closer to legit bullying and iron fist mods than a friendly bro thing. Not my idea to spend good time.
 
Anyway, I didn't get it during the time trial...So I don't care about EVE now.
 
As far as I know, and fortunately, DU is not going on the same path. Until now, PLEX system is the only EVE almost-exclusive feature in DU (the link between PLEX and DAC systems was confirmed by NQ). It seems to me that various games are inspiring NQ devs (SE, Avorion, SS13, Minecraft, KSP, and many others).
 
To me, exploring and building are the 2 most exciting aspects ^^... Wait and see...
 

I'm really excited for the kind of Politics and complex interactions that will be created within DU. I've never played EVE, but I've been somewhat curious about it. I never really ended up trying it out though, partly because I didn't want to join a game like that where I would be late to the party essentially. 
With Dual Universe though, not only will I have the opportunity to get a start on it early on, I'll also be able to enjoy the building aspect of it, since I have played a ton of Minecraft. 
So in other words, I'm just really hyped for the game!

I'm really excited for the kind of Politics and complex interactions that will be created within DU. I've never played EVE, but I've been somewhat curious about it. I never really ended up trying it out though, partly because I didn't want to join a game like that where I would be late to the party essentially. 
With Dual Universe though, not only will I have the opportunity to get a start on it early on, I'll also be able to enjoy the building aspect of it, since I have played a ton of Minecraft. 
So in other words, I'm just really hyped for the game!

While the other suggestions are good, this one is golden.  Added. Also it answers Lethys's question to an extent.

Okay. I am not the Illuminati, obviously. I shouldn't have even mentioned secret societies (as that illicits preconceived notions of the purpose of my post).

Let me word it differently:
 
It would be great if orgs hosted on the community portal could choose to not display all of their member's names, right? That way it would be easier for people to be involved in controversial orgs without advertising their involvement.
 
 
Disregarding the definition of a "secret society," this was the essence of my post:
 

Much better.
 
I agree with you on this point. It would be a nice feature to hide member names from the public record. 

I'm sorry, we want this game to actually come out.

Hey man I totally agree with you, I mean who would pay $156 a year for a game? Nobody!!!
 
I mean, it's not like there are over 15 million people playing subscription model MMOs right now who pay more than that XD

So... the game is of infinite rating in your eyes... but deserves not the price-tag of an infinitely rated game...









































































































...what.

Why 156/year? They said the monthly subscription will probably be around 10/13 (euros or dollars i don't remember) depending on how many months you buy in the same package. So you're likely going to pay something around 120$, that is like 2 "AAA" games (and you get for free 1-2 expansion/year, that you'd pay anyway otherwise). If you prefer you can buy 2 "AAA" games that will provide 20 hours of gameplay each if you're lucky, to me 120$ for a year of gameplay seems better
 
If the game is really going to be as good as they said, the price is not a problem.

(Posted Friday 20th of March 2015 on the DevBlog)
 
 

 
One of the ambitious and new aspects of Dual Universe is that traditional organizations that are found in other video games, like guilds, nations or corporations, should actually emerge in the game. This means that we have to design a generic structure to represent the union of several players, without biasing it towards one particular type of organization or another. The term we use to designate this structure is "organization". A state, a city, a guild, a nation, a group of pirates, an alliance, etc, are all organizations in the game. They differ in the particular way they specialize the generic definition, and in doing so they specify political orientations and implicit organizational goals. Let’s have a look at how it works.

To start with, organizations are divided into legates and members. All legates are not necessarily members, and vice-versa. The legates literally own the organization, which is divided into several shares that are distributed to the legates. Members don’t own the organization, but they have what we call “roles”. Roles are defined by a set of rights, duties and privileges that apply to members. A member can have one or several roles (and, as an legate can also be a member, there can also be roles for legates, but not always), and a role can be fulfilled by one or several members. Roles can be organized hierarchically, so that sub-roles inherit their default set of rights/duties/privileges from their parent.

