CodeGlitch0

This should be moved to NDA section, but the problem was that you didn't balance your ship properly. Extra weight (interia) exacerbated the problem.

Let's say I want to operate a spaceship rental business in-game for newer players that can't afford their own ships.  I would want to implement some sort of Rental DPU / construct to assist with automated rentals (so that I don't have to be there in person to babysit the ship rental business).  
 
You mention in the DevBlog about expiring tags, but will it be possible to get tag expiry events on the Rental DPU?  
 
For example: Player Joe walks up to SpaceFighter953, which I currently have available for rental.  Joe then deposits XX currency into the Rental DPU and it issues a "SpaceFighter953_rental_token" tag to Joe, which will expire in 24 hours (or however long depending on how much currency deposited via the rental DPU).  Once the tag expires, Joe will be locked out from controlling the ship, unless he deposits more currency into the Rental DPU.  And finally...  15 minutes after the last expiry, have the ship autopilot back to my shipyard to become available to the next renter.
 
Will it be possible for the Rental DPU to get a notification when the rental tag expires, or would I be required to track the time events in the DPU itself within the Lua code?  If I can process a tag expiry event, then I could issue tags to allies to allow them to use my fleet temporarily and arbitrarily based on the tag itself.
 
 
PS: Yes, I am currently envisioning those coin operated airplanes/rocket ships for children outside of your corner store pharmacy.

Dear community members,
 
A few weeks ago, we took a stance regarding “out of the game”/IRL-related practices to discredit, threaten or shame publicly another Community Member (even if the involved person is guilty of several infractions) that could be an opponent in-game.
 
As the DSI (Dark Star Imperium) / TSU (Trinary Star Union)  / UEE (United Earth Empire) case blew out of proportion during January, we investigated.
 
We are really serious about differentiating real life from the game itself. Unfortunately some didn’t take our stance seriously. We gave them a chance to come clean in a private discussion and restart on an healthier basis. They didn’t take the opportunity for what it was: a last chance.
As they preferred “playing dumb” with Novaquark staff, we can’t have any trust that they won’t continue. Therefore we have decided to ban permanently those Community Members for various reasons (all not being banned for the same reason(s)):
Not being honest towards Novaquark staff. Making and encouraging ghost accounts. Abusive recruitment practices. Practising real life harassment and/or threatening another player. Making false report to Novaquark’s Customer Support in an attempt to make ban someone they dislike. Spreading real life information without the involved person’s consent, aka Doxxing.  
(strong reminder: even if a person gives you real life information about him/her, it’s not okay to share these information with ANYONE else without his/her consent. You can’t predict how the other person(s) will use this information and if he/she/they won’t share it again. If some trouble occurs following this sharing, you can be held legally responsible).
 
This might seem an extreme sanction but this shows how serious we are when we say we are not going to let toxic attitude and practices spread in the Community. Our goal to build a healthy and friendly community isn’t just a figure of speech. Anyone caught to spread or encourage any toxic behavior will be removed from the Community as it will be considered as damaging the Community and negating Novaquark staff efforts (without saying that it’s time consuming and a waste of our resources).
 
Saying it’s a long time grudge coming from before the arrival in the Dual Universe community is absolutely not a valid excuse. If someone has a personal grudge with another community member, he/she should either:
Leave it at the doorstep and/or settle it in private and peacefully with no one else involved. Contact directly (and only) Novaquark staff if the issue persists.
The moment someone uses the Dual Universe community as a tool for IRL revenge, he/she is not welcome anymore. We’re all here to have fun. It should always stay that way.
 
Therefore, the following Community Members have been permanently banned from the Community:
Lime / Fullsend / mmtheboss / Sakej99 [DSI] Primarch Zelevas / TharisUEE Melkor_Morgoth
  In addition the DSI Organization member list has been reset, and the Novaquark Team has appointed CN_Firestorm as the new owner of the Organization, should he accept to take a fresh start on a healthy basis.
 
We also give a warning to all those who were indirectly involved (with the evidence we found) but not actively participating in the recent community troubles. Next time, there won’t be any new warning. If you become involved against your will in some shady real life activities, you have only two healthy options:
Leaving the group doing such activity immediately. Report it to Novaquark staff.  
If you stay in such group without leaving or reporting it and the group is caught, you take the risk to get the same sanction as those actively involved.
This investigation has taken (or more precisely wasted) a lot of time from Novaquark staff. We really don’t like to intervene in players affairs. However, if there is a chance that such affairs damage the Community by toxic behavior, you can expect Novaquark staff to step in. We hope we won’t have to take the same measures again.
 
