NanoDot

The common feature of all the images you linked is not so much determined by the "rarity" of the materials used, but rather by the extensive amount of small intricate surface details. The size of the voxels we can work with will limit that. A wide selection of available surface textures can compensate to an extent, but I'd guess that something like the cathedral window will not be practically possible. There are several pre-made meshes for decorative elements that NQ have developed (e.g. trashcan, indoor plant, etc.), but those require artists' time, so they will probably be added slowly.

There may actually be a use for formal wardec's, but not by imposing some game-determined limits. An org or alliance could integrate war declarations in their RDMS system. That way, anyone that declares war on an alliance is automatically flagged as being at war with all members, for instance. Being formally at war could trigger all kinds of rules and actions in the RDMS. Making wardec's a formal concept in the game allows players to use the concept as they see fit. But if the concept doesn't exist in the game code, it can't be referenced in RDMS rules or Lua scripts. Making wardec's a concept in the game does not imply that the game rules should attach meaning to the concept, other than recognizing it as a status attribute of an org or a player. The players can decide how they want to use that status indicator.

Space should not be about "getting there" as much as "what to do when you DO get there". How quickly you get to space does not change the difficulty of surviving there. Access to space opens up vast new possibilities for game play. Exploration, colonising new planets, building secret asteroid bases, enjoying the view, and so on. Getting to space should just be a tiny speedbump in your character progression, and it probably will become just that very soon after launch.

I don't think it should be "hard" to get into space. Space is an integral part of the game play. If everyone is stuck on Alioth for months, players will get bored and frustrated and that just leads to bad behaviour and rage-quitting.

NQ will generate buy orders on the market which will buy resources from players. That will inject Quanta into the game and remove resources. The plan is that when NQ feel there's "enough" money in the game, they will stop generating the buy orders, which will effectively cap the money supply, because there will be no other way to generate "new" money in the game. The theory is that capping the money supply will limit inflation. However, the money in circulation will slowly start decreasing once the supply is capped. Players inevitably leave the game, which also removes their Quanta from circulation. So NQ will have to resume placement of their buy orders from time to time, to "top-up" the amount of active Quanta in the game world.

The speed of mining will be a significant factor in resource prices. More supply means lower prices. The faster you can mine, the more you can bring to market, and the less your risk while mining. But speed of mining also ultimately determines the intensity of PVP in DU. If ship losses are easily replaced (fast mining, abundant resource supply, low prices), more people will engage in PVP. And it will also mean more "speculative" PVP, because ship loss will be relatively trivial. The balance of game play will swing in favour of combat and destruction, because it's always faster (and more fun) to blow something up than it is to build it.

I cannot vote in this poll, the options either don't make sense to me or are too vague. "Cheap or expensive" are a relative terms, and mean different things to different people. "Cost of minerals" will vary wildly depending on how your org deals with the different aspects involved. "Risk of piracy or stockpile theft" is a reality of the game, the only aspect that's up for discussion is how the risks should be managed. Supply-and-demand will largely determine the prices for anything bought and sold in DU. It's a cornerstone of the player-driven economy. The only price regulation will be via the fake resource buy orders placed by NQ to create currency in the game. Those buy orders will set a floor price for specific resources, and only while they're active. If a specific resource becomes "too expensive", that's an incentive to find new deposits of that resource. You may have to go to a different planet, asteroid or moon to find more, or even go to a new solar system, but there will always be more somewhere. Resources in DU are infinite. They have to be, otherwise the game grinds to a halt. Resources are only finite in a given area. The distribution of resources is regulated by NQ to achieve balance, depending on how they are used in the game. The "rare" resources will always be "more expensive" than the common ones.

Without some regulatory system like "re-inforced states" on shield-bubbles (a.k.a. timers), we can look forward to raids and surprise attacks whenever most of your org is logged off. So, if you want to be a viable org in DU, make sure your org is large enough to include a significant number of members from all the world's RL timezones. If not, don't be salty if your base is attacked at 4:00am by an org on the other side of the world whose RL primetime happens to occur at that point. You may even face "alarm clock raids" from motivated groups in your own time zone. Timers and "windows of vulnerability" came into being in online games for a reason. They weren't arbitrarily invented to make combat more tedious.

DAC will NOT create an "outflow" of currency from the game. You will be buying DAC from other players, so DAC will only transfer currency from you to another player, the quanta will remain in the game world. The only "money sink" I've heard of in DU is the possibility of "rents or taxes" that may be charged for claiming hexes in the safe zone. Presumably the tax will be payable to the arkship AI ?

AFAIK, in DU you drop your entire inventory and all equipped items on death. Only your body is resurrected at the Rez node, your items don't "teleport" with you. Read the last paragraph in this devblog: https://devblog.dualthegame.com/2014/07/06/quantum-immortality/ However, part of what you drop is randomly destroyed, and the rest is lootable. The % of items not destroyed at death remain in a virtual container wherever you died. DU works exactly like EVE in this regard. But the "gamey" systems that would be needed to deal with "downed states" is the reason why I don't like them in the first place.