One could say that legates are making decisions regarding the organization structure, while members are more in charge of running the organization. The mechanism by which legates make decisions is voting, with a weight based on the number of shares owned by the legate. A delegation system enables certain legates to gather the voting rights of other legates. This delegation can be limited in time or not, and can be for every vote or for certain types of votes only. Note that the wording used here, “vote”, induces a notion of democracy, but this is not necessarily the case. In an organization where all legates have permanently delegated all their voting rights to one single legate, you have a de-facto dictatorship. Intermediary cases involve a parliamentary system, where a subgroup of legates concentrate the voting rights of all the others, but none of them can rule alone. All nuances are possible.

There are several types of votes that legates can cast, but one crucial type is about creating roles and assigning/revoking members in those roles. Other types of votes involve approving new legates or revoking them, deciding whether organization shares are tradable or not, and many subtles details on the voting system which are meant to prevent obstruction situations.

Roles, as we said, are about rights, duties and privileges. Rights are defining what a member can do with the organization properties. Can you open containers? What type of containers? Can you access the bank account? Can you delegate your rights to other members? Can you fly ships owned by the organization? Can you control the organization territory system? Can you create subroles? Can you hire/fire members? etc. Duties are things like paying taxes on your in-game revenues or when using certain organization property, obligation to deliver a certain amount of certain assets per month to the organization, etc. And finally, privileges are things like salaries, insurances in case of death, protection in case of aggression, and other practical in-game benefits.

And last but not least : legates and members can be organizations themselves. As such, organizations can be hierarchical, like an alliance, a federation of alliances, or any kind of union.

Now, what can you do with this? Let’s try to build a corporation: you have a board of shareholders, representing all legates through delegation. They elect a CEO, who is a member with a special role that grants him/her the right to create subroles (head of marketing, head of RH, etc) and who will run the company. Each member gets a salary, and the profit of the company is shared among the legates with a dividend mechanism (voted by the legates). This is pretty close to how a real company works. Now, can we imagine creating a democratic nation? In that case, every legate has only one share of the organization and is also a member. Voting can happen through parliament representatives through the delegation mechanism by the legates/members (same thing here). Member roles’ duties include paying taxes, and privileges include possibly a minimal wage (sort of “salary”). A president role can be created and granted subrole delegation powers and full access to the nation’s assets. This president can create roles for prime minister, ministers, etc.

We will provide default templates for typical organizations, but it’s easy to figure out how you could create an interplanetary alliance of planetary organizations, themselves organized in a hierarchy of nations, cities, etc. Corporations can be members of nations, with specific roles separating them from regular citizens. And you can also structure corporations in a hierarchy of conglomerate, trusts, etc. Now, can you imagine how you would like to create your own organization, your own political system, your own subdivision between legates and members? We hope to see pretty amazing things emerge from this, let us know what you think!

JC Baillie,
Project Lead

I would just like to jump back in here. Like Hades pointed out, there is no way the NQ would even be able to police everything, let alone want to. It will mostly be up to the players to blow up things they don't like.
 
The problem with censorship is that it can easily backfire and get rid of things you do like. Not to get too deep in real world politics, but there is a large portion of the population in my country (US) that sees no irony in advocating for more free speech in other countries but advocates for reduction is speech at home. 
 
Back to the game: We have to trust NQ to do the right thing, and if they do something that the community doesn't agree with, it is important for us to let them know in a constructive manner, so that the community as a whole can improve.

Very nice way of saying "I have a fetish of having a gun on my head" but most of us don't share in that fetish matey.
 
Let me illustrate with one of my escapades.
 
In another game, I had an SJW go ballistic on me when I said "I watched the end of BSG and I cried like a bitch". Why? Shit if I know, but my bets are because I dared to assume other humans have emotional triggers to bittersweetly ending romances ( uhm, spoilers ).
 
I guess I should have assumed female canines or any female of any species is an emotionless golem, and I should have also stuck to my privileged white male role and not even dare to shed a tear or two over how Roslin and Adama ended up.
 