Best regards,
The Novaquark Team.
 

NQ shouldnt do shit, it should be the players community which decides how to deal with copyright infringement

As a future developer in Dual Universe, the idea of DACs as payment seems like an interesting prospect.  But the more I think about it, the more it seems like a bit of a d-bag move on the part of the developers.  I don't want this to be an overtly negative post, but bear with me..
 
I intend to be creating a whole lot of stuff in game, ships, defenses, tools, etc. with full Lua scripting to back them all up.  These things will take a TON of time to develop if you hope to have a decent result from them.  However, with the Dual Access Coupons being the only *real* form of payment I can hope to receive in game, it kind of feels like a bit of a face slap.  Think about it. 
 
I spend 25 hours working on a super awesome engine control module with advanced auto-maneuvering for someone who requested it custom.  Joe Space Captain goes to the Dual website and buys himself two DACs to give to me as payment for the work I did. Great, I got this month and next in game for free as payment.  = 30 Euro savings or whatever for me.
 
Now, instead of a custom job, I make a super awesome base turret blueprint that I sell on open market.  Let's say 250 people buy it at 500 credits each, and I trade those 125,000 credits for 5 DACs that people are selling on the market.  What happened here?  I now have 5 free months in game, which I may or may not ever use, but NovaQuark just made 75 euro in real money cash for all of that work that I did. Once I start collecting DACs like candy because now 10,000 users have realized how good it is and have purchased my super-awesome turret, NQ is rolling in the money for work I did, and those DACs I accrued have become virtually useless to me.
 
Obviously, I made assumptions the monthly fee is 12 euro and DAC are 15 euro.  Actual cost doesn't really matter.
 
The more I make and sell on market, the more trivial the DACs will become. Meanwhile, NQ makes tons of constant value cash on my work. My alternative would be to just hoard the in-game currency, which has equally nil real-world value.
 
I have to imagine that with this system of payments, serious developers and builders will eventually just start dealing outside of the game and make contracts to do in-game work with payments in real cash.  That's the only way it would actually be worth it to build things over the long term.  All of the really good stuff in game will only be accessible through various user-run black markets outside of game, with in-game market only used for trivial purchases just to get items transferred and to earn the in-game money needed for resource accumulation.
 
I could be wrong, but that's what I foresee happening. What are your thoughts? 

I don't know if this was mentioned elsewhere in the thread but i believe in the AMA they said there would not be multiple game server clusters. Only a single one active at any given time.
 
 
EDIT from AMA:
Quote
 
We won't have our own datacenter at start, that would be too costly and really not necessary in 2016 when there are so many high quality cloud offers dedicated to high performance gaming. So we will work with third parties to host the datacenter, and we are currently reviewing several offers. Now, due to our single-shard approach, we cannot of have regional servers, there will be one central cluster to connect to. We are considering the possibility to switch from a US based cluster or Europe based cluster depending on the time of day (doing sync in the background or during down times), but this might not be necessary.

Anycast or an alternative solution is already in use by most cloud hosting companies.  There's no need to hack into their infrastructure.
 
 
DNS allows for changes to IP addressing.  Novaquark would not need to know the IP address provided by the hosting company until the server name was created.  There's most definitely a reason servers have names instead of just having IP addresses.  Ask any Admin.
 
 
A single IP address is the SOLE cause of why DDOS is so effective.  But once you do authenticate your client will be connected to the server service that hosts the sector your avatar is in.  It may not be an actual server.  It could be a service, but it will most likely have a dedicated ethernet interface and IP address.
 
DDOSing is not about gaining an advantage over one player within a game. 
 
Its about holding the game hostage and asking for a ransom from Novaquark.  There's a good "Wired" article about how hackers held an online gambling site hostage, asking for a ransom. 
 
A hacker doesn't need to send encrypted packets to the service.  All they have to do is overwhelm the network infrastructure with invalid packets.  (junk packets)  This will take the entire game down, thereby denying revenue to Novaquark.  At the very least, turning off players, and making NQ look bad to the gaming community as a whole (which ultimately impacts revenue).
 
