NQ-Nyzaltar

Hi Daddio! While at some point we pondered the possibility to use Voxelfarm, we didn't in the end. We are now using our own voxel engine. About your question, I'm not sure what you mean by "rotating off grid". In a building zone, you will be able to rotate any Element before putting it on some voxel shape. At the moment, the rotation is made with the mouse wheel, so it's not a fixed 90 degree turn. But we are talking about Elements here, not voxels. Rotating a group of voxels isn't possible at the moment, but it should be implemented when the Voxel Elements will be introduced ingame. At the moment, the Voxel team is busy polishing planetary procedural generation for... something coming soon The answer is: unfortunately, no. And it won't change any time soon. If you dig under some voxels, they will stay at their place. This is something possible to handle and simulate in small areas... but not yet possible to handle in a single-shard universe, where the planets are not instanced but really in the same sandbox. The necessary computer power is just too much if you do that with, let's say... a mountain? Maybe someday when the technology will have evolved enough? Best regards, Nyzaltar.

Be careful... Did some prophecy not predict that furyan people attract necromonger raiders?

For those who don't follow us on social media, here are a few more updates about the art direction posted in the recent weeks. A preview of available Elements to make a small (single player) spaceship: Some examples of concepts showing modularity when using these Elements on a voxel construct to make a minimalistic spaceship: Best regards, Nyzaltar.

Hi Atriumgp, There will probably be some "Salvaging" gameplay mechanics. But if it's implemented, it won't be soon. The dev team will probably decide when the combat gameplay will be implemented. Best regards, Nyzaltar.

There will be three announcements today. You might already know the first one. The other two will be revealed in time Best regards, Nyzaltar.

Hi TheSlaxx and Hydroclan, Yes, we want to make Dual Universe realistic, but keep 2 factors in mind: - We will always ponder Realism vs Fun. If something bothers more players than adding interesting gameplay value, we won't add it. - We're still a small team, meaning we have to make choices and priorities. And for now, we don't know if this is something we will have time to implement as the team has already the hands full with all basic gameplay mechanisms. Harmful gravity seems to be an interesting and original parameter for suvival gameplay. I will transmit the idea to the dev team but I can't promise it will be implemented. I'll inform you when a clear decision will be taken about this idea Best regards, Nyzaltar.

Hi atriumgp! What do you mean by "destructible mechanism"? About plans: (what is explained below is still work in progress so it might change with development iterations) - You will be able to create what we call "Blueprints": it will include informations about all voxel shapes and Elements (props) used in a construct. If you have the correct amount of materials and the elements necessary to build the construct on you or in close proximity, you can create said construct by using the Blueprint with a Factory Unit. Blueprints will be represent as items in the inventory. Blueprint copies are meant to be tradable. Blueprint masters (originals) might be bound to character (but this is still something not set into stone yet). - You will be able to design "Patterns": once the player has defined a "Selected Area", it is possible to copy this area into memory, storing all the voxel shapes information (this excludes active Elements). This is called a Pattern. Patterns allow basic operations like Copy/Cut/Paste. A Pattern is limited in size and cannot be traded/exchanged in-game. About "alliages" (you mean "alloys" ?): This is something currently in development. It's a bit early to present you a clear gameplay right now. But this is definitely something we would like to include in the crafting system: enabling players to make their own alloys. We hope this answered your questions Best regards, Nyzaltar.

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

For those who don't like Social Media, here is a repost from those scary places! The only thing that was "photoshopped" in this image... is the inserted text! Do you guess what the countdown is about?...

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

Unigine is a lower level engine than Unreal Engine 4. Lower level means more flexibility in programming but it also means generally more development time, as you need to start developping with less things already ready to use. As an indie studio we have to find a middle ground between flexibility and necessary development time. If we had unlimited budget, sure we could even made our own engine from scratch. But doing that or using OpenGL will need far too much time, just to have a proper engine able to do everything we want. As a general estimation, expect a decent engine development to take around 4-5 years with at least the double of the size of our current indie studio. And we are just talking about an engine, without a game on top of it. About our website on mobile phones: As we investigated the matter you described, we found indeed that links pointing toward external locations (the devblog, the forum and the wiki) don't work properly. This is a bit weird because it works for others sections on mobiles using Android and the problem doesn't even exist on iOS (iPhone). The new website will be released in a matter of weeks now and we will make sure this problem doesn't appear anywhere. Thanks for spotting the problem! Best Regards, Nyzaltar.

