Michaelc

Hi Astrophil90,
 
Hacking as a game mechanic is definitely planned. But it won't be before the official release of the game (don't expect it in Alpha or Beta versions of the game).
The Hacking will be a game mechanic where skills learnt by the character will play a big role. This won't be a "real hack" by using a script language. LUA will be used to script a lot of elements ingame, and provide basic AI in some ways. But it won't be related to the "Hacking" gameplay.
 
I hope this answer you question
 
Regards,
Nyzaltar

Hacking the system of a ship or building could be another component in combat. Say during space combat that you hijack the opponent ship's shield system, rendering them completely vulnerable, but that the same could also happen to you. It could either become a powerful asset or pitfall and add to the realistic aspects of the game, as cybersecurity and cybercrime are a very real problem in our world today.
 
The question would be the format in which the hacking would take place. Would it be in an actual programming language (possibly LUA?), or in a fictional, simplified code, or perhaps it would be unique to that particular system.

I think there should be a lot of strategic ways to play the game. Like I saw one post about hacking and rendering shields useless. I would love and encourage such game play because new players could even out do the senior players do to just better strategic placement, communication with their team, and the decisions made in the game.

Sorry I accidentally hit enter I will continue in this post
 
                                   Apothecary training
             Herb Growing
                                   Poison Knowledge
Farming                               
              Orchard Farming
 
 
                     Pole Fishing
Spear fishing
                     Net Fishing
 
 
I hope that gives you some idea of what it would be, my idea would allow for much customization by the players, the actually thing could have hundreds of base categories but really how many is up to the developer and what will work best with the game. I also feel that it shouldn't be you level up get a skill point and unlock one of these I think it would be better if you got a sort of skill experience as you continue in the game which can then be applied to one of these categories for benefits. After you put so much (Skill Experience) into the base skill then you can start upgrading the others giving more choice to the player. This could also include many other skills that you don't usually see in other skill trees such as flying or ship maintenance effecting how maneuverable or how fast you can repair your ship. And depending on how much Skill Experience you put into a category effects how many bonuses you get from it.

There will likely be many styles of gameplay, strategic being one of them, to avoid having the classic "power in numbers" being the sole decider in combat/normal gameplay. Communications will be a central part of succeeding, especially in combat and in large organizations, because it will be more difficult to coordinate all of the efforts of a larger group or when the adrelanine is pumping during combat.

I think the crowdfunding route is perfect. What PetDcat said is true about landmark. As long as you are able to communicate to your fan base you will be fine but if not then issues can stir.
 
One thing I have noticed about landmark is that a lot of people do not like the main communication to be on social media outside of the official forums. That makes sense, people come to official forums to get news updates etc, its a logical flow for the process. 

(Posted Friday 23rd of April 2014 on the DevBlog)
 

 

 
 

Many people have been asking questions about how we plan to finance the development of Dual Universe, which is an ambitious project and would seem to require some heavy funding. Even though we are in many ways fairly different from them, as I will explain below, we have sometimes been compared to some of the current very big budget productions, and asked to explain how we could compete. I thought it would be nice today to share more about our plans and strategy, while stressing the peculiarities of our game, so that we can start giving you a clearer picture of the financing side.
 
How much does a game like Dual Universe cost to produce? The first thing to notice is that, unlike non-MMO games, there almost never is a definite final version of the game. It is constantly evolving and so if you look at the total budget to produce such a game over several years, the number can be quite high. What we are really interested in is rather, for a MMO, how much does it cost to get to the point where the game is playable with enough value and fun in order for it to move from an ?alpha/beta? to a ?release? stage.
 
The other thing to notice is that what factors in most of the cost of producing a traditional video game revolves around creating content: 3D models of the environment, story content (quests, backstory, etc), and testing the balancing of all this to make sure that the content is neither too easy, nor too hard to play. This is actually a huge part of the cost of any ambitious video game today.
 