I don't like "gamey" systems like special KO mechanics and "downed-states" that allow all kinds of game play to continue. Dead is Dead ! My version of KO would be a realistic version of being "knocked-out": if your health bar drops below a certain %, you lose consciousness and drop on the spot. So no vision, speech, movement or taking actions, and your inventory and equipped items is fully lootable. After a certain time, you "regain consciousness" and can stand up and function as normal, but with the very low health that caused you to fall down in the first place. And KO should not be some magical damage absorption mechanic. If you have 25 HP left and the KO threshold is 15, you die outright if you take 25 or more damage in 1 hit.

On the contrary, I'd imagine that a group of 20 could very easily be self-sufficient in their basic needs. It all depends on how important "rare" resources and "high-end" parts and elements will be in everyday game play. Large orgs may have a virtual monopoly on those kinds of items, which would mean other players would need cash to buy those things from the suppliers.

How would you avoid that ? If the ability to manufacture components is purely skill-based, a group of 20 players can possibly co-ordinate their skill training to cover all options. The only constraint would be the volume of items they can manufacture and/or assemble. If your group can acquire sufficient resources in DU, and you have the required skills for building/manufacturing, what need would you have for money ?

We don't know to what extent NQ's money-injection mechanics (i.e. fake resource buy orders) will interfere in the player-driven market. Hopefully the fake buy orders will only be i.r.o. the most common basic ores, with the price of everything else being determined by pure supply-and-demand mechanics on the market. If the fake buy order prices are set very low, it will mean that quanta will enter the economy relatively slowly, and making "new" money will require much grinding. But it would also mean that players wouldn't have to struggle to "beat" the prices offered by NQ's buy orders. We also don't know how important cash will be to the average player. What is cash needed for in DU, other than to buy resources from other players ? We don't know how R&D works, or what the effect of skills will be regarding the manufacture of alloys, parts, elements, etc.. It may be that a medium sized org can supply all the needs of its members without needing much actual cash...

The biggest problem with component-based weapons is balancing and the inevitable "FOTM" issues, imho. Even if you have 1000 possible combinations, the players will parse them down to "the 10 best options" in a matter of days. Fleet doctrines will further constrain the weapon fits allowed. One way of getting around the problem of "1000's of meshes" would be to have multiple recipes for specific parts, so that the ingredients used can change the stats of the part, and ultimately change the performance of the weapon element that the part is used in. The weapon elements would still look the same when built, but they would perform differently.

We are now a starfaring civilization that will soon be spreading to multiple systems. The stars are not mythical objects anymore, so they won't be regarded with the same level of reverence and awe felt by our primitive ancestors. Star/system names in DU will most likely be arbitrary, with an emphasis on brevity and useability.

Scanners will be a vital part of DU, because of the size of the game world. But longer scanner ranges will be tricky, given that the game world will be dynamically assigned to various server clusters based on load in specific areas. How a long-range scanner would technically function in DU is not clear to me. A mining scanner in DU has relatively short range, and will be a "local" query, so the area being scanned will all be hosted on a single server node. But a long-range scan in DU might require communication between several distinct server nodes or clusters. In DU, a scan of a single busy solar system might involve querying dozens of server nodes. In EVE it's relatively straightforward, because each server node hosts one or more solar systems, so scan results can be returned very quickly, given that all possible scan results are elements hosted on a single server node.

Nothing in DU is simple, lol, even something as basic as logging in/out becomes a multi-page discussion ! Leaving ragdolls in the world (like in ARK) is simply not practical in DU. Having 100 ragdolls on ARK's island is fine, having 10K+ ragdolls in DU is not going to be fine... The most practical solution for DU is probably "ghosting" the player image and slowly fading it away. The ghost image would obviously have no collision detection, otherwise it could cause issues. As for what happens when you log back in, that's probably material for several multi-page discussions...

I don't think we'll be getting THOSE kind of "enhancements", lol

The KS basic goals include "a few alien creatures". So unless NQ decide not to honour all the KS promises, there will be a few "alien" animals on Alioth at launch. But I doubt that there would be enough of them to justify a scanner and logbook combo...

Just a note of caution here... That quote implies that if only 1% of the planet consists of useable resources, it will still take several years for the resources to be depleted, even with 3000 players digging 8 hours per day 24/7/365. If that is the case, then depleting resource deposits will be far less of an issue than many imagine. Don't forget that the starter system has 12 planets confirmed, with the possibility of even more being added before launch. I expect things will change somewhat before release...

Resource deposits in DU will not respawn once they are depleted. The area around the arkship will be stripped of resources fairly quickly, but there was talk of creating new spawn zones on other planets as the game world expands after launch. The current "starter zone" will not always be the only place for new players to spawn.

The original definition of DU's "Starter Goals" on the Kickstarter page includes: "Alien Life: a few NPC creatures". So, at launch there will be "a few" creatures to hunt or run away from... I think there was talk about expanding the function of this feature at some point after launch, so that creatures could become a source of food (e.g. when "survival" features are added/expanded).

I see the "factions" are starting to solidify ! Over the coming months, there will be many forum battles fought between the "PVP is primary, everything else comes second" and the "building of things is primary, everything else comes second" groups. Both sides will claim to represent the "true vision" of what NQ intends for the game. Balancing these opposing approaches will determine the future of DU. Mega structures will be conflict magnets. Just as some will build things for no other reason than "because we can", there will also be those that want to destroy them for no other reason than "because we can". But destruction is inevitably faster than building, and in MMO's, the deck is almost always stacked in favour of the aggressor.