A few changes are happening in the Community Team at the moment and it's necessary to make some clarifications about it:
- For those who remember NQ-Nunc, if it wasn't clear, he has left the team for quite some time now.
- NQ-Nomad is still there, but is investing a significant amount of time in many internal tasks related to live operations and project management.
- I'm still there, obviously, but I have to divide my time between reporting the community feedback, working on some internal tasks, as well as working on some projects for the future that should lead to some QoL on tools at the disposal of the Community (more info on that later ).
- NQ-Naerais has joined the team this week! If you want to say "Hi", you can do it in this forum thread.
We know a fair number among you wanted more interaction with the Community Management team, and some changes are planned in the (very) near future on that topic!
As NQ-Nyzaltar said, I just joined the team here in Montreal. I'm very happy to be here, and excited to continue this amazing journey with all of you. I am quite new to the company so I do ask for a little patience while I get sorted here, I may not have all the answers right away but do know I will do my best to help make your experience with us the best it can be.
A bit about my background, I've worked on quite a few games of all varieties (MMO, Table Top, Card, Collectible, Board and more) for more years than I care to admit. I'm definitely an MMO fanatic and will be spending just as much of my free time along side you (in secret ) as you do. I'm convinced I'm a cat whisperer (though the same can be said for coffee), and a sci-fi fan.
I can't wait to see, share and celebrate all that you build in this amazing universe together!
As announced in the news available here, we are glad to welcome a new Community Manager in the team!
She will be the Community Manager at Novaquark Montreal, which means we will now be able to cover more time zone.
We are really happy to have her on board!
Give a warm welcome to NQ-Naerais!
Hey everyone, my name on Landmark was Angelsheart and i was one half of (BiA). Below is one of the builds we did on Landmark that ended up in the safe hands of LadyKathrine. The build took us a while to make and was HUGE. Hello to all our friends who may remember me and hopefully we will meet in you all in DU.
We've discovered and learnt (or remembered) to be again "sola arbo kun multaj folioj", a motto we used to say in our native language and which means "a tree only of many leaves".
And there we stood, singing those last verses with irrepressible emotion ...
I want to go with you without cold
Like birds, like the river
Slowly to sing
Drinking the birth of the day
The earth, the night, the sea air
And the promisse to stay
Our eyes were full of love, but bathed in tears. How to explain that we were happy and sad at the same time? Happy because we had begun to truly love, we had begun to learn it in our community, Natumo, and our hearts had awakened and expanded, calming and clarifying our minds. And sad because, paradoxically, we had to part, right now, having tasted life like never before, now that we lived every moment as if there were no tomorrow. And today came that day.
There would not be a tomorrow - not on the planet that saw us born - to continue sharing alongside those who stayed there. Among us and among them were our women, our men and children, our brothers all. It was no longer a legend or a theory, we had become what they called a people with only one heart. But the Ark Ship was about to depart ... and would never return.
In our farewell, under the tilo -the lime tree-, in Naturomo, which had been silent but warm witness and companion in so many assemblies, in so many parties and games, now we sang one of those sweet tunes of our ancestors, one that oozed life and beauty; one that had passed from generation to generation. It was called "O riso que me deste" (the laugh you gave me), but now would be, for ever, our farewell song.
Is it not life so, full of contrasts and changes?. But always Life.
Goodbye Natumo ... and hello Tilo.
Text by Alsan Teamaro.
Song and lyrics: O riso que me deste (Teresinha Landeiro version).
I played to SE, KSP, ED, X², Freelancer, Avorion, and more...
A lot of people know Space Engineers here and (RIP)Landmark, because they are references regerding building, crafting games. The same for EVE Online for the community driven economy side.
New guy here, looking forward to getting my teeth into this
Other games I played recently and in the past:
Elite, Frontier ...
Eve Online
Mass Effect 1-4
Elite Dangerous
Empyrion - Galactic Survival
Fallout 4
Astroneer
Space Engineers
KSP
Hellion
No Man's Sky
The Solus Project
Greets! I had backed Silver Founders in October of '16 and have been reading all the email updates, watching all the videos, etc etc. I really like what they're putting out and getting excited, so I just added a Patron Pack pledge so I can start playing and help build a successful game.
I currently play a lot of Elite Dangerous, I poke at Star Citizen now and then, and I'm starting Eve Valkyrie with my Oculus.
My first game was City of Heroes, and I played a lot of Wow. Whole bunch of MMO's since then: ST:O, SWTOR are two I still play sometimes.
Plus a bunch of other games here and there.
And by day I'm a stained glass artist. Hello everyone!
