John

Hey all! So I've been playing around with the new screen tech on the PTS, and decided to try to create a basic 3D renderer. It was a bit of a pain because there's a 50,000 character limit, and no vector libraries in place (yet?) but it was a fun challenge, and it runs fairly well!
 
 
 
Anyone else playing around with the new screens yet?

Sup DUveans,

Just stopping by here to say my final farewell to everyone here, in discord, and in game that I had the privilege to be acquainted with or some, to even call friends. 

I had a blast being along side everyone of you these past 7 years, watching this community grow from literally 0 members to a whopping 50,000+ of you. I had many fond memories building premature alliances, making in game hostile moves, watching orgs rise and fall, overall, nerding-out over every aspect of Dual Universe.

However, all good things must come to an end. I'm sad to say but due to recent announcements and the overall direction of community aspect of Dual Universe is partaking, per say, I must state my farewell from the community and Dual Universe completely (as a player and as Moderator, in Discord and other platforms). At this point, I'm not enjoying being part of a community that's not being nourished at its fullest or been ignored for so long. (That's just the tip of the iceberg) Regardless, I leave on good terms, hope you all have fun, wishing the best to everyone and Novaquark (Here's hoping for a fast recovery, community-wise) 


As always,
Catch everyone on the flip, but most importantly; Have Fun!

Remember: Comfort: is the enemy of progress
 
o7

Wonder if they were surprised by how many people quit over the last big patch.

Problem is, Minecraft, realisticly, has much more content and variety of gamestyles, then DU. Calling DU "Space Minecraft" is veeery huge compliment currently, even unjust thing to do. 
 

1 mine rocks, use crappy hover to sell rock to bots.
2. use money to buy ship parts - to build ship that can carry more rocks - while traing up mining only skills
3. mine more, train more, sell more.
4. Make bigger ship to haul more rocks to sell to bots.
5. mine more train more sell more rocks to bots.
6 BUILD BIG SHIP to scan for large underground rocks to mine, then sell to bots, while more mining skills train.
7. mine more, train more, sell more. 
8. BUILD MASSIVE SHIP WITH WARP TO TRAVEL TO OTHER WORLDS IN A BLINK----WHY?
9 TO MINE MORE, DIG DEEPER, BUT NOW ON ANOTHER PLAENT....YAY END GAME!
 
wheres the PvP - dead due to industry change.
where is the industry - WELL YOU GOTTA MINE MORE, SELL MORE, TRAIN INDUSTRY- 
 
10 so you can start making a starter factory.
11. MINE MORE SELL MORE TRAIN MORE INDUSTRY
12 - now spend that all on thousands of schematics needed to produce anything at a rate you can profit off of. but basic stuff only right now.
13. MINE MORE DIG MORE SELL MORE TO BOTS, TRAIN THAT INDUSTRY.
14. Buy a dozen more machines, 
15. MINE MORE SELL MORE, TRAIN MORE.
16. now SPEND ALL THAT ON THE 500 SCHEMATICS you need to run the next set of machines you bought.
17. MINE MORE SELL MORE TRAIN MORE.....at some point you might be able to use the ORE TO ACTUALLY MAKE STUFF WITH INDUSTRY...but not yet...
18....
19....
20.....
21...........
22.............. BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG....sound of keyboard keys hitting the floor. 
 
NEWS : in news today, developers of game Duel Universe, sent out an apologies, for all the computers that players smashed, in frustration, becasue all they did was make Minecraft Eve online. With the promise of more..but somehow went sidewise somewhere... in other news,  NQ uses the tears of players everywhere to make new, life extending tea. 

Markets by the Extraction Cartel has added several new features as well as expanded the sampling of orders for a more accurate reflection of the Pure and Ore markets.
 
At the moment, over 90% of the items have a base price calculation. This calculation uses the current pure prices to determine the cost of a single unit of each item without taking skills into account effectively setting a guideline Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price. The future state of this will include skills, machine costs, and schematic costs to get to a better MSRP number.
You will also find a baseline component analysis and calculation on the pure inputs needed to create an item.
 