Our core gameplay approach is emergent gameplay: we believe that it can be incredibly fun and rewarding to let the players build their own stories, their own buildings, their own ships. We will of course bootstrap the process with a few of our own productions, but the whole point of the game is to empower people with the freedom to create their own world in a way they see fit. We also use procedural generation to create the landscape and environment. And it turns out that, as a side effect, this has a profound impact on the cost of the game. Instead of spending money to create content, we spend money to create the tools, the ?laws of physics?, the community support.
 
So, where most other games, including those we are sometimes compared to, will need many millions of dollars to deliver, we believe we can make the game we dream of with less money, while still providing a great and convincing emergent experience. That being said, it is clear that we still need money to get this ball rolling: we still have to create 3D content (every active element in the game is a 3D mesh, like weapons, reactors, control units, etc), we obviously need to develop the innovative technology behind the planetary engine, the continuous single-shard cluster, the inner workings of the game design (how to create an organization, trade, fight, secure territory, etc). This is by no means cheap. But we believe it?s within the scope of an indie studio.
 
Currently, our funding is based on the money of private investors who support the concept of the game, including myself. We have enough cash to get the 20 people team to function properly until we reach the alpha stage, somewhere in 2016. The traditional way to move on from there is to go to a publisher with our alpha, who might be convinced to add a few more millions and ? get more or less full control of the game. The problem is that we have a very innovative and disruptive concept in hand, and publishers rather tend to push their licenses towards more conventional grounds. My fear is that this option, if we have to get to this, might affect the evolution of Dual Universe in directions that neither me, nor you, the community, would really like.
 
The other option that is now available for small companies like us is to go for crowdfunding. The same process goes: you show up with your alpha and ask for support. But here, instead of a publisher, you might get the chance to finance the next stage of development entirely with the support of your community. More than money, what you also get is feedback, which is all the more relevant since we focus our design on emergent gameplay. There is no magic however, we know that the alpha has to be incredibly convincing, and that we have to deliver something to the community that shows that we know what we are doing. All the team is working hard with this in mind, and we are going to do the impossible to try and not disappoint.
 
Even if the crowdfunding might not bring as much money as what a publisher might be able to provide, we are much more in favor of this option. If the amount of money raised is modest and we cannot reach all our stretch goals, we might face a possibly slow ramp up of the amount of game features, centered on a small but active community, that will gradually (maybe over several years) get closer and closer to the ideal final game we dream of. We are ok with that.
 
The really amazing possibility with crowdfunding however, is that we may get the community so excited, as we are, that suddenly everything becomes possible, right here and right now. We could accelerate the development of the game, add more interactive elements and create the most beautiful emergent video game world ever made! We love games, we love the concept of Dual Universe. Ultimately, it is you, our community, that will decide whether we can press the ?turbo? button, and remain free from publishing constraints at the same time. The sky?s the limit (or rather, interstellar space!).
 
JC Baillie,
Project Lead

Yes, this will up to players to do what they see fit with the planets they colonize. Of course, nefarious ways of treating a planet might have consequences (just like it would in the real world). We are thinking about implementing possible natural penalties for players or organizations degradating or slowly destroying a planet. But nothing is written in stone yet.
 
And concerning potential Aliens in the game... Well, I can't tell you much right now.
Because if I do, there's a high chance that some men in black with sunglasses would come and take me away to have a "nice little chat" with me 
So in short, I would only say: Maybe, maybe not  . Let's just say that before any Arkship landing, alien life (flora & fauna) has been spotted on some habitable planets but no intelligent/sentient alien race has been spotted so far.

Exactly. Landmark is nice, but building something always leaves me feeling empty because it serves no purpose. This is where Dual Universe takes the ball and will make touchdown after touchdown (note: I really have no interest in sports). I can't wait to be a part of this exciting community. I love the art DU is producing and happy to see another sci fi voxel game.

I agree! Building things is only half the fun, the other half is seeing other peoples' creations. Can't wait to see yours (before it's blown up by griefers of course).

