CptLoRes

Hello Games (No Man's Sky) and NQ had similarities with inexperienced leadership and promising more then they could deliver. But that's also where the comparison stops.
The state of NMS at launch had much to do with Sony forcing the game to lunch before it was ready. But Hello Games always delivered timely updates and made solid progress with the game.
 
NQ on the other hand has dilly dallied around for 8 years now and have still now yet even made the framework need to support the six pillars in the game.

The speed changes were another nail in the coffin of DU for me. There is no rationale to having mass-speed relationship, neither in physics nor in the game's lore or appreciable need. It could have all been handled with mass/acceleration - the "old school" way. More mass - less acceleration, less mass - more acceleration. Sure you couldn't outrun anything that's already heading in a direction at max speed, but as soon as you turned you'd gain lots of distance away from a heavy weight pursuer.

In a way, the clipped element debacle was the nerf way to go around something that could have been solved with buffs. Devs could have added more OP high-tier engines to satiate the need for speed, at the appropriate (high) cost, instead of messing with everyone's constructs even if they don't PvP. The turn rates also go nerfed for PvP reasons but affected 100% of people. This is all the examples of the wrong direction the devs took, and lets be really honest here - the only reason fast PvP ships were needed was to chase down the multi-mission haulers who weren't interested in PvP and rob them blind.

this makes no sense, other players can't cause graphics lag on my screen lol ... please learn how computers work.
 
this could be the reason, but i have never seen EAC lag games. most games nowdays use EAC and its not known to cause lag. OUTRIDERS used to have EAC, but they removed it and i didn't notice any change in framerate or GPU usage at all. i don't remember all the games by name, but there have been few games in past that implemented EAC and again no change in performance.
it doesn't even make sense, because EAC would use RAM and CPU, not GPU. it has no graphics, its background process.
 
 
however one odd thing i noticed, is that my GPU is no longer under 100% load. it was fluxuating between 70-100%, while my framerate is constantly 30-50fps. i have no bottlenecks on my PC, i checked RAM and CPU too. RAM is about 80% and CPU is 40-80% depending on what i'm doing.
so clearly they've messed something up bad ... which brings me back to my original point: BAD OPTIMIZATION.
sign of WORST optimization is when your PC has no bottlenecks, yet framerate is low.

As I have already said before, after giving NQ my time, money and many, many chances I am now at the point where I am just here to eat popcorn and watch the slow-mo train wreck as it happens. Does this make me a small person? Maybe.. But at least I get more entertainment from watching NQ fumbling along then playing the game. And even after all these years the one thing NQ consistently manage to do, is to add a little fuel to the fire now and then.
 
Edit: But don't worry. Judging be the lack of traffic in the forums, it wont be long now before I can retire my DU persona it would seem. Unless that is if NQ release whatever meta thing they are working on, which would liven things up in here also I bet (fuel for the fire).

NQ had no problem showing and bragging about how many player they had during early pre-test and alpha when the numbers where decent.
But when players started leaving because NQ.. they stopped showing the player count and never bragged or even just mention any player numbers ever again..

I don't really agree, that they've had updates isn't the same thing as developing the game. What real features were added in 1.1 and 1.2? It's 5+ months after release now...clearly it isn't enough. Why would anyone think that 1.3 is going to be a big feature...?
 
We're talking about one single PvE mission when having PvE content over 5 months after release for an MMO is not exactly something to celebrate when the expectations from every other product in this genre is that this is standard.
 
I don't view NQ's slow and minor updates as real development...but I'll agree that's entirely subjective and it's up to players to decide if their new skins and one new mission is enough to grow the game. I don't see it. 
 
 
Except that DU hasn't had more than 1,000 concurrent players on Steam ever...its active player count has cratered since release down to barely over 100 people a day!
 
There's an ocean of difference between DU and a game like PUBG or EQ. Those games have had some level of scale in their life, DU hasn't. Even NQ's CEO describes DU as a "moonshot". 
 
There's a huge, huge difference between "doomsaying" -- declaring something without any evidence -- and DU, where there's no objective evidence to indicate actual player growth. 
 
Occupied territory count is a far worse metric than Steam stats because of what I've already explained -- the only metrics tell you anything for a subscription product are churn rate and number of subs. Steam stats are the closest thing to churn rate we can see because it measures DAUs -- territory counts do not. A few hundred new players every few weeks is really, really bad even if you assume a conservative churn rate based on known metrics. That's not growth. 
 
