elDunco

kill'em to mute'em

Will there be an In-game voice? mechanic, and if not can there be a solid one?
 
An in-game voice mechanic which allows you to talk to players that are within a certain area near you. And they can hear you louder the closer you are? And also possibly a way to amplify your voice for example if you're giving a political speech? Or something like PA speakers so you can alert your crew to abandon ship? Even something else like using ships to contact another one of your ships to give them an order or even a motivational speech?. 
 
Without an in-game voice, people would be negotiating by typing or even using software such as discord and this can be long and complicated just to talk to someone you just met. And let's say you have a meeting with a high up official who just sent you a message to meet him. Would you rather click on a discord room with him in it and talk? Or would you rather stroll down to the hanger and enter a ship and flying to the officials command ship. To then proceed to walk into his office and sit down for a meeting.
 
This could be done similar to games like Dayz, Rust, and many others. It would really push forward how realistic cooperation between two people can go and the entire game in a whole. 


Update - (3/03/2018)
This suggestion was made a long while ago, and during the course of that time, some interesting questions and ideas have been brought to the discussion that I would like to touch on here.
 
This type of communication is a necessity for Dual Universe, for the scale of this game having a voice system really boosts its quality and can even make the game, Chance encounters are one of the most important and exciting moments you will experience, without a proper communication system they simply cannot be brought to their full potential. One of the largest reasons is that Dual Universe is a societal game, from nations to pirates and companies. You need a way to convey information that is easy and and connected to the game, some examples of this include traders trying to convince you to buy one of their products, a police officer asking for identification, a pirate asking for demands, a superior officer in the military giving you a quick order in an intense situation and the chance encounters that were mentioned earlier like someone who has managed to settle on the same asteroid as you or someone in the street of a large city. These examples show you why 3rd party services cannot be relied on, they take too long to configure and to hold one for an entire organisation would require a stupidly large amount of constant micro-management. 
 
A city is alive because information flows through it, cities are what keep organisations alive and if you cannot allow information to flow through a city then it results in the eventual collapse of that establishment and possibly the organisation. An in-game voice system perfectly fits into the city and maps it accordingly unlike 3rd party software.
 
[Further Explanation of above point]
For example, lets take discord and build up a small model area of a city, we have a marketplace with around 100 people trading and talking to each other, we have an area not too far away where there is a political candidate giving a speech and between them another area that is a residential building, some conversations are taking place between people looking to buy an apartment and neighbors talking to each other. Its possible at this point to create a setup in discord, you could have a voice room with everyone in it, but then you face difficulty hearing the person you are trying to listen too because everyone is the same volume, you could take the more obvious root and divide the channels into speech, market and residential but then each one has the same problem of not being able to hear the person they are talking too maybe directly calling someone is a better option but then no one can enter that conversation so you divide up the rooms again. In a sense an attempt to map the city to discord. The problem  with mapping in discord is that when a new instance is created discord cannot simply be updated, lets say there is an explosion or crash nearby, a new environment has been created, for in-game voice its a matter of walking into this area to hear the new environment and for the map to be updated, you would also globally hear the effect of the crash and how it affects the market, speech and residential area. Discord cannot have a new environment in this area unless you have someone online who can create a new channel in a hurry, and even then you would not get the connected experience you would with an integrated voice system. 
 
Some common problems/points:
 
This would put too much load on the server: 
It could, I'm sure if NQ puts there mind to it they can find a way around it, for example, it could become P2P.
 
This isn't what NQ should be focusing on right now: 
I agree they shouldn't even look at this feature until some time before launch, or even after launch, it doesn't mean it shouldn't be in the game.  
 
This would be an annoying feature: 
It might be in some places, but if you are in a nation it becomes there responsibility to moderate it, there could be some settings in-game which allow you to disable it, mute specific people, adjust your hearing range etc. 
 
 
Thank you, this has been an interesting discussion and I hope it continues to be. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Incoming bromance

You do know there are materials you can put around your electronics to protect from EM weapons... right? And EM weapons will be in the game, like EMP bombs or missiles, that you need to take down the shield first for them to actually be effective. It's a no-brainer of a weapon. 
 