Hola! My Nickaname is Elobo and Im from Spain, I discovered this game few months ago and really wanted to play so Im going to pledge for the Alpha 2. Im interested in building and warfare, also on trade and housing. I expect a lot from this game and Im sure im not going to be dissapointed with this community and of course the marvelous Dev. Team.
Hey everybody! I've been following this all for awhile now, but not really paid any attention to the forums. Just wanted to let everyone know that I'm here, and if anyone wants to get to know me, go ahead.
SE is a good reference. Empyrion is a lot inspired from SE, so I believe you can consider them as the same regarding ship building.
Another game which is closer from the "voxel ship" experience is Avorion. It's a nice little game made by 3 guys.
On the other hand, I don't think DU aims to become as accurate as Kerbal Space Program for the space sim part.
Otherwise, you can make your own opinion watching the official atmo ship tutorial (and other ones):
This tutorial was made for Landmark. I didn't make the tutorial or play the game but, since it's based on the same technology, we can assume that it will work pretty much the same.
It starts with the very basics and ends with some more advanced concepts.
Whether or not you have already tried Dual Universe, this tutorial should be able to help you to understand this awesome (but very difficult to master) technology which is the Voxel.
As a voxel beginner, I think I am not the only one who yelled at these crazy little voxels, "WTF happened?! I didn't ask you to do that!"
The Inner Space of Voxelmancy
Voxel Characteristics
First of all…and this might hurt your brain a bit…a voxel is NOT a shape. It’s not the 1x1x1 cube shape you add with the smallest ADD brush.
Actually, a voxel is a point. The different points (voxels) are connected to each other by lines (vectors). Those vectors form the outlines of the “cubes” that you see in the world when you use the ADD brush. (In other words, it takes many voxels to add enough vectors to make a shape.)
When you use the building tools to change the shape of the cubes you see in the world, what you’re actually doing is dragging one (or more) of those voxel points into a new location…and then all those connecting lines move too, thus changing the outline of the shapes you see.
There are only TWO voxel characteristics that matter to builders.
The position of the voxel
The material applied to that voxel’s cube space
Also, for the purposes of this document, there are only four terms that matter:
Voxel : The point in space that is the end point of one or more vectors.
Vector : Any line connecting two voxels together.
Shape : Any collection of vectors that outline an area thus creating a contained shape. (The default shapes are cubes, but voxels are easily moved around to create almost any shape. See below.)
Cube space: In game terms, the natural "cube space" around a voxel is the same volume of space used by the ADD brush when you place a 1x1x1 cube into the world. Voxels *usually* live within their cube space, but can also comfortably live outside of it. However, the voxel is *always* associated with that cube space.
What data is in a voxel?
Imagine a grid of dots. (Each dot is a voxel.)
Now imagine that each of those dots is connected to its neighboring dots by lines (vectors).
Now, stack that up so that it’s in three-space. Voila. You have a decent representation of the voxel points in their natural “healed” cube-like state.
NOTE: The positions of the voxels, in the rigid formation shown above, is the natural “healed” state of the voxels. The resulting shapes created by the vectors connecting them are what we normally see as “cubes” (and which, erroneously, we all have been calling voxels even though those shapes are actually composed of voxels instead.)
When you move one of the voxels, the vectors connected to it also move. Thus, you change the shape of any cube seen as soon as you move a voxel.
So just remember…everything is connected. You can’t move one thing without moving another. All the different welding, recopying, and smoothing tricks you may hear about are just different techniques to get these dots to end up in positions that make cool shapes.
Last but not least: Cube space. The world is gridded out into cube space. (NOTE: Cube space is the same size as the smallest ADD brush when in cube mode.) By default, voxels live along the edges/corners of these cube spaces and the resulting vectors connecting them look like cubes.
Normally, voxels need to stay within their cube space. However, there are building techniques that let a voxel wander out of its normal cube space. This is how shapes that are bigger than a cube are created. Voxels can also be smashed down into the center of that cube space, which allows the creation of smaller shapes as well. Roaming vectors let voxels wander WAY outside their normal cube space, but that gets pretty hairy to explain so we’ll discuss it some other time.
What Material is on the Voxel?
Material, in this case, is the material you chose from the Element Tray. (Example: Red Lumicite is a material. So is Hammered Gold or Raw Iron.) When a material is specified for a voxel, that changes its appearance in the world.
That’s it. There’s only two special cases that might not be immediately obvious:
Air. Yes, air is a material. Air voxels act *exactly* like regular voxels. They are just painted with a 100% transparent material, which is air.
Default terrain. Everything in the world that has notbeen changed by a player is designated as “default terrain”. It has less data than a user-changed voxel so that we can optimize the heck out of stuff that players haven’t changed.
The important characteristic about this default terrain is that it cannot be copied. (Its data structure is simpler and doesn’t have all the dots/vertices described earlier.)