As for IPs..
 
I can go onto my EC2 servers and obtain an IP within seconds.  Registered to Amazon.  And I can drop that IP address seconds later.  There's no need for NQ to purchase an entire block of IPs.  This ability coupled with DNS resolution allows the hosting company to deal with the DDOS packets in multiple ways. 
 
The key concept is to not make anything a single point of failure, or define a static environment.  It should be completely dynamic.  This will give NQ and their hosting company several methods to address the mass spamming of invalid packets.

Hi everyone,
 
As the topic is derivating seriously in the last pages, it's going to be closed.
To all those who are wondering if the current level of funding already include the pledge withdrawal, the answer is yes: The pledge amount is updated in real time. If someone unpledge, it's immediately reflected to the amount pledged on the Kickstarter page. 
 
@ChipPatton:
 
To sum up your point of view:
1) Our communication is canned because we didn't reply directly to your community's experience.
2) You didn't try to discuss with us because the previous reply was canned in your opinion.
3) You said the PLEX is inefficient against goldfarming.
4) You assume that I'm convinced DAC is the perfect too and that, apparently, only my opinion counts in the Novaquark Team.
5) You consider that globally we are non-caring.
 
So to address this (very) subjective declaration:
 
1) We read your community experience and we understand that your experience with PLEX hasn't been fun. However, just looking by the prism of one experience, and refusing to look at the bigger picture is something we can't do as game developers: The problem you encountered is something that you would have encountered sooner or later even without the PLEX existence. Why? If unfair players want to harass a specific group and they have money for it, yes, the official staff can close as many accounts as possible if those use gold farming sites to get a lot of in-game money, but the unfair players will come back again and again, as money is not a problem for them. This is a neverending story. As an EVE veteran player, you probably won't refute the fact that you can harass anyone with fresh new toons, only a few hours old, in Tech1 ships in EVE Online. Again, even without the PLEX/DAC system, the problem remains as a whole, only less visible. So what you consider as a "canned reply" is just a different opinion from yours.
 
2) Avoiding to start a discussion just because we have a different opinion from yours, and that there are chances it wouldn't go your way... It has indeed no chance to convince the Novaquark Team. Self fulfilling Prophecy here. But you have no right to complain if you didn't even try.
 
3) Three big developers/publishers seem to disagree: CCP, Blizzard and NCSoft (Carabine studios).
Beside that, as gamers, we didn't experience the consistent huge amount of PLEX/gold selling you're mentionning in EVE (Yes, we have EVE players in the team). Do you have something to back your declaration about PLEX system being inefficient beside your own words? If it's the case, we are interested in this data.
 
4) The Community Manager status seems to have been misunderstood here: having a personal opinion and making the communication (both ways) between players and the Novaquark team are two different things. Whether or not I'm convinced of something is irrelevant in this case: If players have concerns about one aspect, I transmit the message to the team. If the team has an official stance on a topic, I transmit it to the players (the reason why you received twice globally the same answer). Now, while the team won't change a feature as important as the DAC system on a whim, if some solid concerns followed by facts are given in a well-argued discussion, everything is possible (except coming on what has been already promised to other players such as Kickstarter DACs). However, loud voices and threats of unpledging without solid reasons will not affect game design decisions. 
 
5) Just because we have a different opinion doesn't mean we are non-caring. We care about every opinion. However, we are also realistic about the fact that we cannot satisfy everyone. Nobody can.
 
If you have something else to discuss with us that are not: 
- Your (unfortunate) experience on EvE Online.
- Assumptions of the real intents of the Novaquark Team (like implying the DAC system has been chosen by greediness, when the game is free, the expansions will be free and there will be a free trial period when starting the game... not really a good way to start a reasonable discussion with a developer).
 
Then by all means, send me a private message on this forum and I will transmit the message to the team for discussion.
 
Best regards,
Nyzaltar.

Look in the 1st update of the kickstarter :
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1949863330/dual-universe-civilization-building-sci-fi-mmorpg/posts/1675018
 
Thanks to @Zack Barnard on the kickstarter comments :

+1
 
It is known.