Different types of armor, for different types of weapons. IF you think building a good ship will be easy business, it won't be. The more diffucult a ship is to make engineering-wise, given all the materials and the tweaks in Lua, the harder it will be to be captured.
 
Emergent Gameplay? Be a sociopath, infiltrate a ship's crew, befriend them, then kill them and hijack the ship as it is, then reverse engineer it. The spy business is dark and full of terrors, too many terrors for your heart it seems. You want the easy way of things. You won't have it, as JC said in the DM21 interview : "if the Kickstarter didn't succeed, the investors would ask us to go F2P , that we'll have to go P2W, and tell us that things are too complicated, simplify simplify simplify, so, this will not happen thankfully and we are talking with the investors who want to fund us further as long as they agree on the game's vision ". And it won't be simple to steal a ship lad, it won't.
 
You confuse Emergent, with "easy". You'll need to double-think before trying to take over a ship. You'll need an actual tactic and method of doing so. You want a trophy hangar? Good luck with that, although it will be really impressive if you manage to neutralise all those crews on board all those ships. And because it will difficult to do so, everyone will say "Dayum, them Yin Yang lads are so hardcore, let's roll with them, they seem to know their stuff, they got like a hangar just for trophy ships they captured and dat thing is uber hardcore man".
 
So... good luck and don't let paranoia get in over your head
 
 
Pro Tip. : Always make sure you negotiate with the crew of the opposing ship. Buy time in negotiations while you charge up that EMP to fry their electronics and make sure to go for their propulsion first so they drift helplessly. Once you fry their electronics, go in, kill them, hack the Core and copy the ship's blueprint, then salvage it for materials you can carry with you, and rebuilt the craft in your hangar.
 
If your crew and you suck at Avatar vs Avatar and get killed, congrats, you were humiliated.
 

Yeah I'm holding back on the cosmetic designs of my ship till I know exactly what a practical ship design will be. Right now I've got a rig ship sketched up (for space trucking ) but its a very basic, boxy design atm. Essentially It's just a sketch up of the basic ship they've shown with a cargo container on back which I've planned on placing our nano pack containers in. Also drew it with a quad engine with 2 fuel cell setup since I figured the added weight would need an extra push. This is all based off that ship building teaser I saw so I'm sure there is plenty of room for design improvement. Like I said though I wouldn't fall in love with your cosmetics for the ships till we have a better idea of whats capable. Wouldnt want the vehicle to move like a brick because of a few fancy prongs sticking everywhere.

Naming of systems and planets should be considered "Nicknames". They should retain their identied name (ie "HS4-RD" as mentioned above)
 
The Nickname of the planet should only be unique to the player and be used as an organization method. A group/tribe or whatever could consider a planet one name and a different group could have a completely different name for it.
 
The planet ID would remain the same across the game but the "Nickname" would be personalized to the player.

Form follows function.  Unless I'm selling a ship I don't see the point of sexing it up.  If wings don't matter, I'm not going to use them.  If they improve performance in atmosphere, I will use them.

The most important ships to build in the beginning will be prospectors designed for the home planet.  I don't know if we'll be able to mount scanners directly on ships or if we'll have to get out of the ships in order to scan.  The design of the ship will depend on the range of the scanners if they are ship mounted.  We may also be able to build drone-mounted scanners so you get to a location then you deploy your drones and they run a pattern around your ship and draw a map for you... a lot will come down to the instrumentation we can build, the capabilities of the elements and so forth.  I know that mining itself is going to be a human-only activity as they don't want to allow ships or drones do it since that would result in planet-wide devestation.  
 
If we have the option of refining ore using a ship-borne refinery, we may have a prospector-refinery design so we don't want to fill our inventory with unrefined resources.  I know that we store resources in our nanopacks but I don't know what the inventory capacity will be.  Maybe we'll have room for a whole day's mining on our back.  Maybe your inventory fills up after half an hour and you need to head back, in which case having cargo capacity on your prospector ship will be very valuable.
 