The other important thing to remember is that HEALing a voxel returns it to this “default terrain” material. And that’s why you can do nifty stuff with healed earth.
These latter two special cases (Air and Default Terrain) cannot be directly selected with the selection tool. So the only way you can “grab” them is by also grabbing another nearby shape that’s painted with any of the other materials in the game.
Side Note: What is a Roaming Vector?
When we added Roaming Vectors to the game (6/26/2014), we increased the precision of lines and shapes quite a lot. This was done by “borrowing” nearby voxels and letting them “roam” outside of their normally allowed cube space. This means that nearby shapes sacrifice some of their own definition so that another shape can get one or more extra voxels added to it, thus providing more possible vectors, which enables that shape to have more detail.
Pasting Dominance
There is one thing to keep in mind as we go through the rest of this doc. Any item that you are pasting into the game is dominant. All the voxels within that copied area will keep their relative positions. This means that any shapes nearby are likely to change shape slightly as their voxels reconnect to these new voxels, and the vectors connecting them are changed.
This “dominance factor” can be very useful when fixing any warpage that occurs, because any current data is overwritten by a paste. That lets you “re-weld” voxels and vectors by pasting in small bits that are the desired shape.
Voxelmancy Techniques
Okay. Now let’s talk about the various building techniques the community is using.
Micro-shapes & Anti-shapes
NOTE: Players have been calling them microvoxels and antivoxels, but that makes this discussion harder to follow when talking about voxels in conjunction with these shapes, so we’ll refer to the microvoxels as micro-shapes, and antivoxels as anti-shapes. (Sorry for the switch.)
Both of these kinds of shapes are really just normal shapes that appear to be different. (It’s still useful to give them names for easy reference, but the point is…they’re still just normal shapes composed of voxels and vectors.)
When you smooth a regular shape down into a micro-shape, you’re essentially just taking all the voxels the cube was composed of and squashing them down toward each other so that the resulting shape is a very small cube.
Side note: Just to expand your mind, you’re also enlarging the air cubes around your brand new micro-shapes because you’re dragging those connected voxels away from the center of those shapes. Right? Everything is connected.
Still, it’s cool, right? That voxel *looks* smaller and that make it useful for lots of building stuff.
So what’s an Anti-shape? It’s exactly the same thing as a “micro-shape”. But its material is “air”. So it’s (currently) tricky to make, but it behaves in all other respects exactly as a smoothed-down (micro)shape. You just can’t see it or select it directly, because it’s made of air.
Why do micro-shapes warp other nearby shapes?
Remember how the voxels in a micro-shape are squished toward the center? Well, when you copy that micro-shape, you are really selecting the positions for the voxels that constitute that micro-shape.
When you copy that shape into place near another existing shape, the vectors of the existing shapes are forced to attach to the voxels in your micro-shape. The game knows that what you *want* is for the thing you copied to paste as true as it can, so it connects the vectors from other nearby shapes toward the voxels you smashed into the center of your shape and this can cause warpage on the neighboring shapes. Make sense? Again, everything is connected.
“Strings”
So now let’s paste several of those new micro-shapes in a row, one cube space apart from each other. What happens? They stretch into strings! So cool!
But no, that’s only what it looks like. What’s actually happening is that you pasted one micro-shape down (composed of a bunch of voxels and vectors) and then you copied another identical micro-shape in the cube space next to it. When you did that, the vectors from the previously pasted MV stretch out to connect to the voxels in the new one you pasted, and the resulting shape looks like a line. (Remember, the last shape pasted is dominant and everything else warps to it.)
There is a convoluted process that force the end points of the string to align to the normal voxel borders. This technique creates “Antivoxel strings” and is Example 4 in the section below.
Warping vs Non-Warping Shapes
There’s a bunch of techniques designed to create objects that don’t warp neighboring shapes, but ultimately, there is only ONE way to avoid warping.
That way is to ensure that the voxels in the shape you are pasting are aligned in such a way that they don’t cause the vectors of a neighboring voxel to move.
That’s it. Just don’t make the vectors move and your shapes won’t warp.
To make that seem simpler, here’s a few images. These images don’t show all the voxels. They show the shape instead and the normal “cube space” that the voxels for that shape live within.
Ex 1: Micro/Anti voxel
Regular “microvoxel” or “antivoxel”: This shape lives in the very center of its normal cube space. It will warp EVERYTHING IT TOUCHES because any neighboring voxel will extend its vectors out to reach the voxels in your micro-shape.
Ex 2: Microvoxel strings
Any “string” that is created by pasting two of these centered MVs together will still cause warpage everywhere it touches because the end points of that string are in the center of the cube spaces they represent.
