Sir_Rat

This sounds interesting, I am imagining the massive space station shown in the kickstarter campaign as a concept image.
 
I would be interesting to help throw ideas around, and the Novark Power Corporation would be interested in helping develop, operate, and maintain the station's power/energy system.

Hi there,
 
For the time being, the only rotation angle available for Voxel Elements will be 90 degrees.
The development team might allow customizable angles later, but if it happens, it will be most probably after the Official Release.
Despite the look of it, it would need a significant development time to be done properly: it's much more complex to anticipate how voxels would behave with anything else than a 90 degree angle, and so far the preliminary tests conducted in this direction haven't been satisfying. It's not impossible but it's a long road to get good results on this topic. So it has been decided to work on this kind of feature only when we will have enough time to allocate to make it properly (as you can imagine, the team has already a lot on the plate until end of 2018 before going for such feature).
 
Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.
 

Lau2356, interesting idea. I agree with Ostris here; I think for a large base, ship, or  whatever it could be very useful and cool. 
I think interplanetary, or space-to-planet teleportation is a bad idea, as it negates a lot of potentially meaningful situations: (especially interplanetary which I wont address) Using stealth to get into a city undetected to scope out defenses (well, the stealth part is taken care of), landing a fancy ship carrying a delegation of politicians to engage municipalities in diplomacy, you dont get to see the planet's cities from the inner atmospheres because you only come as far as the outer edge, depending on if it were implemented so you could bring cargo through the teleporter as well, docking bays would be half the size they would normally be, enemies can just teleport in and then buy a ship and then fight so defending a planet from space doesnt make sense, etc.
 
I do really like the teleport in base idea, though. would make it way easier to get around the death star. Then again one might get lazy in designing physical accessibility of a large construct if someone could just teleport anywhere when needed. 

No developing a whole new protocol would be far more restrictive normally than simply allowing sockets and the list would not be to protect others but allow a few to be access. I don't know how you think developing something new would be less restrictive but whatever. Scripts could also send payloads or have the IPs they connect to hidden in which case any poorly designed script would be the fault of its creator and not a user.

It really does make sense to implement this later on in the game as an expansion. There won't be big ships for some time because of various reasons (resources, manpower, skills,..) - better to implement other, more pressing expansions first.
 
As always, thanks for answering nyz

Hi there, 
 
It's true that:
- Massive Constructs "battlestar cruiser" size or "death star" will require incredible amount of resources and may not (or hardly) be possible to build alone.
- We don't plan to let players import design from 3D tools like 3DS Max, Blender or Zbrush.
 
However:
- It's also true that trial & errors will have a massive cost in resources if designing/prototyping a very large of spaceship must be done in the "real" in-game universe.
- It's also true that it would force all large ship designers to get huge amount of resources just for designing, not even for building. The ideal situation would be that the designer role shouldn't be tied to gather huge amounts of resources (this should be left to the production role).
 
In conclusion:
Yes, having a creative mode inside the game, just for designing purpose (without giving any free resources in the "real" in-game universe) is something we are considering.
However, this is a huge feature to develop, and while we would like to add it to the game, there is a high chance it won't be implemented before the official game release. If it's implemented at some point, it will be probably after, in an expansion.
 
Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.

My opinion the only place i would think is ok to have teleportation is between different places on the same construct. Basically a way for people to build fast travel stations on large bases or space stations.

I'm the sort of person who sees a big hole in the ground and is proud of it. Don't you dare fill in my holes.

It could also be interesting to use the ship's acceleration as a form of gravity if artificial gravity is disabled/not installed.  In this case the direction of "down" will be the direction of the engine exhaust.  If the main engines, gyros or maneuvering rockets are able to compensate for the center of mass shifting slightly (or if the game ignores the current position of people in a ship when calculating its CM) then you should be able to walk around normally as long as your ship is designed with the floor in this direction with the exact gravity strength dependent on the ship's acceleration.  Cut thrust and you're back to artificial gravity, mag boots or floating even if the ship still has some speed.  For a good example of how this arrangement would work watch any episode of The Expanse.  Yes, I'm really hoping gravity generators will be optional.
 
As far as the programming side is concerned Star Citizen had a way of pulling this off.  From what I understand each ship generates its own coordinate system which governs the position of all players in, and possibly near, a given space ship.  In this way the player's position is referenced relative to the ship, not the world.  This way the movement of the ship is irrelevant with regards to the movement of people inside the ship... at least until you crash into something.  DU could do something similar, using that base block as a reference for any players in, on or near a given space ship.  With the game treating the ship as a stationary world it should be relatively simple to apply a gravity vector in the mini-coordinate system.  Overall the arrangement would basically be what Fitorion said; the game first treats the ship as a stationary world then determines the visuals of the universe moving around it based on the ship's movement in the global coordinate system.

My understanding is there are two main reasons for lag.
 
1.  Graphics rendering of everything on screen.
2.  User bandwidth bottleneck, for transmitting data.
 
I'm not a graphics guy, and I couldn't say how NQ plans to keep rendering under control. 
 
However, NQ has indicated that player positional coordinates will be updated on the game client by proximity to the player.  This will allow for larger battles.  I would ALSO recommend to NQ that if they are already prioritizing players by proximity, then they could also set the highest priority to players who have damaged you, or you have damaged in the past 30 seconds.  Possibly prioritizing the player that is also in your cross hairs.
 