I've read that there will be different scanners for different materials.  If these can be mounted shipboard, it may be convenient to have the full array of scanners available in the ship.  It may be that a crew of prospectors need to work together, one on each type of scanner, which would result in a much larger ship.  Or maybe we'll be able to script the scanners together so they fire in sequence and we can build a scanner map showing different kinds of resources.  We may want a ship to run the scans then land and send out vehicles with their own cargo capacities that the miners drive to their targets while the ship moves to scan the next hex.  
 
It all comes down to the business rules are for scanning for, mining, refining (if needed) and storing resources, and what elements are available.  Will we know the depth of the resources when we detect them?  Will there be deep resources that we have to dig down to even be able to scan for?  Will we have to have ships that can drop off a mining camp with basic defensive systems, then run back to base to fill up with security forces, then return with a load of ore... so the ship may not be specialized at all.
 
Basically I'm saying what's important in my philosophy as a designer and scripter will be building vehicles that respond to rules, conditions, economic realities and the military situation.  I think it's important to consider what will be possible and come up with some basic ideas for a variety of conditions so that as we discover the rules, capabilities and conditions, we'll be in a position to come up with efficient and cost-effective designs.  I'm going to want to be able to quote a Return on Investment for the equipment I design, for example, so that people will know what they're buying. 

https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/10000-kickstarter-ama-event-first-part/?p=32186 
 
 
You are target numero duo.

I did say the skill loss system should be tied to how far the RN is from your location of death.
 
 
You die far far away? You'll lose skill points probably. Like, in the middle of deep space. 
 
 
Space-truckers will probably sell on THAT for their prices on hauling.

I've dabbled quite a bit with blueprints. Only way to hold me over before alpha 
 
The latest ship class i've been concepting:
 

 
The rest are here: http://www.objectivedriveyards.com/ships/

What kind of vehicles will you build? I want to see if anyone has began sketching out blueprints for the ships they plan on creating. I know we've only been given a little bit of info on ship building but I've already began sketching out some initial ship blueprints myself (I'll post those soon )
 
What kind of ships do you plan on making given the info we have? Post pics if you have any!

I think that's a terrible name, might I suggest Twerks MotorInn?
Make it a space trailer park.

I'll be trying to push the limits during alpha and beta, seeing just how big I can make something, how awkward or poorly a ship can handle, how fast I can make a ship built just to be fast, etc.
 
At launch however, I'll get my org together as best as I can, get into space ASAP and go pretty far out. Far enough that it would be pretty challenging to bump into us accidentally without sensors (yes and far enough for trade to be terribly inconvenient). Go isolationist for a while until we've got a general culture and uniform-ish look going. Once we've got a good mix of ships, weapons, loot etc...
 
We'll return to populated space, a foreign people with foreign looking tech, with our own isolated history. neat?

As much as I'd like to be part of large organizations, I tend to get frustrated by all the rules and bureaucracy. So I'll probably end up being a vagabond, taking up jobs here and there travelling as a crewmember on whoever will hire me going out into the stars.
 
Either that, or I'll be a space trucker. 
 
Space Trucking was the best time I ever had in Eve Online, despite how boring it seemed on the surface, I rather enjoyed kicking back and just quietly flying towards my destination 20-30 jumps away. 

I want to build a frontier trade outpost and saloon.  It would be cool to bring people together in game and start a township on the edge of explored territories and watch it grown and progress overtime, fighting off bandits and eventually developing our own customs and politics.
 
The way I see it, without NPCs or fast travel the only place to get equipment will be the ark and the only place to get resources will be the frontier, people will be forced to work together or spend hours and hour hauling inventories of unrefined ore back to the auction houses at the ARK.

what should happen, is that weapons fire doesn't make particles disappear, they make particles compact into a new material: scrap.
This scrap would then combine the materials inside and could be retrieved to get back the original material quantity.
The more compact a scrap voxel is, the harder and longer it will take to be refined.
This would allow for battles to leave nearly 100 % of their original material, but in an unusable form, and with a wreckage shape similar to the one of the ship. assuming only the planet gen would be reset (refill the ores and regenerate the non artificial undergrounds, compacting all artificial constructs into scrap ruins) this would leave a nice amount of wreckage and scrap to work with.
Scrap would need some amount of resources to refine, since you need to separate all the metals. base metals could be combines into alloys, and any failed alloy would be scrap with the composition used to make it. To separate the metals a chemical process would need to be used, like in reality.
 