Upcoming features
Sampling and analysis of other key trade goods (like warp cells) Commentary Ability to factor in skills to the prices Schematic Amortization calculations Visual representation of the markets Trade Routes  
Feedback is welcome and we are always interested in new ideas to expand this market analysis
   Please visit http://www.extractioncartel.com/

Do you have people you hate so much that you'd refer them in?
 
Such cruelty....

It ain't ready for that. It'd get review bombed so hard that records would be broken.

The disconnect idea would be good, if the game was optimized.
The fact is when you go to a populated area you get massive lag or what ever the case maybe.
 People use the disconnect option to save from this.
I believe that this should be implemented only after optimizations of the game take place.
 
As far as the movement tool is concerned , with the problem above mentioned, the movement tool in its current state helps 
elevate this problem.

If I can't maneuver tool the voxel board that Yeeted itself 10km away back to my base, then what do I do? Fix game breaking bugs before nerfing the tools we would use to compensate for those bugs.

The Alt-F4 was used to compensate for flaky mechanics. Fix your game before nerfing the tools we use to make this game bearable to play.
 
And nearly nobody travels at sublight speeds anymore, EVERYONE warps. So this nerfing of Alt-F4 only hurts those trying to not have to repair their ships over and over because of game-breaking bugs. And combined with the fact that elements will have a fixed repair amount, you are going to have people ragequitting in droves...

Thought I would write this up before I leave, If anything for NQ to take as feedback/criticism.

The game is nothing like it was advertised, or made out to be, Which ultimately after 3 months, still is nothing near it, as such I feel really really played by NQ here. Was promised a blank canvas instead, Hundreds of Industry parts were injected into the game, was promised a player made economy, Instead Bots were put out and 100k quanta daily given out....

Played through the server downs, and the server ups, But all this game is, Is a mining simulator, and for those who stick it out, then yes you can build something for an hour, before you go back to mining. There is NO value in anything you build here, and most fixes end up breaking something else...

I'm leaving out of pure boredom, I had high hopes for the game, based off the good advertising given, NQ released a broken Alpha, and made out it was a beta, and it still isn't even worthy to be deemed a "Beta release" at this point. Things are still broken, RDMS is like a win 95 firewall system, that's over-complicated with not enough organisation logging. The skill tree is pretty much just a basic form ripped off EvE with no real optimisation to any of it, and no real value in it, until you hit level 4 in a tree, but no real motivation to go to lvl 5...

There is no ai missions to do, to fill the gaps when standing around twiddling your thumbs waiting for parts to refine/produce. The graphic options are really really lacking, like not at all what you would expect from a Beta release, the options your allowed to tweak are more what you would expect within the first couple patches of Alpha, That being said, the general graphics are run server side... Which is awful for client optimizations. There was no difference in FPS between having an 12 core/24 thread cpu, and a quad core/ 8 thread cpu which confirms the optimizations are done server side, rather than client side. Although good in one aspect, this has been proven time and time again to cause more issues through out the gaming world. All the worlds are barren, apart from Alioth/Sanctuary and Teoma, The rest are just Ball objects given very little colour, with hardly any textures on it.

The way NQ have handled some players also was a HUGE turn off for me, Like Ban people for desecrating a marketplace in a sandbox environment, due to their own RDMS mistake, but haven't banned known exploiters/griefers - That to me tells me the integrity of a company, and as of this current point, unless there is some real changes done, I wouldn't pay the subscription cost, and had I known all this beforehand, I wouldn't have pledged...

The PvP is also just an AFK simulator, You sit in a seat, staring at a pop up modal with two or three buttons to click... There is no excitement, no challenge, no skill involved in this, The overall UI and UX, sucks badly with literally no changes done to any of this in three months (Not even a small tiny bit), there are still game breaking bugs, yet NQ think it's great to not even add half of these onto their "Known bugs" list. They force the game to run/play in admin mode, which is a serious security issue and isn't needed... and while some of this is still rampant, they release an update adding emotes into the game...