Ello! *waves*

Hello everyone! Names Michael and I love to build and create things. Hopefully one day I can become a game designer and do what I love to do best and that is to create places, worlds, and other things. I have been following the progression of Dual Universe for quite a long time as it really captures my interest. One of the main factors that really got me interested was having the ability to make something, out of voxels, and make it actually work! There are alot of other things that has had me interested in the game as well like multiple planets, outer space, faction/organization creation, and pretty much all the things listed on the 'About the Game' page. This will truly be an outstanding game and will have my full support.
 
Anyways, thanks for reading and I'll be around on the forums! See you all around!

Heya Kiklix! Glad to see someone familiar from landmark interested in Dual Unvierse as well!!

Hello everyone! Names Michael and I love to build and create things. Hopefully one day I can become a game designer and do what I love to do best and that is to create places, worlds, and other things. I have been following the progression of Dual Universe for quite a long time as it really captures my interest. One of the main factors that really got me interested was having the ability to make something, out of voxels, and make it actually work! There are alot of other things that has had me interested in the game as well like multiple planets, outer space, faction/organization creation, and pretty much all the things listed on the 'About the Game' page. This will truly be an outstanding game and will have my full support.
 
Anyways, thanks for reading and I'll be around on the forums! See you all around!

A lot of things are under construction. The Lore is no exception.
Join us in this section to talk about the storyline, to give your feedback and/or make some suggestions about what has already been uncovered of the storyline.
 
Stay tuned as we are currently working on the game world bible

(Posted Saturday 13th of September 2014 on the DevBlog)
 

 
 
While we will encourage and foster PvP activities in the Dual Universe, we also want to find a way to let less action-driven players, or simply beginners, to enjoy other types of gameplay. Some of those would incidentally be essential to the mechanisms of a player-driven economy. To give you a few examples, we could mention architectural/artistic and building activities, politics, science, exploration & research, or financial organizations. None of these can easily develop in a war zone. At the same time, we want rare resources to be hard to secure, exploring the unknown to be challenging, and territory control to be central for Alliances and Empires. How can we reconcile these two extremes?

Often times in the design of the game, I like to look at the real world for inspiration. In most industrialized countries, we are enjoying a relatively stable peaceful environment, but it was not always the case. Originally, people used to gather in small towns characterized by high protecting walls, internal police and usually a garrison of military forces ready to defend the city. The goal was to define a collective force of defense, and a "secure" perimeter, presumably easier to defend and therefore more peaceful than an isolated house in the forest where bandits could attack at any time. Today's industrialized world has developed similar protections at the scale of a country: frontiers, military forces and collectively financed weapons to discourage any aggression. Modern countries typically also add economical interdependencies with other countries, creating a commercial network that encourages cooperation rather than aggression.

This is the kind of emergent security we would like to witness in the game. However, building cities and then nations will undoubtedly take a lot of time. Maybe several years of game time. If we don't bootstrap the process, the game will be a sort of Mad Max world for so long that we might never get there.

The backstory is going to help here: you are a colonist who just arrived on a new planet, in a gigantic arkship that transported you and hundreds of thousands of other colonists through the universe for millennia. The arkship was designed in Kyrium, a super-resistant, graviton-absorbent semi-transparent material able to manage any type of brutal deceleration for the ship or its passengers. It is programmed to literally and frontally crash in the planet's ground, becoming an impressive 10km tall high tower lurking over the landscape. Digging deep for geothermic energy harvesting, and standing high in the skies, the arkship is meant to become the universal beacon for your new civilization. As the ship designers expected, your nascent world would need supervision and defense regulation, at least around the arkship, to be able to bootstrap rapidly a self-secured civilization: as a consequence, there is no aggression possible in a perimeter of 20km around the arkship, no PvP.

The ship’s autonomous AI will constantly monitor every action performed in its action radius and neutralize any attempt of aggression or unauthorized destruction. Beyond that zone, it’s PvP free-for-all. You only go there if you’re well prepared. We might introduce intermediary zones before the full PvP area, where certain levels of protection remain, but this is not yet decided.