This would require a chemical synthesis mechanic, and an advanced metallurgy mechanic, that would give you an advanced degree of freedom to work with alloys and their recycling. for containers, a good idea would be to require certain alloys that to not react with the contained compound to build and use a container for some materials. for instance a plutonium container made out of neutron reflecting materials would trigger a nuclear blast. (i am pro nuclear weapons as we wand absolute freedom even if it means having massive craters in the ground of planets and even then it could be awesome to see a crater from space )

That's the point of colonialism sir. As Agent Smith said it :
 

From my experience only the very core areas on minecraft servers are destroyed while once you go a pretty small distance from the spawn the world returns to what would otherwise be considered a normal world. It's definitely going to happen, especially on the spawn planet. Players will disperse rapidly as people move further out and the issue wont really present itself strongly.
 
And in my opinion I think it SHOULD be an issue, something for the player base to manage as a whole. Dual Universe's climate change.

Role with a group to gain knowledge and learn a few things.
 
 
And Afterwards? Who knows? Perhaps, search the furthest reaches of the galaxy.
 
 
It will be ripe for the taking.

definitely seeing someone testing out the fall damage early on lol

Easy one.
We have to use several premade stuff to build our constructs. They could offer cosmetic variants to them or even new ones, only available with the shop. As long as they would not be more powerful (noone likes pay to win) this would be interesting. Keys to some ancient vaults found throughout the universe All things cosmetic we could look at (clothes, armor, helmets, weapons, capes) - offer an appearance slot and you have a truckload of opportunities for your shop, your spacecraft has stylish flames trailing it? Your engines are yellow, red, violet, sparkling pink Convenience items which let you mine slightly easier or in style, hover you around instead of running, bigger backpack, greater resource load? If we collect ideas or look at other games shop, there will be plenty of options for any possible game without hurting the game balance. Yes some people will cry at every shop, but some will cry at everything, always, everywhere

I'd like the idea of a time limited free play period to try it out and get a feel for the game - perhaps 3 hours of game time or something. I also like the idea of charging for actual game time instead of on a monthly basis - purchasing time packs or something similar perhaps...$X per 10 hours of game time.

Lifetime subscriptions are the most useless payment method ever invented - from a developer point of view. Yes, you get cash fast, but after that you never get some again, which hurts the development in the end. Every company ever offering lifetime subs did regret it dearly. For us players, if a subbed game seems worth it, is sounds promising and might be. I played Lotro for year every now and then because of a lifetime abo.
 
The last subbed only games all jumped the F2P train after some time. It is hard to make it up for lifetimers, when a game goes F2P. With the exception of WoW (don't like it, don't know it much) the only long time subbed only game I know of is EvE. EvE is offering 2 free content expansions a year making the game worth paying for. Dual Universe don't offers 'content' at all. It will feature (hopefully) cool tools and an environment. For me this is a normal PC game. Buy it, play it, done. I doubt many players will stick to their sub, if there will be no content flowing in after release.
 
But I may be wrong. As the devs spare the money for content creation like quests and story, they might go for a very low sub of one or two $/€ a month. This might work, we will see.

I believe the best test method for users trying the game will be some form of 'trial period', short, but sweet. 
 
 
As for life time, the issue is the lifetime of this game can vary so much, it will either be around for years and years (I hope), or it may just stay a small community held game that really doesn't gain much attention and has to shut down. With this in mind, I like the system of Monthly, Tri-monthly, Half yearly or yearly subscriptions with a discount as you buy more and more time. 
This will allow the devs to keep atleast some form of a steady flow of income if people keep playing or until they end up using the in-game subscription items. I believe this system can and does still work with micro-transactions on some games, as people become super addicted (As I have before) and I end up spending way too much money on both the sub and micro-trans.
 
But I understand where you are coming from and does seem like a good idea regardless, just thought I'd add my ramblings too.