The LUA coding has no documentation behind it, no API and is heavily restrictive, yes you can log the space in a container, but if you want to log what's in the container, you have to have 1 item per container, which overall causes more code to be run putting more strain on things... (To name one of the things)...

I personally feel at this stage NQ have got their priorities wrong, and have taken a lot of people for their money through over-hyping and false advertising, You can't even call this a game at this point in time, it is still very much Alpha. The overall playerbase has dropped significantly from Beta launch, and primarillyt because of things outlined above, some of which still have not been sorted.

With all this in mind, I have had an overall "Pleasant" experience, although as time has gone on, and not a lot being said, other than asking people for feedback, I won't be returning back to this game for a long time, it is currently a 50% mining sim, 40% waiting around sim and 9% of actually doing something, with 1% allowance for whatever... 

I still hope NQ deliver on what they promise, but If I don't return before the beta key runs out, I will heavily consider whether or not to subscribe to this game and give even more money to support this, My overall opinion, Is that NQ are trying to make a platform to sell on to other developers, rather than actually making a game for their customers, and this shows in the serious lack in attention to detail particularly around the UI/UX...

When making their plane design decisions during WW2, the US-army once concluded that the most-hit areas of planes should be the parts which must be improved by more armor. This seemingly common-sensical conclusion was proven to be false by the statistician Abraham Wald. The issue was that, the Army's conclusions were drawn from planes actually made home after sustaining damage. One would notice a way different damage distribution and draw very different conclusions, if one actually looked at planes that fell down in combat and didn't survive.
 
I suggest that a similar error might be beginning to haunt DU's developmental prioritization. NQ is beginning to take the feedback of the currently surviving DU community very deeply to decide which areas of the game they should improve immediately. While this might seem common sensical, it might also be creating a bias similar to the above example.
 
My (very anecdotal) experience of reading DU community gives me the impression that we have a lot of people here who enjoy making ships and constructs. I know this would be an oversimplication, but let's for the sake of argument categorize these players with othergames they might enjoy. Let's say current DU playerbase has a lot of Minecraft, Satisfactory, Factorio people. This would check out, because voxel building has been one of the most advanced and interesting aspects of DU since early alpha. So people who would enjoy this kind of gameplay came into DU and "survived". The game ended up being interesting to them at the current state.
 
Meanwhile people who would enjoy PvP, dogfights, exploration, empire building, creating huge organizational (managing real people, not factories) tycoons etc. either didn't come into the game yet, or didn't "survive". Eve, Star Citizen, No Man's Sky kind of players didn't fill DU's current playerbase. And I know many of them dropped out after the weak experience in their areas of interest after beta launch. Ofc, there is greater diversity in player mentality compared to alpha, but still insufficient.
 
I would argue in its full potential, DU should appeal to all these types for different reasons. But since the game is still in a very early stage, the population of DU is less diverse across these player mentalities and the effects of this bias are greater. Meanwhile, some developmental prioritization decisions are being made by the influence of the existing playerbase, rather than the playerbase DU should be appealing to. Here are some examples how this happens.
 
1) A feature upvote page was created with no regard to principles like "nobody reads the second page of search results". Then features were upvoted by mostly pre-beta players, cemented on top by the web page's design, and those began taking significant NQ attention. 
 
2) Due to surviving players, ideas like "voxel vertices editor" or "mining bots" are heavily upvoted. These are features which the Satisfactory and Minecraft kind of players would enjoy. They wouldn't enjoy mining so they'd seek ways to build without mining. But DU should be a game which should also appeal to people who like to mine. Bots would devalue their work. Instead of working on an improved mining experience, prioritizing bots is a clear example of survivor bias in development.
 
3) Similarly, voxel builders are already achieving greatness in DU. Instead of elevating their gameplay further, NQ's developmental prioritization should be getting other gameplays to that level of interestingness and fun.
 