@Vylqun & Semigod: Eagle777 is from Russia. He made some efforts to write in English (even if it's still difficult to understand) @Eagle777: If I understand well what you are saying, I don't think we can't compare EvE Online and Dual Universe on many aspects: 1) In EvE Online you can build things, but you can't design the shape of your ships or your buildings. It's already predefined in the game. 2) In EvE Online you have planets and Planetary Interaction, but you can't walk yourself, as a character on any planet surface, nor modify it either. 3) Dual Universe is more centered on a character avatar than a ship model considered as an avatar. So while both games have similar points, they are also very different. Best Regards, Nyzaltar.

(Posted Friday 29th of April 2016 on the DevBlog) Many of you have been waiting for quite some time to see the first in-game screenshots of Dual Universe! It?s coming soon, but one of the main reasons why we haven't shown anything sooner is that we were working on a very big move: we have switched our underlying game engine from Unreal Engine 4 to Unigine 2. Let me say a few words about this decisive evolution. Unigine is a rendering engine that was well known for GPU benchmarks showcasing advanced Direct X11 features. Quoting their web page, ?Unigine 2 is designed to handle virtual worlds of unprecedented scale without limits: double precision of coordinates, supersonic speed of data streaming and huge visibility distance.?. Well, that?s exactly the kind of technology we needed for Dual Universe. We had been working with Unreal Engine 4, which has lots of incredible features and excellent rendering quality, but some of the things we wanted to do were more complex, or would have required us to branch the source code of Unreal to basically make our own version. Unigine 2 is much more low level and thus provides us more flexibility and computational power. Unigine 2 is perhaps less developed than Unreal regarding the game engine side (level edition, assets integration, etc, even if this is progressing rapidly and should improve in the near future), but as we generate everything procedurally those features are less relevant for us. However, the freedom in low level modification and the clear focus of Unigine 2 towards large scale open world rendering was a perfect match for us. It also gives us a great platform to develop our own PBR (Physically Based Rendering) shading framework. We have already started to work with our engineers on many other rendering technologies on top of Unigine 2 features, that will enable us to provide really cool stuffs visually. To give a taste of the kind of rendering that Unigine 2 enables, here are some images from the Unigine website, following the 2.2 release (these are NOT images from Dual Universe!). You can get more images & news from here. In the ?coming soon? screenshots of Dual Universe, you will see giant spaceship, mountains, planets and the amazing thing is that everything you will see will be real: you can walk to the top of those mountains, or fly in a ship and visit those planets. We know that since we started to work on Dual Universe, several other games have shown inter-planetary seamless travel, but keep in mind everything you will see is modifiable with voxel technology: You could take a bite out of those mountains, or even out of the planet, and the landscape would adapt from every point within the universe. We are talking about a full gigantic open world with editable content at the scale of planets. There are not many games that can show this today, together with a network engine capable to handle millions of players in the same universe. That?s it for now. I also want to say a big thank you to the Unigine Corp team that has been invaluable and helped a lot in the transition to Unigine 2. More to come soon! JC Baillie, Project Lead.

Hi Atriumgp and welcome! To answer your questions: - Big atmosphere on planets with clouds? Yes, it's planned. - Different natural meteorologic effects? It might be implemented, but not anytime soon (meaning: most likely not in the alpha) - Lots of npc, some with secrets or speciality? Well we won't say never, but keep in mind we are still an indie studio and not a studio backed by a big publisher with hundreds of millions of dollars (developping a lot of customized npcs cost a lot of dev time, hence a lot of money). We have to take tough decisions, at least for now, and choose some priorities over others. We also want to incite social interactions between players and we fear adding too many npcs could have a contrary effect. That being said, we will do our best to make the best immersive experience for our game and we will remain attentive to community feedback. - Tons of variety of vegetal, mineral and animal? We plan indeed to have a significant variety of vegetal and mineral. variety of animals will be a bit more tricky as it cost a lot more in terms of development time (you need to have animated models + AI and that's not cheap if you want to make only quality content). We plan to add more diversity over time but it will also probably tied to some strech goals on our crowdfunding campaign planned for the end of the year. We are aware that this might be not as satisfactory as you expected but we prefer to be honest and straightforward than promising the moon with our current budget. If the crowdfunding campaign goes well then this might become entirely another matter, but for now we have to keep realistic goals. I hope this answer to your questions. If you have some additional ones, don't hesitate to ask! Best Regards, Nyzaltar.