The arkship is self-powered and impossible to destroy (no one knows how Kyrium is made or harvested, but it's clearly not something that plays in the same league as any other materials you will encounter or craft in the game). So, this safe area is impossible to deactivate. However, it is not impossible to build another one somewhere else in the unsafe zone or on some other planet, power it and defend it. The AI-shield technology that the arkship uses is documented in the blueprints available for download, and with the right skills it can be rebuilt. However, the energy cost of such a gigantic device, as well as the military protection that will be necessary to protect it against frontal attacks or sabotage, does not make it something you can just build in your garden with some friends. It will typically be requested to support some strategic mining operation or some political plan that makes it worth the effort. This is the kind of construct that will require a very large number of players and resources to create, and will be made available in the game much later. But it will be in principle possible to settle a new safe zone anywhere on any planet (except in another safe zone), if enough players are willing to contribute to its building and maintenance.

Strategically, a secondary arkship-like defense tower and safe zone will obviously be a target of choice, either for military purposes or simply by griefers eager to set the world on fire. The first type of attack could in principle be settled without much damage for the inhabitants of the zone, if they consent to transfer territory control to the attacker when he has proven to be stronger than the existing defenses. In the second case, ultimate destruction could be the goal of the hostile forces. Players will always be encouraged to take electronic snapshots of their constructions, if not blueprints when appropriate (the difference is that a snapshot cannot be traded, it's a personal asset), together with insurances, in order to be able to rebuild if necessary. However, rebuilding after destruction is costly, as neither the materials nor the time required by the auto-rebuilder can be avoided. It would be better to lose a bit of time and money, rather than losing your magnificent neo-renaissance imperial castle on top of the mountain.

Ultimately, for a group of players outside of the range of the arkship protection zone, the best way to insure their safety is to invest in powerful defensive weapons, secure energy sources or backups, and cultivate a network of diplomatic links to be able to call for reinforcements when hell will knock at the door. I wonder who will be the first to settle on another planet and how long it will take!

JC Baillie,
Project Lead
 

(Posted Friday 30th of January 2015 on the DevBlog)
 

 
Piloting a spaceship in a videogame is a classic of the Sci-Fi genre. Amazing titles have been written based on that idea. Most of the time you get to control a given ship, among a set of predesigned ships, either in first person view within the cockpit (Wing Commander style), or from a third person view outside of your ship (Eve Online style). You will be able do that in Dual Universe too, but there is more.

First, in Dual you won’t have to use predesigned ships, and in fact there will be no predefined ships. We will have some basic ships available at the beginning but nothing will force you to use those. You will be able to build your own, or buy a model designed by another player or organization, from a nearby market. With the balancing provided by the supply and demand selection mechanism (I’ll talk more about the ingame economy in another blog post), the best ship designs will naturally emerge, incremental improvements will be made on them over time and innovation will disrupt the status-quo from time to time. Just like in a real market economy.

The first ship you will pilot will likely be a single seated one-person ship, mostly for transport or small cargo jobs. The experience of piloting such a ship will be similar to the classical cockpit first person/third person view we mentioned at the beginning (you will be given ways to choose which type of view you want).

Now, the interesting thing is that a ship is not a special entity in the game. It is in fact a construct like any other - it just happens to have reactors and ship-like elements that make it behave like… a ship. But in particular, it can be given any shape and any size, provided that you are able to equip it appropriately in terms of power and control so that it can fly. Being on a planet surface, entering a ship and being “in” a ship is also a completely continuous experience for the player, there is no formal boundary. So you could have a truly gigantic ship, hosting a complex infrastructure inside, with hundreds of rooms and corridors. People would be free to embark the ship, walk inside it, jump out of it. Think of all the possibilities.

The control of this multiplayer crew ship would be distributed to several players according to their specialization. People for navigation, some others for left bank/right bank weapon systems, missiles, others for repair facilities, radar, energy systems, com, or for the faster-than-light engine, etc. You would need real team play to fly an interstellar mothership, creating emergent “professions” ingame as people specialize in certains aspects of ship control.

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.