We're talking about a game that as I'm writing this has 19 people playing it on Steam. That's what death looks like. 
 
There's more people playing 2015's "Corgi Warlock" on Steam than DU, an MMO that's not been out a year. That's not a growing, alive game. 

Yes.. And we all knew this right from the start, and kept asking how they where going to solve the obvious scaling issues. And all we ever got was silence or "don't worry guys" in return, until suddenly years later it was not OK at all.. And this together with all the other stuff is why I do no longer respect NQ as a professional company.

There will never be Territory War or AvA. 
 
I don't know why people keep talking about DU as if NQ is working on the game full-steam. They aren't.
 
The CEO has been very clear that DU is not NQ's main focus...and why would it be amid bad reviews, flagging player pops, and a mountain of technical debt? 
 
The "big" thing they're working on after 5+ months of release is one PvE mission...this imagination of Haven being full or changes that come when TW is ready is weird to me, because there's no evidence that this will ever arrive.
 
The only real evidence we have is that NQ's CEO is 100% focused on adapting DU's core tech to other projects. It'd be silly to suggest that DU has the majority of NQ's resources when even NQ's CEO describes it as a "moonshot". 
 
Every piece of evidence about the game points to DU getting fewer dev resources as the company attempts to pivot, slower updates, and most importantly...massively churning players. 
 
So this imagination of "when" TW "will" come is puzzling to me, because I don't see it as "inevitable" -- I'd be surprised if the game keeps getting updates through the rest of the year, never mind this far-flung future when Haven is full and TW exists. 

All that is needed is basic filtering with tag and blocking functionality, like you would expect from any sane MMO where trading and markets are supposed to be a major part of the game. So put it on the list with the other WTF's like the chat system etc.

You know a game is fundamentally broken when even though there’s only 100 active players, resources are at a premium.

And I envy you that experience, because judging from how many left that is not what the majority of players have experienced.

We have been waiting for more content (actual pillar type content) for something like 4+ years now.
And that is why most of the veterans are frustrated with NQ, and no longer give 'balanced' feedback.

What do you even mean by "server engine architecture"...? Why would you want a backend that's failed to scale at every turn -- especially one that's likely vendor-locked into AWS? 
 
Regardless, there is a way to buy it off them...clearly NQ is wanting to be acquired.
 
Their timing and strategy sucks...because they are hoping their early trademarks around "metaverse" and whatever patents they hold would make them an easy target for some big entity investing in the metaverse.
 
Of course, Microsoft just dropped their metaverse project and no one believes Meta's platform will amount to jack shit. There's no "big entity" left other than Meta, and they have no need for NQ's silly trademark or poorly implemented tech. 
 
People in this metaverse space are dropping like flies for a good reason.
 
I do believe NQ's leadership genuinely believes in web3 (hence their announcement that their current development focus is on metaverse tooling like "3d blogging")...and this belief absent any evidence, valid use case, or basic understanding of the technology in general is (as time will prove) not a healthy way to run a company. 

We have been waiting for more content (actual pillar type content) for something like 4+ years now.
And that is why most of the veterans are frustrated with NQ, and no longer give 'balanced' feedback.

And it is highly unlikely that NQ will deliver.

Well.. we are talking about a dev studio that made it so that the game would freeze for seconds if there was to many messages in the notifications list.. (not that many in reality, and should not have mattered regardless how many there was).
 

On of the things NQ did to try and improve performance was that voxels are converted into a normal polygon model when you leave the build mode. This allows them to use the built in traditional polygon optimization tricks and LOD rendering methods that come with the 3D engine.
 
But there must be something fundamentally wrong with how NQ does rendering. because excluding a visit to Market 6, there is nothing show on the screen in DU that justify the slow rendering (FPS) performance. And streaming content from slow servers should not impact FPS performance on the client side, since loading new data and rendering existing data are two completely separate tasks.
 
So the argument is actually that slow servers should lead to higher FPS, since there will be less data to show when it has not loaded yet.
Which leads back to my point that it appears to be something fundamentally wrong with how NQ does 3D rendering. Probably because they for a LONG time had a "just make it work somewhat, and we will improve it later" attitude. And as all experienced developers knows, the fixing later time never comes around. And sometimes it also turns out that stuff can't be fixed and has to be completely changed. Which then becomes a HUGE problem when you have used this as the foundation to built an entire game on top of.

