NQ-Nyzaltar

Hi Astrov,
 
Yes, Alpha release has been postponed:
We want to provide a meaningful experience for Dual Universe Alpha testers.
And while the game has evolved a lot until now, it seems to us that we won't have a version that we estimate satisfactory enough to be released (even with a restricted access). Updating our roadmap with this in mind is currently in progress. As soon as more information will be available for the Alpha release, you will be informed. 

Hi everyone!

I'm Nyzaltar, the Community Manager for this Sci-Fi epic adventure known as "Dual Universe"!
If you have any question or suggestion on the game or anything related (forum, website, the team, etc), don't hesitate to contact me.
I will be more than happy to answer!

Also, as many of you, I'm a huge fan of Sci-Fi Themes and a passionate MMO gamer.
Eve Online, Landmark, to name a few... but far from being limited to these.

I hope you will enjoy this forum as much as we, the Novaquark Team, hope!
Also I will be around on the forum during this week-end, to answer topics that have already been posted

Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.
 

Hi Astrov,
 
Yes, Alpha release has been postponed:
We want to provide a meaningful experience for Dual Universe Alpha testers.
And while the game has evolved a lot until now, it seems to us that we won't have a version that we estimate satisfactory enough to be released (even with a restricted access). Updating our roadmap with this in mind is currently in progress. As soon as more information will be available for the Alpha release, you will be informed. 

Hi Astrov,
 
Yes, Alpha release has been postponed:
We want to provide a meaningful experience for Dual Universe Alpha testers.
And while the game has evolved a lot until now, it seems to us that we won't have a version that we estimate satisfactory enough to be released (even with a restricted access). Updating our roadmap with this in mind is currently in progress. As soon as more information will be available for the Alpha release, you will be informed. 

(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

(Posted Friday 26th of September 2014 on the DevBlog)
 

 
Dual Universe is what we call a single-shard continuous universe. What does it mean? Basically, it means that there is only one world, one reality, shared between every player, and where people are free to move and gather as they see fit. It is what you would naturally expect from a persistent virtual world if you could forget about all the technical challenges that usually come in the way to implement such an idea (which are all very good reasons as to why you haven't seen it in a game yet). To better understand where we stand, and what we have in mind (and currently in testing) to solve the underlying issues, let's have first a look at the more usual ways MMOs are dealing with virtual worlds' sharding.

The core issue that every MMO game is facing is to handle the problem of having 'n' players moving around and seeing each other. In the most basic implementation, this leads to n position/orientation updates several times per second, each of which has to be broadcast to n other players watching each other. This is a total of n*n updates, and it grows very fast with even small values of n, like 100 or 1000. The result is a saturation of bandwidth, CPU and globally a practical limit around a few thousands individual players.

The simplest solution used by most MMOs is to limit the number of concurrent players to a hard ceiling. When the number of concurrent players exceeds this limit, they are either queued or another copy of the virtual reality is created where new players are redirected. This is called multi-sharding, and it has many variants. The simplest one divides the world into zones and players are free to move from one zone to the other. When a zone is full, a new instance of this zone is created, and inter-instance visibility is not possible. Players are never living in the same place at the same time. Examples of games following this pattern are D&D Online, LOTR, StarTrek Online or Neverwinter. World of Warcraft has an evolved version of this model : you have a global zone for everyone (a "continent"), and the instance duplication model is limited to selected areas called "dungeons". Players enter these dungeons in limited batches and new versions of the dungeons are constantly spawned for new entrants. Each dungeon is attributed a set of servers that can handle many 5-players, 10-players or 25-players groups.

A more sophisticated approach is illustrated with Eve Online, where there is only one reality, shared by all players, but divided into small zones centered on solar systems. Each zone has a max number of players allowed in it (with a queue when there is an overload), but no instance is ever created. There are no parallel worlds around, and all players can experience the same reality, influence each other and basically do things that matter because it affects everyone. This is a huge difference in terms of gameplay compared to WoW-like traditional models, a shift from the “theme park” model to the “sandbox” model. One example of interaction that applies to all participants across the cluster is market exchanges. No matter in what zone you are, if you have enough skills to do so, you can see other people's market orders and interact with them. While being a single shard universe, Eve is however not a continuous shard: each zone, or solar system, is limited to a few thousands players capable to physically interact with each other.

This simplified model would not be possible in Dual Universe, because we have very large planets, that will (hopefully!) host hundreds of thousands of players, and you cannot segment the planet into arbitrary zones. Think about a very large capital city, you could have a lot of people packed into a relatively small area, impossible to predict in advance. A planet therefore must be split into different servers, because the n*n limit is still there, but you cannot simply physically cluster these servers according to geographical boundaries (like solar systems in Eve).

The approach we have developed is based on the idea of subdividing zones according to their population density, in a recursive way. If only 5 people are roaming the surface of a remote lonely planet, it will most likely be handled by one single server. Come thousands of visitors spread on the surface and the initial area will automatically divide itself. Player clients are dynamically reallocated to the new servers in charge of their area. This process can repeat itself up to areas as small as 8 meters large. The interaction between different areas is handled with a complex cluster-wide synchronization mechanism, and an actor-based model that we might talk about in another post.

The other crucial part of this algorithm is that we have designed a method that is efficient to guarantee that the further a player is from another one, the less frequent the updates of position will be between them. When two players are close to each other, they will be updated very frequently and see each other with a great level of fluidity. However, when players are far away, there will be some delay in movement (because interpolation needs several updates to proceed), but they will still see each other in a visually convincing way.

The prototype is working, but we need to make much more testing of the current implementation to have hard results to show in terms of the max number of concurrent players. So far, it's looking pretty good, and should allow us to provide a continuous, single-shard universe, where you are totally free to move around without instances or zone limits. If you have a few hundreds of thousands of friends, don't hesitate to invite them to join our future beta testing!

JC Baillie,
Project Lead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JC Baillie,
Project Lead

(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

Hi everyone!

I'm Nyzaltar, the Community Manager for this Sci-Fi epic adventure known as "Dual Universe"!
If you have any question or suggestion on the game or anything related (forum, website, the team, etc), don't hesitate to contact me.
I will be more than happy to answer!

Also, as many of you, I'm a huge fan of Sci-Fi Themes and a passionate MMO gamer.
Eve Online, Landmark, to name a few... but far from being limited to these.

I hope you will enjoy this forum as much as we, the Novaquark Team, hope!
Also I will be around on the forum during this week-end, to answer topics that have already been posted

Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.
 

Hi everyone!

I'm Nyzaltar, the Community Manager for this Sci-Fi epic adventure known as "Dual Universe"!
If you have any question or suggestion on the game or anything related (forum, website, the team, etc), don't hesitate to contact me.
I will be more than happy to answer!

Also, as many of you, I'm a huge fan of Sci-Fi Themes and a passionate MMO gamer.
Eve Online, Landmark, to name a few... but far from being limited to these.

I hope you will enjoy this forum as much as we, the Novaquark Team, hope!
Also I will be around on the forum during this week-end, to answer topics that have already been posted

Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JC Baillie,
Project Lead

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!