Once again, at the heart of all these ideas are key game-technology changes (real ships created by players), together with emergent gameplay. What players will do with this is still not really known, but the possibilities are huge and exciting!

JC Baillie,
Project Lead

(Posted Thursday 4th of December 2014 on the DevBlog)
 

 
In-game economy is a crucial aspect of any good MMO game. Very few games however take on the challenge of providing a very realistic, dynamic economy within the game, mostly because it is considered a bit too complicated. The traditional approach is to have a centralized auction system, accessible from various places, allowing people to sell their items to the best bidder. This is an oversimplification of the type of economic exchanges that can take place in a real world economy. Let's look at how this is going to be handled in Dual Universe, and why it matters.   Fundamentally, economy is about exchanging things for other things. Goods or services, against other goods and services. It initially starts with barter, and then some reference good is chosen as a common reference, which becomes what we call “money?? and makes it possible to quantify the process (more about the history of money here). In Dual, we will assume there is one single currency across the whole universe to keep things simple.   (NB: we will discuss the question of faucets and sinks in balancing the amount of available in-game money in another post. For the moment, let's keep our discussion on the question of pricing and goods exchange)   So, at this stage, you have the concept of money and you can start to sell your goods, but you need to set a price. The simplest method is… to set a price. If it's too high, no one will buy. If it's reasonable or down cheap, you'll find a buyer. The core problem here is to figure out a way to assess the price correctly, without too much guessing work.   The simplest way to deal with pricing estimation is auctioning: assuming there would be potentially several buyers, let them compete for a time for who is willing to pay the most. This is a bit better than guessing, but not quite perfect: you can always get unlucky and have your good sold for half the price, because you ran out of time or you ran out of wealthy buyers, etc. However imperfect, this is often the only method available if your good is a “one of a kind?? good, for which no other price estimation ever occurred, and no recurring auctioning could be organized. That's why there will still be auctioning in Dual Universe, but that won't be the only method available. Unlike in other MMOs your auction won't be seen from anywhere in the game but only locally (in the “region?? you set it up).   The second way to set a price has been invented with market economy: if you are trading goods that are similar in nature and in large quantities, you can set up a market exchange for it. On this market, people who own that particular good can make selling offers. They are listed in increasing order of value: the cheapest offers first, and then the more expensive. Symmetrically, if you want to buy that particular good, you can make buying offers, that are listed in decreasing order: the highest price first, and then the cheapest. Whenever the two lists collide (you have a guy ready to buy at a price higher than the lowest of the seller's prices), you have a deal and the corresponding orders will be then removed from the list.   The relative pressure on one side or the other (buyers or sellers) will tend to empty the respective order lists either towards higher prices or lower prices. This is the well known mechanism of supply and demand equilibrium.  
 

 
In Dual Universe, creating a market will require nothing more than setting up a Market Unit, a particular Element that you can craft and install in any construct of yours. The Market Unit requires an energy supply and a container to store the traded goods. It can be as small as a front door market in your little farm, where travelers can buy your local production, to an orbital station sized market where interstellar megaships are traded.   Importantly, you will access market information (the current list of buy/sell orders for any given good) from a distance, using Information Units to analyze prices on different markets, and compare. This mechanism will naturally establish competition between markets and tend to aggregate them based on geographical or specialization efficiency criteria. When you'll buy a good on a market 1.000km away from where you stand, it will show up in a local inventory physically attached to that particular market container. So, you have to factor in the cost (in time) to get there and collect your good. This is extremely important as it will give birth to local markets in remote areas, which only purpose will be to save you the efforts of organizing the logistics of acquiring goods from afar. This service will translate into higher prices, as those who take the risk of convoying these goods for you have to maintain a sound logistic chain, protect the area, etc.   The way markets will work is exactly as I just explained: you can deposit a good in the market container and set a sell order with a given price for it (you will be able to check existing orders to make sure you are competitive). Symmetrically, you can set a buy order where you indicate at what price you would like to acquire a particular good. Now, if you are in a hurry, you can buy immediately by picking up the currently cheapest available price among the sell orders. Or you can sell immediately by picking up the currently highest offer in the buy orders. This difference between immediate and deferred transaction is at the heart of the “time is money?? paradigm: making an instantaneous transaction by taking what is available right now will almost always get you a worst deal than if you had been patient with a buy/sell order listing. For many players, the way to interact with markets will be through instantaneous orders (it's very simple, and you don't need to understand more to play the game). But for some people more into economics, there will be profit to be made, in exchange of time.   To sum up, the market exchange model will be a key mechanic because it allows to: - have a realistic value of any good in game based on supply and demand. - let the players set their markets anywhere they want, making the geopolitical/strategic aspect of this a core element of the emergent gameplay - witness market specialization according to what actually happens in the game (not some predefined assumption that will bias the equilibrium) - allow for lots of specialized activities in game: market owner and manager, trader, broker, exporter/importer, logistic, etc.   JC Baillie, Project Lead