I'm not prone to blindly drink Kool-aid offered by people I don't know personally. I am simply asking for an official (read: from NovaQuark) statement on whether or not alpha/beta will indeed be subscription-free or not.  That is not an unreasonable expectation, considering they are asking (and I have pledged) 100 Euro for said alpha access to the game. Just because the alpha/beta standard in other games is free does not mean it is the same for DU, which will have *significant* server-side cost overhead compared to most games.
 
Please forgive me if blind chants of "It is known. It is known." by community fans isn't enough for me, I mean no offense.
 
$150k of $500k from kickstarter blown on always-on servers over two years only leaves a healthy $7,000 annual salary for each of the 25 employees, not including any of the other expenses. Yes, the point of the kickstarter is to generate klout for loans/investments from other sources.  But even 2.5 million additional funding only barely covers a modest salary (if they average at 57k) for each of the current NQ team. Again, that doesn't even cover other expenses, such as office leasing.
 
Without an additional source of revenue, the business model doesn't hold up very well over the course of 2+ years of additional development. That might get them to launch, but not if there are delays as there always are in development.  Even developers have to feed their families. 
 
I would be ok with a partial monthly fee during alpha/beta, but only if they are up front about it.  Again, this is not an unreasonable request from someone pledging financial support.

Woah! Easy now. Your post is completely out of order. 

One question about the constructs and DPU devices... Where will they be executing?  On the user's local machine if they are in the area, or is there a hosted cloud / server service for processing all of these DPU events?  
 
My question is largely because if run locally, the effectiveness of DPU code would be higher on machines they have stronger CPU power, giving a possible advantage to more powerful machines as they theoretically can run more DPUs at once without lagging down the game.

Software development is my profession, and I have done a bunch of Lua scripting in games like Second Life and Legend of Grimrock I & II and scripting in other languages such as Javascript for games like CodeSpells.   As a result, I will likely gravitate in a huge way towards construct building and sales. I will also be trying to get into the earliest possible alpha / early access program they make available through Steam or Kickstarter or whatever.  As such, I hope to grow a huge manufacturing and sales empire in the game. From this perspective, I have a few comments:
 
It is probably inevitable that certain  resources will become dirt-cheap (literally) in the markets, others will have greater value.  As a builder, I would rather spend my time constructing and coding, rather than mining and gathering resources.  I would prefer to leave resource gathering to newer (or more dedicated who can handle that grind) players and just buy them off of the markets.  Depending on how many people gather resources, I may pay more or less for them on some days.  At first, I probably won't have much cash on hand, so I'll focus on smaller items that I can build and sell quickly in order to generate the revenue for larger products to put up for sale. According to the DevBlog, much of the markets will be automated.  You post a buy order at specified price. Someone who has the resources posts a sell order. If the two line up on cost, it will automatically post the transaction for you.  You shouldn't have to babysit the location for sales to go through. As to scripting the constructs, I will certainly be one player developing scripts constantly to make things bigger and better. I may even contract myself out to players from time to time to code private scripts if they can't do it themselves.  So there will be at least one, but probably many people to assist with that sort of work.  Contracting for script coding, means I will have more capital to buy more resources so that I can build more products to sell later. My product prices will be based on the amount of work I have to put it to develop the prototypes and cost for resources plus a bit of profit. From my perpsective, that will balance out nicely as I won't short-change myself. I plan to set up a base right near the Arkship so that all of the new players will be able to find me right away and Know I am the one to go to for the best constructs.
 
EDIT: For the grammar police.  

This is it. Just about everything in game (that you'd actually care to protect) is the code for how things operate. If the devs have a creator protection on scripts, which they'd better or the game probably won't be worth playing, then it shouldn't be a problem. Copying the construct without the code would leave the copier with a nice ornamental paperweight. That's about it, unless they put in a ton of work to recode everything. 
That said, do we really need a legal system in game? Maybe the players could set something up if they can convince everyone to follow the rules. But I think that will be unlikely.
 
I will be a builder/coder in game. And I intend to protect my creations. If people decide to copy my work and sell it to others, I will be willing to pay large sums to any mercenary who can prove they have terminated said copycat and destroyed everything they've built.
 
Ruthless? Yes. But it should be a sufficient deterrent.

