Oije

I would prefer a limited API. DU should be driven by discoveries which are made inside the game by spending time inside DU and by doing research inside DU. The players should gain advantages they made inside DU and not by spending time at programming bots or 3rd party tools. The most active gamer shall have advantages and not the best RL programmer

Ja, wir freuen uns auf Dich und Dich und ganz besonders auf Dich.

Ja, wir freuen uns auf Dich und Dich und ganz besonders auf Dich.

Something like this ?
 

I have been gaming / father of 4 / full time tech for 14 years now. My steam account shows that if you know that type of account but i want to personally Thank ALL the devs , And workers of DU for
bringing the world of DU to us all, and all gamer's together into a game that i think personally will change game-play mechanics for all of us for any future game. games will need to compare or beat standards being set here. Glad im a part of this!
 
So Big thanks to JC , Alain , Maxime , And all the Programmers , Graphic designers. As I speak from most DU fans we love you guys for it
 
No need for comments not needed its just a Thank You !
 

I think we have different interpretations of "solo" play.
 
To me, solo play is simply what happens when I'm not playing as part of an organised group (usually referred to as a guild in older MMO's). That means I'm not subject to the rules, duties, activity schedules, rank privileges, drama, politics, etc. that exist in a formally organised group. My time is my own and I can do what I please whenever I please.
 
A demand for self-sufficiency is not part of my solo play needs in an MMO, in fact, it would detract from my enjoyment of the game. The presence of other players around me makes the game world feel alive and dynamic. I still compete with other players, but the level of that competition is determined by my agenda, not the agenda of some formal group that I belong to.
 
I spent half my time in EVE (3 years) as a "solo" player. During that time, I "interacted" with the markets constantly, but spent comparatively little time interacting directly with other players. I have no idea who supplied the things I bought every day on the market, or how they were made. I had no idea who bought the things I produced. I simply looked at supply and demand, and at the bigger picture of what was happening in the game at any given time (by reading the forums). Sometimes I temporarily co-operated with random other "solo" players for a while to get certain things done.
 
Game play in MMO's is not a binary activity: you don't either play as member of a formally organised group (org) or else try to avoid all contact with other players. There are many shades of grey between those two extremes. Trying to force everyone into formally organised groups is just an attempt to impose a preferred play style on the game.

I cant see your point. How fast do you think can those carts drive, how many fuels do they have?
Speed is not the point but distance

I am really looking forward to the pre-alpha, but as an 8-year Eve Online veteran and almost 2 years of Space Engineers I have a few concerns/recommandations. I am curious how other people think about this, and if the devs said anything regarding these topics.
 
My concerns are: 
Travel should be slow Large ships should be full of equipment Blueprint use should be limited.  
Let me explain :).
 
Travel
In Eve online you can go to the central trading hub (Jita) with a couple of carriers or jumpfreighters in less than an hour from anywhere in the 7500 systems. 
The introduction of cariers, jump freighters and jump beacon networks (over the years) killed off local trade hubs, and most of the deep space industry. Deep space / 0.0 is now mostly just used for (moon)mining and alliance wars. Trading is mostly limited to the center zone and the profit margins are so low most people do not bother. It also had the side-effect that empires got too big: it is so easy to have fast moving roving fleets cross the universe the empires got bigger and bigger. I miss the early years where you could set out with a group of friends, find yourself an empty solar-system and build yourselves a home. Those days are long gone in Eve-Online: you have to negotiate a rent from an empire, then mine your ass off paying that rent, or you sign up for endless grinding fleet service but never fight for your own home. (this is why I stopped with Eve-online a few years ago)
To avoid this, travel should be slow:
I think we should not have stargates in this game: that would make big empires too easy. People would just restrict their use to their own alliance to get a war advantage. I think 12 hours flying or so to the next solar-system is fine to start with (was mentioned in one of the videos). Maybe you can introduce a warp drive so that travel to moons and panets within a solarsystem is a bit quicker, but to the next solar system should take hours (at least 1 or 2 hours I would say, enough so that it is a real expedition, not just a little hop and back). This makes trade more viable, with better profit margins (you could even pay for getting your ship moved while you are offline?: dock it in a huge ship as in the Dune books for instance?)
As long as all the basic building components can be found in each solar system there is no need for fast travel. Slow travel will create many local economies instead of one big one, give room for real exploring, make trade and local industry viable. It will make the universe feel big. It will also mean that many people from two sides of the universe will never meet, but I see that as a plus, not a problem.
 