A second aspect of network bandwidth that concerns me is all of the uniquely created models.  If players are cranking out thousands of models a day, then those models will need to be downloaded to each client PC.  We know we don't have to download the models until we get within range of them, but consider flying into a new city on a planet you haven't visited recently.  There would be a HUGE amount of models that need to be updated.  I can't speak for the file size of each model, but I would guess it could impact performance.
 
We will just have to wait and see.

Hi ZipSnipe and Kirtis, 
welcome on the official Dual Universe forum!
 
- It's true the introduction post was a bit brutal. It's understandable as many developers released games promised a lot and didn't met the expectations of the players, and now every game projects having any significant ambition is welcome with caution, suspicion and/or disbelief. And that's okay. We don't ask to be believed just with words. We force no one to support us before having seen the game. We understand your decision. We have no problem with that.
 
- It's also true vylqun's answer was a bit brutal as well. It's understandable as we had many aggressive introduction in the past from people who think to know what Dual Universe is about and bash it, before even inform themselves on the game. So those who took the time to inform themselves have sometimes to a hard time to answer kindly to this kind of introduction post.
 
- Regarding the role of the veteran community members (and especially the members of the ATV group):
True, we are happy to get feedback from the active members, but we are also happy if they welcome the new members and help them to integrate the community: "welcoming new comers and reply to their questions, even obvious ones without being rude" is one of the factor on which the ATV members can be selected as mentioned there. 
 
Now to answer the main question of the topic:
 
Games like Space Engineers or Empyrion were originally designed to be multiplayer for small groups of players, hosted on private/personal servers. Going this way has its pros and cons. Among the pros, there are some that made the popularity of these games like the physics applied to voxels where you can ram into a spaceship with another spaceship and breaking it in two parts moving independently. It's this kind of "waow" effect who made Space Engineers well known for example. The problem here is this kind of things is hardly compatible with massively multiplayer technology (if you want to avoid big lag problems), at least with the current level of technology across the world and the average internet bandwith of a player. 
 
In Dual Universe, this is the kind of topic that we decided to "sacrifice": where Space Engineers put physics applied on voxels at the top priority (and it makes sense if you aim for a multiplayer game with a few friends), we put the priority on the massively multiplayer environment, while physics come second. This is essential for a single-shard universe (where the whole community is gathered on one server cluster). If we can implement physics in some aspects without stressing too much the server where we are in a situation with hundreds or event thousands of players gathering at the same place, then we will probably implement it. However, physics applied to voxels, water physics and other type of realistic features that are "unfriendly" with massively multiplayer environment will most probably never implemented unless there is a technology breakthrough to handle that properly in a MMORPG. 
 
Large scale battles of Planetside 2 are also a great achievement, but they can't push much further as FPS real time mechanics can become a factor that limits the massively multiplayer environment. That's why we opted for a "lock and fire" mechanics in PvP combat similar to EvE Online, instead of FPS Mechanics a la Planetside 2. "lock and fire" mechanics enable us to refresh the position of players very far away less frequently without making it a gameplay issue = less data to transmit to all clients = more massively multiplayer friendly.
 
In the nutshell:
- We are favoring massively multiplayer environment (trying to avoid as much lag as possible) over physics.
- We are favoring massively mutliplayer environment by chosing massively multiplayer PvP mechanics optimized for it ("Lock & Fire").
 
So we are not trying to make a perfect game impossible to make.
We had to take tough design decisions to make the best game possible while keeping in mind the constraints to make it doable.
 
That doesn't mean either we promise there will never be any lag: so many factors come into play that there might be situations where you will have lag, depending on your computer configuration, your internet bandwith, the ping you have, etc... But we will do our best to minimize the lag whenever it's possible. That's one of our priorities.
 
Best Regards,
Nyzaltar.

I really appreciate the complement  It brought a smile to my face. However, don't deify me because of one post. I have made a *lot* of posts and there are a few I'm not proud of. Likewise don't villainize @vylqun based on a couple posts. He is not a bad person by any stretch of the imagination.
 
I think the important thing is to build our community positively, and convince skeptics through tangible proof (as it comes) and with presentation of information rather than force of argument. I'm glad to hear that I have made a positive impact on your DU experience @Kirtis and I hope that when the game comes out it will comfort everyone's concerns and that you will join us in exploring the stars.

Great answer Lord_Void and really exemplary behavior.
 
I want this game to succeed... I want it a lot actually. But honestly, I have seen a lot of great ideas generated by game developers and still those ideas either have not been implemented or there were not enough technical capabilities to implement them. I am not IT specialist, neither engineer and I can't judge if the plans of NQ are valid and achievable. Therefore I fully understand skepticism of topic starter - I am bit skeptic myself. But people like Lord_Void make me want this game to succeed even more as it would be pleasure to play the same game with such a nice person.
 
While people like vylqun make totally different, opposite impression. If you are irritated by people who know less than you, did not read all the dev. blogs/logs and so on... just avoid threads like this... that will be way more useful for them, game community and... yourself too. If you can't/don't want / don't know how to help these people, then don't do anything - others who want/know/like helping (like Lord_Void ) will do it without frustration and everything will be fine.

I am looking forward to test the scalable load balancing multiplayer system.