(Posted Sunday 17th of August 2014 on the DevBlog)
 
 

 
 
We have been asked several times what the actual typical gameplay of Dual Universe would be, how it would be played, in a very practical way. It's of course too soon to give a lot of details about the numerous activities that will be possible within the game, but we thought it would be nice to go through like five typical minutes of the kind of gameplay you could experience on the surface of a planet. To start with, let's talk a bit more about what we have in store for the alpha version, which will be made available next summer.
 
(Update Tuesday 17th of March 2015: The alpha version has been postponed. We will give more information on this subject as soon as possible)
 
In the alpha version, you wake up inside the arkship, which is still on its way towards the planet where you are to establish a new civilization with your fellow colonists. You have been woken up early from cryosleep, because you are a member of the alpha team, a set of special operatives that will be given a pre-training in the basic ways to run your future new life on the new planet, and be able to coordinate actions when the time will come (when the beta will be out). And this pre-training will be done through... a simulation (within the simulation, yes, where does it end?). So basically, you are still in your cryosleep vat and the ship’s AI is plugging you on a sort of Oculus Rift-like super neat simulator and here you go.

You step out of the arkship already loaded with blueprints, materials, skills, etc. The simulation is meant to put you in a situation which would correspond to where you are after a few months of playing and skilling already, so that you, the player, can experience it right away and test the core of the game. Generally speaking, it is a difficult thing to show “the” gameplay of Dual, because we expect that there will be many gameplays possible and, more specifically to the sandbox experience, we expect the gameplay to evolve over time, as players master more and more technologies and expand into the world. Think of it as a sort of live version of Sid Meyer’s Civilization, entirely player-driven!

OK, so you are in the alpha simulation. The game is going to be a FPS, and depending on our budget and time, we will also provide some TPS view, especially in combat. The FPS view is important for immersion and also because we have Oculus Rift and similar devices in mind, so it would not make sense to offer only TPS view in any case. So, looking through your virtual eyes, the arkship stands proud and high in the sky behind you and you are facing a large empty crater that was created by the ship impact, followed a bit further by a dark and deep forest on your left, and a large mountain chain on your right, with white snowy tops. It looks very familiar, the planet’s atmosphere is similar to the one on the Earth, and the cloud patterns you can see in the distance are also recognizable. It’s not exactly like on Earth, but familiar enough. Some planets will look much less friendly than this when you’ll start to explore the universe, but for the moment, it’s OK.

Your first task will be to create a safe house to protect yourself from the cold of the night, as the temperature differences on this planet are much stronger than on the Earth. You got a quick briefing from the arkship’s AI, so you know that already. The arkship can be a protection for a while, but it won’t host a lot of people as the space inside it is limited (all goes to fuel – now empty containers, but not meant to be lived in – and to cryosleep vat support technology. More about the arkship in another blog post). The simplest thing to do is to head for the forest, and get a bit of wood and stone to start building your safe, and create a fireplace inside it for the night.