Big ships
In Space engineers, when you build a really big battleship, it is mostly empty space: the power plants, oxygen plants, etc. take very little space. For the rest its an endless repeat of engines and guns, but they slap on on the outside. Inside it is mostly empty space. I do not like that. This way there is no real reason to build a big battleship other than the look: a smaller one is just as strong, and easier to armor.
I would suggest that in DU the equipment should be BIG. And I would also suggest lots of supporting equipement.
For Instance: say a large shield generator can be made stronger with one or more capaciters to handle peak loads, and they need 1 or more cooling systems so it overloads slower, they all need to be linked to a control unit to configure these settings, but they need to physically close to work. Then add that when a shield generator overloads, it explodes (seems very reasonable). This forces you to armor the room on the inside. Follow up with making the shield area it covers a limited sized disk, not a sphere. The effect will be that if you want a battleship to be shielded, you need a series of armored rooms full of equipment.
Repeat this type of thing for large guns, engines, power supply, sensor arrays etc, and you get a naturally big ship. I think a large ship focused for battle should just have room for living quarters and a few small ship bays, but for the rest be full of equipment.
(I am speculating stuff like this fits with the game engine, and should not take much performance as the supporting equipment can just be calculated through as improved stats for the shield module).
A positive side effect is that large trading ships - that DO need lots of empty space - will always be more vulnerable than a battleship of the same size.
 
Blueprints
I like the blueprint idea to store and recreate your personal designs. But I think it is a bad idea to make mass production too easy (also an experiance from Eve online). In the end somebody will come up with an optimal design for a small scout, miner, fighter etc, and then everyone will just endlessly copy that design. I think we all want there to be lots of variations in ship design.
Standards might still happen, but I think we can fight to keep diversity by limiting the blueprint functionality. One way of doing this would be to make the use difficult (as in Space Engineers you see the blueprint in space, and then have to slowly welt it together from the inside out: very hard to do for large blueprints). You could also make it so that you can reproduce your blueprint, but only 1 reproduced ship of the blueprint can exists in DU: that way you limit it to personal use as a sort of 'save game', but not stimulate mass production. Wat would be the dead of ship variation is the buying and selling of blueprints, I hope we do not get that.
As I expect some wipes in the alpha and beta phases of the game the blueprint is a great help, but personally I hope that it is dropped when the game is out for real. Losing a ship should hurt, and not just for the materials: it should take time and effort to create a new one. 
This will limit piracy, because it makes piracy more time-consuming and harder to make profitable, and it will limit war: nobody is going to trow their hard-build ships away because an alliance leader has a temper tantrum. War will come when a group of people feel it is a just cause.
 
Ok, so far the 3 topics running through my mind lately. How do others feel on these topics? Is this all old news and already sorted? 
 
 

Dear ladies and gentlemen,
this offer is for German speaking players only, please respect that:
 
Hallo liebe Mitstreiter!
Die Hyperion Corporation ist ein eigenständiger, deutscher Flügel innerhalb der Terran Union.
Wir haben es uns zum Ziel gesetzt, gemeinsam, große Bauprojekte im Hauptspiel "Dual Universe" zu realisieren.
Mit dem starken Partner TU im Rücken, haben wir die Möglichkeit in wirtschaftlicher, militärischer und infrastruktureller Sicherheit,
Projekte zu erforschen und zu entwickeln. Wenn du also mehr als nur eine Zweckgemeinschaft suchst, dann bist Du bei uns genau richtig!
 
Was bieten wir?
Ein freundliches Team deutschsprachiger Spieler, organisiert mit regelmäßigen Sprachmeetings, welche als Gemeinschaft große & spannende Projekte umsetzen möchte.
Bei uns kann sich jeder frei entfalten und seiner Kreativität freien Lauf lassen, solange es dem Wohl der Gemeinschaft dient & die Gesetze/Richtlinien der Hyperion Corporation, sowie auch der Terran Union eingehalten werden. Des Weiteren bieten wir Sicherheit und Territorium durch die TU. Dies ist eine Organisation aus bereits über 600 internationalen Spielern, welche 24/7 für uns verfügbar sind.
 