Yes but in real life the rich born get punished if they die... because they die
In a game the guy who dies should at least have some consequences, it would be quite boring if the freighter im robbing rams me because his death doesnt matter

There's a few good cloud providers I can think of, namely Azure, that have extremely good mobile support. If they develop the backend well and all of the Lua / DPUs run on the server, then it should be a simple matter of pushing an event name and a small bit of metadata to a queue. That would have minimal game impact (a couple network packets to a local service) and another service would costume and push the mobile notifications. It might work for define-your-own events, but I imagine there are only so many types of game events you would care about outside of the game: build complete, intruder detected, item sold/purchased, etc.

When you die, your will spawn back at wherever the nearest accessible resurrection pod is. That will likely be back at the arkship for quite a while in game. After time, you might make your own pod, maybe on your ship where you died, but that will require huge quantities of resources and power to maintain, plus a potentially significant recharge time for the pod. You will also lose some of your resource inventory likely, due to the differences in the other multi dimensional self that was resurrected.
 
But my main point: Once you are dead, it is very likely that whoever killed you will likely scavenge everything you had at that moment, and the only thing left there of your base and ship will be a few piles of dirt.

When you die, your will spawn back at wherever the nearest accessible resurrection pod is. That will likely be back at the arkship for quite a while in game. After time, you might make your own pod, maybe on your ship where you died, but that will require huge quantities of resources and power to maintain, plus a potentially significant recharge time for the pod. You will also lose some of your resource inventory likely, due to the differences in the other multi dimensional self that was resurrected.
 
But my main point: Once you are dead, it is very likely that whoever killed you will likely scavenge everything you had at that moment, and the only thing left there of your base and ship will be a few piles of dirt.

The reason Dual gets meet with more skepticism is because the general population does not truly understand how proper utilization of a cloud backend would work. Most games and game reviewers and even game developers are stuck in the rut of shard instances, game lobbies, single servers.
 
If you really want to understand, look into the current development of a game called Age of Ascent. They are making a space game capable of tends of thousands of people in a single space battle. I've been in their occasional play tests and the tech is amazing. They also have a LOT of documentation describing exactly how it all works to support that.
 
Basically, it comes down to distributed clusters micro services with very specific purposes and an ultra high speed communication layer between them. Servers in the cluster can be spun up and down to meet demand and take over partial zone control and processing.
 
Simply put, Dual Universe is the second game I've seen lately that aims to meet this target. The age of a single server game instance and player "lobbies" is dying or already dead. They just don't realize it yet.

Since this game will be cloud based for the single shard system, I would love to see integration with a mobile app and push notifications that can be set up to respond to in game events, such as a perimeter radar that notifies you immediately if someone comes in range or breaches your compound or ship.
 
That would provide the ultimate hook to lock me to the game. If I know someone is attacking my base, I would make every effort to be back on game as soon as possible to defend.

Since this game will be cloud based for the single shard system, I would love to see integration with a mobile app and push notifications that can be set up to respond to in game events, such as a perimeter radar that notifies you immediately if someone comes in range or breaches your compound or ship.
 
That would provide the ultimate hook to lock me to the game. If I know someone is attacking my base, I would make every effort to be back on game as soon as possible to defend.

I personally love the idea of a common starting area. It would make it so much easier for a trader to set up a ship targeted to new players.
 
I intend to establish early on where all noobs can find me easily for their first products and to buy resources in insane quantities.

I have alluded to this in other posts, but I would like to see a built in support for authenticating users on you command consoles. For example, I hop out of my super sophisticated space fighter and walk around a bit. Meanwhile, player Joe decides he likes the chrome tailpipes of said sophisticated space ship and hops into the cockpit to take it for a spin around the galaxy. As he grabs the control stick, an authentication required message shows up asking for the flight command codes.
 
While I can also imagine a couple of ways to enforce this, using tags and permissions, it would be really nice if this short of support was baked in to the system core by the devs.
 
Your thoughts?

This is an important question regarding construct scripting... Will player Joe, who bought my flight stabilizer, be able to view the Lua scripts that are involved with it? Or will the scripts be visible only with the blueprint master for that construct, making the construct purchased a magical black box?
 
Obviously, as a savvy buyer I would want to review any scripts to make sure there aren't any hidden backdoors or overt flaws in the script. But on the flip side, as a builder I wouldn't want everyone and their dog to see my scripts and copy them for free to their own flight stabilizer... That would be very uncool.