Ex 3: Any shape with a “normal border” flat edge
This shape would not cause warpage *if* it is pasted onto something along its bottom side. (Example: If you pasted it onto a flat floor.)
It would cause warpage if it was situated next to any shape above, or to the left/right of the shape, because those neighboring vectors would be forced to extend outward to connect.
Ex 4: Antivoxel strings
This is the shape that many people call an “AV string”. This is a useful shape because it still looks like a thin bar, but its ends are exactly at the “normal” cube space border and is in the center of the shape. Because it’s situated properly, any normal cube connected to either end of this string will not cause warpage of the block it’s touching.
So What’s a MegaShape?
Honestly, it’s just the exact opposite of a microvoxel or antivoxel. Players have been calling this a Megavoxel. (And again, for the purposes of this document, we’re going to start calling this a “Megashape” instead to avoid conflict with “voxel” conversations.)
Instead of crushing the voxels in your shape down toward the center, you’re stretching them outside the normal cube space borders of your voxel instead. (In other words, you’re making all the neighboring air voxels smaller so that your current voxel can seem bigger.)
That’s it.
But the shapes are still useful because they create the appearance of behavior that you normally can’t achieve.
So how on earth do you go about stretching the voxels of a shape outward? Answer: You don’t really. Instead, what you do is you crush in the voxels of a neighboring shape, thus dragging the voxels outward in the shape you want to enlarge. That’s why people create a megashape by pasting micro-shapes nearby. They are forcing the voxels to drag outward toward those micro-shapes.
Warpage in General
Isn’t it annoying that you can create a really cool shape, it looks totally awesome, but then it deforms the heck out of stuff when you paste it near anything?
Well, the truth is…you’re just *seeing* the warpage for the first time when you paste it in next to the new shape. That same warpage was occurring originally also. You just couldn’t see it because when you made the shape, it was surrounded by air. Those nearby air shapes *did* warp, but you couldn't see them.
Voxels always connect to other voxels via vectors. When one voxel gets dragged outward or inward, it tends to drag neighboring voxels along with it slightly to smooth out the “curve” of a voxel face as much as possible. And that’s just about it. But it’s happening on EVERY voxel all the time every time you smooth shapes or paste shapes or even when you remove shapes.
Inlay Technique
The last major building technique to cover here is the “Inlay Technique”. This is probably the coolest trick that any builder can learn, as it allows you to do a ton of curvalicious detail that's not possible to do otherwise.
We won’t take the time to describe applications of this (there are many player tutorials), but here are some details of how the process works:
Step 1: Select any-sized area of non-air shapes as long as that area is only one cube space thick. Step 2: Take any other area of any design and paste it once above your object from Step 1, and then once again below it.
This forces the “sandwiched” object to realign its vectors and voxel positions to match the object that was pasted above and below.
Why? Because the game is trying to preserve the data of the object that you are pasting. It’s NOT trying to preserve the shape you created in Step 1. Thus, the sandwiched object in Step 1 gets all its voxels realigned to match the object above and below and when you copy that slice out of the sandwich, you’ll see that it has been transformed accordingly.
I come from a single place and usually have the same background.
Currently busy building and installing my (largely) new PC. When done I hope to jump into the next pre alpha (although he real world is keeping me very busy).
Hey everyone, just posting the old initial post so I can get roled on the discord haha. Might as well introduce myself! I'm Primarch, and me and my clan are going to be moving to dual universe from space engineers, along with another clan from there as well merging into each other to make a dual universe clan. To my knowledge we were the biggest PvP faction as far as discord size was concerned, and then the 2nd, so hopefully we can bring in the majority of the 150+ people from our respective clans into here to play Dual Universe! Going to hold off for a while for posting a guild thing on here while we structure up, but if you're interested in my side of the combat guild stuff here's a link to my SE clans discord, will give out the DU one once it's structured correctly and habe all the people in it, have a good day!
https://discord.gg/hjbqJ6E
i saw this game, for the firts time, there was a long time ago. I really enjoyed it but i wasn't sur about his succes. And now, i look it, i just want to taste it, because, i think it can be a great great hit, i hope too. So, i decided to take a patron supporters, to taste it quickly. (i know, it just the pre-alpha, but it looks very good )
i'm french man, and i'm a very big "shit" in english, but i try specially for this ;).
if i could have a wish for this game, except a big succes, to find a good community.
Je me presente : ANNAC, allias Mars du 67
Je joue a beaucoup de MMO de genre different.
Dans les RPG vous pouvez me retrouver sous le pseudo Annac entant que soigneur, éllisabeth pour tankker et en DPS Ullissia ou Nyline (je rajoute des fois le nom Brightshaw)
j'ai aussi un discord dispo pour me retrouver plus facilement : https://discord.gg/39veJrU
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