Was suchen wir?
Vorallem kreative und baulustige Teamplayer, die eine Gemeinschaft zu schätzen wissen und bereit sind, das Abenteuer "Dual Universe"  mit uns zu bestreiten.
Du solltest das Spiel "Dual Universe" besitzen oder ein ernsthaftes Kaufinteresse bekundigen. Außerdem wünschen wir uns eine gewisse geistige Reife, Teamfähigkeit und natürlich Spaß am Spielen! Uns ist ein gutes Betriebsklima sehr wichtig.
 
Was ist unser Ziel?
Mittelfristig möchten wir, gemeinsam mit der Terranischen Union, eine Heimat aufbauen, um weitere, spannende Projekte voranzutreiben. In mehreren Teams aufgeteilt, realisieren wir Raumschiffe, Stadtkonstrukte und diverse, andere Bauprojekte. Die Möglichkeiten für andere Geschäftszweige sind schier grenzenlos und somit liegt es auch an Dir, welche neuen Ziele wir uns setzen.
Langfristig wünschen wir uns, im besten, wirtschaftlichen Idealfall, unseren Membern die monatlichen Kosten für den Serverzugang per Spieleinnahmen bezahlen zu können.
 
Was muss ich tun, um beizutreten?
Du kannst dich förmlich auf der DU Communityseite bei uns bewerben, schreibe dazu einen kleinen Text, wer du genau bist.
Die bessere Variante: Besuche uns auf unserem Discord und schreib uns persönlich! Die Links findest du weiter unten.
 
Schau dir doch auchmal unseren Trailer an:
 
 
Ich hoffe, wir konnten Dir einen guten Eindruck von uns übermitteln. Hier sind alle Links, die du benötigst:
 
Unsere Webpräsenz:
https://hyperion-corporation.de/
 
Communityportal:
https://community.dualthegame.com/organization/hyperion-corporation-german-deutsch
 
Unser Discord:
https://discord.gg/5MMxacV
 
Unser Youtubekanal:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC675uKYy3LFM5VCv5bkOGwg
 
Wir freuen uns auf dich!
 

First I want to gather distance from what has been raised already: creative mode and the like. I have searched and found the "Creative Mode" thread and while it kinda addresses the same issue, I consider it another "game mode" that would be separate from the "real" universe (ehem... just let me use the term "real" without quotes from now on - don't slap me).
 
Atelier? Holo Deck? Holo Dock? Holo Shipyard?
I guess I don't need to describe the atelier (holo deck) in detail - you all know the Star Trek Holo Deck, where people can create a holographic illusion that they can even interact with, or take damage from if security protocols have been disabled - it looks and feels real, but really is just an illusion/projection within a limited area.
 
What makes this different from Creative Mode?
Applied to Dual Universe and the role of ship designer it would mean that the designer could start by building a first atelier (static construct) which may be rather small, but lets him create concepts of dynamic constructs that fit into the room. I think the Star Trek Holo Deck is infinitely large when switched on, but this would create a "seperate world/instance" within the real world of DU and I think that would imply many issues and players hiding in a tiny spot that inside might be huge. Don't know.
 
Second reason why I think the atelier should be just as big as the inside of the construct: designers would start small and work their way up. As this is a game and you probably aim for some kind of progression, it would be sensible to not have the one week old player design a Star Destroyer (executor- or eclipse-class, hehe) in his tiny 3x3m atelier.
 
Third reason: it's a building in the real world, visible by other players. It adds prestige, too. It's where your company works and where other players (friends, clients) may be granted access and look at your progress.
 
But how on Alioth would one fit an executor class star destroyer into a building that has to fit into a TCU tile!?
Good thing you ask! Because you don't and because you shouldn't. Two reasons:
You don't really want to have ships of this size equipped with atmospheric thrusters to launch from a planet. Once the designer progresses to a point where he could build something like this, he'd have his own space dock - he'd have his own "holo atelier shipyard", where giant rails run along starboard/backboard, topside/keel, bow/stern, which mount projector equipment to get the planning phase done.  
Resources/Maintenance?
You'd have to feed the atelier with power to run the projectors - but those projections don't need material as you can't take them away anyways. You might want to secure your endeavours tho as you leave the safe zone to create bigger stuff.
 