4) The incoming PvP patch is grounded on solving shipbuilding problems. But meaningful choices in ship design isn't the only balance domain for a fun PvP experience. In a balanced single-shard sandbox sci-fi MMO there needs to be PvP commitment, non-consensual PvP, and a meaningful risk/reward spread. I would argue the lack of warp disruptors, warp bubbles, webs; the ability of PvP'ers to bail out of any fight even after engaging in it, are more important issues than borg cubes. I'm sure it'd be better for more people if NQ solved the core gameplay experience of looking for meaningful PvP for hours and not finding anything, or the ability to bail your ship out of engagements (thus economics, chance of death, consequences not mattering), rather than fixing the shape of my ship. 
 
Of course, in an ideal world, NQ should keep improving all aspects of the game. I am not arguing at all that the game does not need a vertices editor, nor that borg cubes aren't a big issue. I am just saying that NQ should be wary about de-prioritizing important developmental areas which also happen to have no voice in the community since people who would care about these issues aren't even playing yet.
 
The game is very early and I'm eager to see how things will develop. This post is meant to be more of an early warning to NQ and a conversation initiation. I hope they keep the great work up.
 
o7

PvP I can understand, crashes not so much. If they're going for realism, ok, but it's a game where people want to escape real life.
 
Also, it's on me where I spend my money. If the devs really don't want it, they can take the game in a direction I don't agree with.

I am for it with a caveat fix the network/server/Software bugs. With 2 exceptions my big ship mishaps have been hitting something not loaded in (Towers anyone) landing underground and then getting pushed out gets the ship destroyed (slow loading of terren I guess) Mountains out of nowhere. I'm a builder/Miner If I have to budget for a ship every couple of runs I cannot stay competitive on pricing     

The help-Support Channel is going to get busier with people asking to have their ships repaired/restored because of server lag crashes. This will also probably be abused by people who just want their stuff back and will try to dupe the system.
 
The sheer amount of time it takes to craft some items, I think some people will just give up. It's ok if you have an Org to help with resupply but people that prefer a more solo type of gameplay are in for a rough time.
 
What happens to talent points spent on improving repair skills or the time and resources spent crafting repair units? These are far less appealing/useful with this system and the points may feel wasted.
 
Then there's new players, their first ship, taken a month to get the mats together, not used to flying and boom, their ship is destroyed and they're back to square one.
 
Nice idea further down the line but I think some of the creases need to be ironed out before this kind of thing goes live.  This is just funneling people into a specific playstyle, you must have an org or it will just be a grind, you must instantly be proficient at flying etc.

No I'm not blowing it out of proportion. Learning to fly, people crash, or at least I did several times. If this were implemented, my stuff would've been destroyed and would've been forced to buy new stuff with extremely limited money. This will hurt new players coming into the game since destruction happens from a simple crash. It's going to discourage new players and they won't stick around.

this perm destruction of the elements.. there is way to much wrong with this game currently to even be considering this. 
 
1st      crashes do to server side related stuff. You dont have enough staff members to keep up with those complaints let alone right now.
2nd     Ive flown many variations of ships . and im sure others can agree because of current Hover height limits / wing limits its a royal pain to traverse even the easiest of bumps in the road.
3rd      flight controls.  its 2020   were is the controller support . i'd settle for attleast the Xbox controller support tho im sure most of use would love Hotas support.   Unless were flying something really      
            small  its rough flying period in this game.
4th      crafting times is a nightmare as it IS.. weather or not you have talents for it or not...  whats the point in even spending the time picking up the talents for this stuff when it still takes you hours
            to craft.   im going to spend half my time just replacing all the elements with 50 hp.  go 40 speed and glaze a hill im trying to go over and the and some random element on the other side of the ship
            that didnt get hit gets destroyed..
5th      see others are asking about a quick replacement element  tool to go with this update.  i highly doubt it was even considered.
6th      what about all the voxel traps people  been placing around markets ??????   so how it this patch really going to be fair to well   ANYONE??
 
Don't get me wrong. i like this idea. but the game is far from ready for this.  because of the lack of other solar systems its hard even getting to another planet outside the safe zone without being caught by PVP'ers , whens that balance going to take place i wounder.  its dangerous enough just trying to go to the market in one peace to attempt to sell stuff. and now soon due to other faults that need to be taken care of 1st slight fender benders due to bad element designs by devs and controls just trying to get to A to B on the safe areas can just wreck my day.  
 