Our Art team has grown significantly since the beginning of the year, both in seniority and by the number of dedicated artists. This has impacted the development on two aspects: 1) Harmonizing the Art Direction Recent artworks and 3D models (still work in progress) published share a common style: - Heavy weapon turret 3D model - Cockpit Concept Art for solo spaceships - Decorative Props for city streets - The new reactor 3D Model displayed in Marmoset later today You can see in these visual assets the art style (work in progress) we plan to use to represent the "United Nations" and human technology at its peak before embarking in the Arkships (keep in mind it might evolve quite a bit between today and the official release or even the Alpha phase). 2) Including their knowledge and their skills in the first screenshots We had planned to post some screenshots sooner, but we felt it would be a missed opportunity if we didn't include some of the massive improvements, relatively quick to implement, coming from the new guys. No doubt this will have a significant impact on how the game will look & feel. These first screens won't contain the final quality of the playable Alpha, but it will give some ideas of where we are heading. So brace yourselves for the first in-game screenshots in the second half of May! Best Regards, Nyzaltar.

Hi everyone, As you may know, this artwork is one of the first posted about Dual Universe. Having Hunting game mechanics was an early idea. It's one we still have in mind, but as the project is developping, it's not currently considered in the first priorities. While the team is giving some thoughts about implementing survival game mechanics, knowing in which order will be implemented some "gameplay bricks" is still in discussion, so it's hard to tell - at the moment - where exactly it could fit: - Resource Gathering, Voxel Building, Crafting, Construct Piloting are the earliest Bricks. - Range Combat Mechanics (Character vs Character, PvP & PvE), Death Mechanics and Basic Territory Management will probably follow (the order isn't set in stone yet) - Survival Mechanics - including Hunting - might be somewhere after the bricks mentioned above. However, taming and using tamed animals as mounts isn't currently on the roadmap. We are aware this feature has been very popular in some recent sandbox games, but as this no trivial feature, we prefer to focus on our main features first. Best Regards, Nyzaltar.

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

Hmmmm.... It seems like a re-post prevention measure from the website where the picture is hosted. The link remains ok for the re-poster, but not for other viewers. Right now, I see the first picture (probably the link I put recently) and I don't see the second picture (the link you have added recently ?). If the supposition is correct, nobody else should see either the first or the second picture. Let's wait to have some feedback from other readers of this thread. Best Regards, Nyzaltar.

Hi everyone @Astrophil and Deth: Thread cleaned as requested @Vylqun: Your image wasn't displayed. Path corrected Best Regards, Nyzaltar.

I don't know about Zapp Brannigan's book, but maybe Shadow was refering to a Caldari Admiral named Tovil-Toba, raming his ship (with himself aboard) on the Gallente city Hueromont? Or maybe Gallente Admiral Noir ramming his ship into a Caldari Station ? Best Regards, Nyzaltar.

Hi everyone ! (I edited the title to give some clarity on the global topic of this thread) Just to keep you updated on the topic. After talking to the dev in charge, making a /lean emote should be technically feasible in Dual Universe. However, it doesn't mean it would be easy. If it can be done in a reasonable development time remains to be evaluated. If the idea is validated, it will still be quite far in the roadmap. We plan to develop more classic emotes before, where the /sit emote will be included. On that topic, we want to have your feedback on which emotes seem the most important to you. Here are the ones we thought about: (feel free to mention if you think some are not necessary or missing) /wave (waving hand, civilian greeting) /salute (o7, military greeting) /sit (sitting on a chair) /laugh (laughing) /shout (shouting) /point (pointing something/someone with a finger) /rude (making a rude gesture) /dance (dancing) /sleep (lying on the ground) /yes (nodding) /no (head shaking) Best Regards, Nyzaltar

Hmmm... It seems you like skulls on your portrait. I see a pattern there And for the new name, as long it's not offensive, what really matters is that you like it! Best Regards, Nyzaltar.

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

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

Hi LordSilver, As mentioned in the FAQ (that will be soon updated but this point doesn't change) on the website: First Person View was chosen for 2 main reasons: 1) Increasing immersion 2) Simplifying Oculus Rift implementation. However, we are aware that a lot of MMO players have a very strong attachment to Third Person View (even in the team ). So the TP view might be implemented at some points, maybe as a stretch goal in the crowdfunding campaign. Regarding what the player character can have in hand: For now, the character can use either his Nanoformer (to build things with voxels and deploy an elements) if his left hand is free (the Nanoformer is on the left arm but you manipulate it with the hand). In that case you will be able to have a weapon in the right hand. Or you could have both hands taken with an heavier weapon, meaning you won't be able to build and to defend yourself at the same time. However, keep in mind that the game design on this topic might evolve (or even completely change) during development after having done internal tests or received constructive feedbacks from the community pointing to some problems with the current design. It's a bit early to talk about that, as Combat is a gameplay brick that won't be included in the first phase of the Alpha. Best Regards, Nyzaltar.