More benefits?
you could configure the projector to disable clipping and or reduce opacity you could switch to wireframe, which would be bliss (if you ever created a 3d model using design software, you know it can be hard to track down hidden surfaces that don't serve any purpose, but just bloat your model) you could switch voxels on/off as well as components on/off (easier to link fully enclosed components if no voxels are in the way) you could move, raise or lower the construct without having to worry about gravity you could switch to simulation mode in order to enter a projected cockpit and move some meters around within your atelier - speed off and your character will smash into the wall, while your construct swooshes through it and is gone (so you need to reset relative projection position) you could have guides (lines/planes) projected to your workspace - lines to align stuff and planes to view cross sections or set a mirror plane, without having to calculate double/triple/quad resource cost (as there are no resource costs) everything this device can do for you would neither break the consistent universe, nor have people vanishing into thin air, because they suddenly are in "a different game mode" of course you could still just start building - trial and error, get that thing in the air and all that - but you'd be lacking some tools and it would have the full cost in resources Freedom of Choice! This would be an option to excel at something you love - at the same time it would not be mandatory. Your choice, mate! immersion, immersion, immersion..  
Modularity of design and construction
All holographic constructs would be just that - hollow projections. They would not take up real space. This means you would place your projector/-s, start designing your construct and at the same time you could in fact place the core unit where you just planned it and start building the real thing as if you did a colour by numbers ("Malen nach Zahlen" in German). Your company/organization could take in someone specialized on construction/building, who helps on this process.
 
Projectors would be an asset just like doors or cores or engines - they would need players to build them, they would need resources to be built, they could have limited projection capacities in "supported construct dimension and/or volume" - again this means scalability - this means progressing through the game - this means having something to achieve, to work for. The largest stuff doesn't come cheap, but the biggest XXL of projectors coult have clustering capability, so you could connect it with other XXL projectors to create the giant holo shipyard atelier I mentioned above.
 
Final statement
I'm not 100% sure if I thought of everything - but seeing the threads around creative mode, offline mode, single player stuff, creators needs, clients needs, freelancers needs, and the polarization it sometimes causes, I think this is a direction that could serve the needs of all sides. Designers could create blueprints while they wouldn't vanish from the rest of the world, but be an essential part of it.
 
I did the search - maybe this has been here already? I hope I didn't miss it. Yeah, I've seen the note in the "Creative Mode" thread, that something like this "might" come as an addon after release. No problem with that! It's just an idea and open for discussion. Please, add your thoughts - I'm craving for feedback, as I've got a hunch this could be awesome.
 
Merci pour votre considération.

Well, I did not read the whole thread just got an idea what you are talking about.
 
I do not want to have a creative mode, this is totally counterproductive.
 
DU is on big universe, on one server and every action taken by any member of the universe should affect the whole system (butterfly effect). Testing out new blueprints must be an economical risk and it must be time consuming. Engineering can't be free because it would not help to rise an economy system. To have a vital and stable economy is an essential point for the success of DU.

Well, I did not read the whole thread just got an idea what you are talking about.
 
I do not want to have a creative mode, this is totally counterproductive.
 
DU is on big universe, on one server and every action taken by any member of the universe should affect the whole system (butterfly effect). Testing out new blueprints must be an economical risk and it must be time consuming. Engineering can't be free because it would not help to rise an economy system. To have a vital and stable economy is an essential point for the success of DU.

In an interview JC mentioned that approximately 2.000 player have access to Pre Alpha. I can't imagine that a few weeks or months will be enough to get all essential information. Looking at many other games I expect that Pre Alpha, Alpha and Beta will last longer than wanted.
 
As long as the game is in development and players see improvements and new features, they can call their releases what ever they want. .-)
 

To get a working game economy some facts a essential:
 
(1) You need many players
(2) Everything must be crafted by players
(3) Items must have a decay when they were used --> broken items must be repaired, recycled or bought from the market again.
(4) Economy needs Scissors-Paper-Rock or even better Scissors-Paper-Rock-Lizard-Spock principle.
 
 

I would like to see systems implemented that create a greater use of the ship if operated by multiple players.
 
For example. more gun operations from side turrets if multiple people are operating the ship, maybe better, tighther turning or something if a navigator is present...or more efficient FTL if there is a navigator on board vs just a pilot.
 
I can see the need for having one person be able to pilot a large ship, but there should be benefits for groups who multi-pilot a ship. This would help create team play and help to establish "ownership" to a group working on making a large ship.

Hi there,
my name is Oije Nedschowieda, shortly Oije. I am looking forward tobe a part of this universe. I like the researching and crafting aspect of the game. 
 
Cheers Oije

Hi there,
my name is Oije Nedschowieda, shortly Oije. I am looking forward tobe a part of this universe. I like the researching and crafting aspect of the game. 
 
Cheers Oije