Games are supposed to be FUN  not a JOB.   
 
future update folks    people can crash randomly into your parked ships while your logged out for the day and wreck your stuff while your away..
 
seeing this news about this change in elements alone.   Makes me feel like i was robbed a couple years ago when i bought my Gold founders pack .   litterly mined up about 3kt of ore today for a project now i feel like ive waisted my time.

That's entirely understandable. 
 
Sure, playing in a group will get you things faster. But there are multiple ways to be independent and be part of a larger group at the same time. 
 
There are orgs in all sorts of flavors and if you don't even want to do that there will be job boards and multiple discord channels. 
 
You won't have acces to some elements of the game but you will definitely be able to progress in your own way at your own pace. 

No PvE ? What about mining ? It still generates goods "for free" (no redistribution).
Saying that we will see less combat in DU because there is no pirate to kill for a bounty looks a bit anticipated: it greatly depends on ships price too (and I mean, time to extract raw materials, refine them and build the ship, not the currency price).
 
Regards,
Shadow

I like that more:

That DevBlog is a great expansion to the existing save-zone system. I was never really happy with the Arkship-only-system.
 
Considering the recent posts, I’d like to add that safe zones should ALLWAYS be rare…. Otherwise it would just take away the need to cooperate with others! It should be up to the players to build yourself a safe place, and NQ shouldn’t spoil us too much with safe zones.
 
But besides that those MSAs will really be a crucial incentive to spread the playerbase outwards to other planets.
They could act as seed for a civilization center around them; however there is also the potential that they will just be used as a resource-bank by rich players, who are able to just buy a territory there with DACs. It seems to me that NQ already considers this by providing special Sanctuary Territory Units. The information in the DevBlog is extremely vague. But based the topic of the post (“home sweet home”) my theory is that every player will be allowed to claim 1 Sanctuary Territory for free (or very cheap). Thereby preventing that multiple sanctuaries are occupied by a single player, which would e.g. give him a total monopoly on a certain moon.
However with potentially millions of players I think not everyone should be able to find one! I hope MSA territories will still be extremely rare, like <10 territories per moon, so it’s more of an org-effort to get one. To spread the rare MSA zones more equally, and make them more rewarding for dedicated players they should also be hidden. It should require at least 1 week of dedicated scanning of the moon to discover one MSA territory.
To me this sort of territory-hunting would sound like a very engaging endgame activity.
 
 
Regarding organization territory I can actually agree with coke about the problems with building up large city areas. This made me thinking if we actually have a good system to promote these kind of projects:
 
And to my understanding the protection bubble (force field) system would only work well on smaller scale, like for protecting a couple of important constructs inside one territory. But for a large city area, or even half a continent, using hundreds of little individual protection bubbles would simply not make for good gameplay in my opinion!
 
 
Therefore I'd like to propose a system where large orgs can basically create their own safe zone:
 The idea is to reward people cooperative efforts by essentially upgrading normal territories to semi sanctuary level, once enough conjuncted territories are claimed in an area.
Even if a war with another org is going on the buildings inside this upgraded territories cannot be destroyed so no force fields are required, however the territory can still lose its sanctuary status, if the org loses its claim on the surrounding territories.  This would even make large scale wars more interesting, as they would have a real frontline at the border, while the center of large cities still remain relatively safe. Battles would be drawn out around the fortified border territories, and not around where in the orgs territory someone has triggered another 48 hour bubble.
 
Ok, having that many 100% no-PVP safe zones may be a bit drastic, so there should probably be a variety of gradations of “safer” zones without ever fully disabling PVP:
- When a territory is fully enclosed by other territories it should gain tier 1 save-zone status, which would create an overall 150% defender bonus, and immediately flag any PVP going on in this area.
- A territory enclosed by 2 layers of territories should gain tier 2 save-zone status, which would be almost sanctuary level of protection. However it should always allow limited AvA combat, so assassins and thieves could still operate in a huge city. But it will obviously be very hard to actually snipe a player there. Similar to EVEs system in high-sec, where you can still attack someone if you really want to.
 