You come equipped with a very powerful and central tool, rigged right into your arm: the nanoformer. This tool uses incredibly sophisticated nanotechnology to allow you two things: to collect materials and store them in a nanopack (think of it as a super backpack, with space and gravitational compression capabilities), and to release these materials in various forms anywhere you want in your environment. Very convenient! Inside the forest, you have no difficulty to find wood, cutting large trees and gathering stone materials when you find them on the ground. Soon, your nanopack gets filled with various materials and you can start to think about building your first shelter. The process is very similar to Minecraft at this stage, but you will have many more possibilities to carve the structures you want to build into almost any shape. Still, we believe in the simplicity of some elementary geometric shapes, at least as a start, to make the process of 3D construction less cognitively demanding.

At this stage, it is not clear if we will have enough time until the alpha to implement NPC animals to come and bother you during the night, as well as serve as hunting preys. But that’s the idea, because you will need to feed yourself, and the nanoformer cannot make wood-based lunch for you!

The nanoformer can also be used as a very primitive weapon, projecting materials or energy towards your opponent. But nothing really more than a punch in the face. If you want to deal some damage, you’ll need a weapon. It turns out that you have various blueprints in your inventory, which are in fact weapon recipes. All you need to assemble them is to find the raw materials, which means: start mining and digging, Minecraft style! Once you have found the precious ingredients, just set your nanoformer to run a given blueprint and here you go, you can see the item forging itself in front of you. You will also have various recipes for armor, mining tools and various useful items (why aren’t these simply available in the arkship, you might ask? You know the story about telling a man how to fish, rather than giving him a single fish? I think the conceptors of the arkship had this idea in mind!).

I did not talk much about energy at this stage, because it is still under discussion. But the nanoformer, and of course more powerful tools or weapons, will need energy sources. For the nanoformer, it could simply be your body heat, so all you need to do is to (h)eat. We would need to get some serious future pseudo-science to explain that however, because the Watts available will be rather limited!

The next experience for you will probably be to try and build one of the construct blueprint available in your inventory. Like, for example: the hover car, or the balloon powered explorer vehicle, or… the rocket! More about the construct building in another post, but all this will require that you gather more or less difficult-to-find materials, and energy sources. You might want to start a trade post to exchange resources, tools or weapons with other players. Gathering into organizations will also be a good idea, as well as start to claim territories to secure your property. You don’t have to worry about PvP aggression as long as you remain inside the security zone managed by the arkship (see the Arkship security blog post), but if you wander further (about 20km away), you might also start to need to organize your defense and establish an outpost.

Each of these topics probably will be treated in dedicated blog post, so I won’t go any deeper at this stage. To summarize, we’ve seen a very short preview of the FPS style gameplay that will be available in the game: you can gather resources and construct houses, buildings, items. You can also create more dynamics constructs like vehicle or rockets (actually, space ships or space stations, there is no limit in size). We are also thinking about farming and hunting, because you will need food. You can team up with other players, or compete with them, through economy, politics, manufacturing, territory control and a lot of other emergent gameplay elements. One of the challenges we have as we design the alpha version is to find a way to make all these aspects of gameplay easy to learn and quite naturally flowing from the player’s experience. We are working on it

JC Baillie,
Project Lead

All these features will be part of the Nanoformer, the multifunctional tool available to each player character, right from the start. The Nanoformer will be upgradable to increase its performance with the different tools. It is directly embedded into the right arm of the player character.

Warning: We are still in very early development, meaning that everything written below must be taken with a pinch of salt. These features can be heavily modified before the Alpha release and even completely redesigned: We want to end up with the best player experience in the end. And that's why your feedback is essential!
 

Collect Tool: This Nanoformer tool enables the player to collect material in the environment, digging holes of various shapes (depending on the choice of the player, via a specific interface). Digging with regular shapes like cubes or spheres will cost a bit more time than the standard irregular shape.
 