How dare I have feelings, amirite?
 
NQ should actually ban anyone showing any form of emotion. They should in fact require you to declare your sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and if you even DARE say something outside of your privileged role, you should be immediatelly sentenced to death by a thousand spoons.
 
For example, if you are straight, male, caucassian and european, if you dare say "I love japanese cartoons" you should be banned from the game for insulting japanese culture.
 
IF you can't see the issue with a PC police culture or policies within a game world, then I can't do anything else to point it out to you.

This questions was brought up in a Q&A and answered; there will be a way to report things within the game. It is quite a silly/uncomfortable question when discussing an upcoming video game, but of course extremely relevant.
 
 

It's an interesting question because I think intent matters.
 
If someone from India is building a temple in-game, the Swastika symbol doesn't really mean the same thing as some random trolls using it to aggravate other players. 
 
 
However, despite what we'd like, I don't think any of us can really convince NQ not to have to take action against things like that, simply because of the rather strict "hate speech" laws in France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country#France
 
Those of us in America tend to take our Freedom of Speech for granted, but the laissez-faire attitude towards speech isn't really the way most other countries handle it. 
 
 
My personal belief is that the game should be free from censorship, but the reality of the situation is that NQ will most definitely have to censor some things regardless of how they feel about it personally too. 

Do you guys think devs should interfere with certain things like offensive symbols build by voxels and such? For example someone builds a swastika on their base or ship, someone else reports it and devs removes it.
 
Personally i think the game should be 100% free from censorship and rules about things like building potentially offensive structures ,etc.
If people are against it enough they should deal with it on their own. For example gather up and raid the "offenders" base or whatever. The in game 'rules' should be made and enforced by the players in my opinion.
 
What do the rest of you think? Discuss!

You may recognize the voice, as he's in radio ads all over the country  

@Lethys:
There is no automatic orbit mode (at least for the moment). Being in orbit of a planet is basically the result of having reached a certain speed (whether by propulsion generated by engines or by inertial speed with engines turned off) while being near a planet in space.
 
@ATLMVE:
As there wasn't any answer to your topic, it hasn't been archived.
 
@CaptainTwerkMotor:
Yes, at the end of the video, it's the new Core Unit Design.
As the 3D Model is nearly finished, with a bit of luck, you will see it in-game in the next DevDiary
 
@Lights:
No food system planned at the moment, sorry  
We wanted to implement tons of cool features for the Official Release, but we had to make tough choices.
 
@Ripper:
Yes, the switch next to the door was a place holder, not a final version.

Perhaps fire could just be a temporary non-spreading status-effect giver majigure.
One could use an incendiary device to create a temporary area of effect that will quickly disable certain types of elements and cause severe damage to people not adequately protected.

Hi there,
 
In the near future, windows will be available under the form of decorative Elements.
However, implementing voxels made from a transparent material, nothing is clear planned at the moment in the roadmap, so if it's implemented, it will be most likely after the official release.
 
The challenge of making transparent voxels functional enough to use it for windows: Developing this type of materials to the point of being able to make windows of custom size, with a perfect transparency with no blur or deformation when whatching something placed on the other side of the windows is not an easy task. And it will cost a significant amount of development time. So as always, we will concentrate first to core mechanics and mandatory content before starting developing transparent materials that could be used in an industrialized way.
 
In any case, we will keep you informed about the evolution on this topic when we will have fresh news about it
 
Best regards,
Nyzaltar.

So basically what are some somewhat obscure or rarely mentioned features that Novaquark has mentioned that they will or may be adding that you are especially excited for?
For example, I'm very intrigued by the idea mentioned by J.C. for "low-tech" planets where he mentioned that a planet could be limited to something like medieval technology. I can't remember which interview this was from, but I think it would be very interesting to visit a planet where people role-play a medieval society with castles and feudalism.  I think it would add quite a bit of variety and role-playing opportunities to the game that would be fun to try out.
So what Odd features are you looking forward to?