Here's a little reference to visualize how the border of a large organization territory would look with the different safety layers:

 
This system would force players to work together even more, and make it very difficult to maintain a small org with just 1 claimed territory. It may annoy some people that they can’t achieve that much with their small org of friends, but I’m sure it would be very beneficial for the overall atmosphere of the game. Small orgs can still be a legit playstyle if they move to some very remote area, and find a MSA territory. This should basically be like winning the lottery for solo-players/explorers.
The goal for the safe-zone system should be to avert any possible Pay2Win mechanics, while actually rewarding cooperative efforts of players/organizations.
I think my idea would fit very well to the already existing territory protection mechanics. It’s obviously hard to balance all this, and player generated safe zones should really have other drawbacks (which I didn’t come up with jet), so they are not totally op… But I definitely think NQs current 100% safe, or 0% safe approach is way too simplified to properly facilitate all the political dynamics that should be going on in the game.
 
PS: sorry for the wall of text, it started out much shorter when I first started formulating the idea. :|

Hi everyone!
Here are a few clarifications on the topic:
 
- As a general rule, any information or content that has been published publicly by Novaquark can be considered as not under the NDA anymore. As we have started to communicate publicly about the tests schedule since the beginning of 2018, this is not under NDA anymore. I will make a quick post tomorrow in the appropriate section to be sure that everyone is aware of that.
 
- @Elkay: The reason why you may have had some "login problem" on the forum may be related to the fact that you activated your gold status recently. If that's the case, indeed, you weren't able to access the Pre-Alpha section on the forum, sending you back an error message. The problem is now fixed. If the problem was something else, please contact our customer support at support@novaquark.com
 
- @Elkay: For any problem, (log in or anything else), posting on the forum with an angry tone will never solve real problems. Contacting our customer support at support@novaquark.com and explaining in details what the issue is (which error message you get, when did you get it, etc) most likely will.
 
- @Elkay: regarding the time frame of the scheduled tests, as the explanation is in a forum section under NDA, I will re-post it there for information purpose.
 
Dual Universe is still in Pre-Alpha, meaning we are still in a phase where we are debugging/fixing a lot of things.
We do a few tests, then we fix things, then we another batch of tests and we continue to fix more things. Keep in mind that we aren't yet in a phase where you can log to play and have fun like in a nearly-finished game. If you want to log now, you should expect that this is to help the Novaquark team improving the game. If you are logging to have a fun experience, then we thorougly advise you to wait and come back when we will reach Beta, or at the very least Alpha.
 
Now, why the "weird" time frame schedule?
At the beginning, the goal was to have at least one test per month with hours fitting for every player.
If the time frame seems "crazy" for a test (during the night for instance or while you are at work), then it means this test wasn't originally meant for you but for other testers around the globe. However, if for some reason (if you are on holidays, or you can't sleep, and you really want to test the game) you are free to join at these odd hours, and you are more than welcome.
 
Please understand that, at least for the time being, don't expect a weekly test with hours fitting for every player. We are aware that this is one of the most pressing demand from the Pre-Alpha testers (more test sessions, longer test sessions) and that's among our priorities. However, as this involves not only server stability but also recruitment and special authorization (not so easy to obtain unless you are already an international company) to work overnight in countries like France, it may take some time. However, we are doing our best to find a solution for more (and longer) tests as soon as possible. 
 
Best  Regards,
Nyzaltar.

The devs published few tutorials in November and December, plus one devblog in November.
 
If not already done, you should look at their youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/dualthegame

I would suggest watching the official ship building tutorial, and paying really close attention to the engineer report, the names of elements being placed and to what JC is saying. Can't say anything more due to NDA.

Wow that was quick
After this post no one shall ever say that NQ doesn't care..... I mean it's after working hours and they explained smth new. Awesome