Softening Mode: The Nanoformer can generate an area of molecular instability centered around the player and limited to the player Construct, where resources can be added or removed instantly, going back into the inventory. There will be a small delay before being able to enter in Softening Mode. While not in this state, collecting resources from one's own Construct will take exactly the same time as if using the Collect Tool to gather Raw Materials. People who have no rights on the Construct won't be able to remove/collect anything at all: the only way to create a "hole" in this area will be to "damage" (by hostile action) the voxel-based Shapes in the area.
 
Create Tool: This Nanoformer tool enables the player to create a voxel-based Shape (a regular geometric figure made out of a given Material).
The geometric primitives currently planned are the following:
- Cube
- Sphere
- Cone
- Torus
- Cylinder
- Pyramid
 
Polish Tool: This Nanoformer tool enables the player to smooth angles on a voxel-based shape, enabling the possibility to sculpt various contours.
 
Select Tool: This Nanoformer tool enables the player to select a specific volume of voxels, called a "Selected Area".
This volume will be adjusted by the following action:
- Click and drag to create a box, from one corner to the opposite corner.
- Resize the box by dragging the faces or corners.
- Turn (or reverse/mirror) a voxel-based shape selection in one direction or another with shortcuts keys
(arrow keys or +/- keys?).
 
Creating Patterns, using the Select Tool: Once the player has defined a "Selected Area", it is possible to copy this area into memory, storing all the Shape information (this excludes active Elements). This is called a Pattern. Patterns allow basic operations like Copy/Cut/Paste with Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X and Ctrl+P shortcut keys. A Pattern is limited in size (typically 32mx32mx32m) and cannot be traded/exchanged in-game. You can think of it as a player-bound template, stored in the Cloud.
 
Creating Snapshots, using the Select Tool: While Patterns can be stored and copied in multiple instances anywhere in the Building Zone, Snapshots are a static photography of a particular "Selected Area", not limited in size and containing also active Elements. Using this function, the player can create a "ghost" of the area, and, provided the player has enough Material resources, he/she will be able to restore the area in the saved state later if it were damaged. You might think of Snapshots as insurances on the information content of an aera. The process of restoration takes a long time, depending on the size of the Snapshot.
 
Inject Tool: Replace a cube of a specific Material in the world with your current selected Material.
Everything under the surface is also being replaced. This operation is equivalent to a Collect+Create operation.
Advice to player: save resources by using smaller cubes.
 


 
Possible other tools: These will be developped only if it seems necessary to complete the tools mentioned above.  
We are aware that a few other games enabling players to manipulate voxels have other tools. However, assuming the tools described above offer a wide array of possibilities and the fact that voxel manipulation might work a bit differently in Dual Universe, we want to be sure there will be a real need for the 2 following features:
 
Line Tool: Used to form a "line" with similar or different square bases size. Minimum size: 1 voxel (see below)
Select and size a start point then drag and size to an end point.
Click to fill the volume. Can be re-sized between start and finish points.
 
Restoration Tool: This Nanoformer tool enables the player to correct weird voxel shapes obtained by voxel manipulation in other modes. Restore shapes as they were meant to be.
 

 
Tool not planned: its role will be handled by some specific Elements (Area Units), and it won't be available for Alpha.
 
Area Tool: Use to create invisible areas players can interact with.
Link one of the areas to a prop and activate the prop with a script when a player enters the invisible area.

We expect visitors to come from various places and have different player backgrounds.
That's why we opened this section, to know (and understand) each other better.
If you want to introduce yourself, your organization (guild/clan) or just say "Hi", this is the right place to do so!

Hello! I do a lot of sci fi building in another voxel game but I am really looking forward to building in a game that is much more focused on the sci fi aspect of ascetics and story telling. Cant wait to see what the building experience and  general game play is like in this game.
 
Shattari.

I found Dual Universe by a retweet of a friend. I am a designer irl and dabble in art, and photography. 
 
I currently play another voxel based game in early development and build sci fi exclusively (but there is no movement to the voxel creations). I love to make spaceships and spaceships and then more spaceships. 
 
I am extremely excited about a single shard sandbox sci fi game where players can craft and pilot their own ships and or space stations. 
 
I look forward to meeting you all in the future.