You mean magic blueprints which is the one thing NQ promised we would get no matter what, if there ever was a wipe after the soft-release in beta... .. .

On of the things NQ did to try and improve performance was that voxels are converted into a normal polygon model when you leave the build mode. This allows them to use the built in traditional polygon optimization tricks and LOD rendering methods that come with the 3D engine.
 
But there must be something fundamentally wrong with how NQ does rendering. because excluding a visit to Market 6, there is nothing show on the screen in DU that justify the slow rendering (FPS) performance. And streaming content from slow servers should not impact FPS performance on the client side, since loading new data and rendering existing data are two completely separate tasks.
 
So the argument is actually that slow servers should lead to higher FPS, since there will be less data to show when it has not loaded yet.
Which leads back to my point that it appears to be something fundamentally wrong with how NQ does 3D rendering. Probably because they for a LONG time had a "just make it work somewhat, and we will improve it later" attitude. And as all experienced developers knows, the fixing later time never comes around. And sometimes it also turns out that stuff can't be fixed and has to be completely changed. Which then becomes a HUGE problem when you have used this as the foundation to built an entire game on top of.

true, games should be optimized before adding any content, make a base concept and then optimize until it runs smooth as tetris!
 
completely wrong, it's other way around. think of game engine as foundation for house, if foundation is weak, entire house will eventually collapse. this can be seen on some large buildings, where engineers didn't do proper research, ground started sinking and as result building started sinking. just couple months ago i watched a video on some huge skyscraper that has been sinking for years and now they trying to patch it up by digging into the foundation and adding more support pillars and concrete, but it's big waste of time and resources .. if they would have done it right in first place, it would never have that issue.
 
same goes for games, you gotta optimize game as early as possible, you make basics work and then you optimize and make sure it runs smooth. adding content doesn't make it lag again. for example if 3D models are rendered in optimized way, then it won't change this base algorithm when you're adding more 3D models.
 
i don't write my own code out of scratch, but i know how programming works and i can easily optimize somebody else's code if i see it, i can point out what needs to be changed ..etc.
 
 
it has nothing to do with optimize the build itself, even when looking at nothing with no constructs nearby, i still lag, it's the base game itself that lags. basic environment is already laggy for me. it doesn't matter how big the build is, there's only so much that can fit on your screen, that's the part that GPU has to render, everything inside or other side of ship should never render, until you're about to look at them. this is how optimization works, things that are not visible, should never render in. so having ship with 10000 lights and elements, shouldn't cause any lag as GPU should only load what's visible on your screen. regardless of your POV, there's still only limited amount of stuff that fits on your screen, as soon as something is out of your view, it should no longer put load on GPU.
 
which is one of the problems i noticed fast, DU renders in stuff that is not visible to you, which is WORST thing a developer can do. for example lights go thru voxels, it means graphics card has to do a lot more work if there are lights behind a wall. in fact i see this kind of lazyness in many games nowdays. i remember playing old games such as tomb raider 1 2 3 4 5, doom 2 ..etc and i don't remember any area where lights or shadows were glitching thru walls, that's because back then hardware was very limited and devs really had to optimize every bit, but as result games ran smooth and didn't have many visual glitches that nowday games do have.
 
i never said i run it in 4k, i said it SHOULD run smooth even in 4k. i have to run it in 1080p and it still lags really bad, my average fps is probably 35, it's quite cry-worthy, considering that all other games run quite fine in 1440p (not talking about some extremely badly optimized indie games that lag even in 720p).
 
 
 
SIGNS OF BAD OPTIMIZATION:
1: if i look straight down at floor that has only voxels or terrain, it STILL lags, why? there's NOTHING to render, so why does GPU work so hard to render something that even 15 year old computer would be able to render in 4k 60fps? that's one of the biggest issues, with almost NOTHING on screen or even nearby, it still puts heavy load on your GPU.
 
2: shadows have insanely high distance for no reason, in fact i think shadow range is infinite. i often see shadows from like 10km+ away, altho turning shadows completely off doesn't help much .. so i wouldn't be surprised if shadows are still calcualted and rendered, but they just hide them from view. that's only explanation why messing with shadow quality or turning them completely off has almost no increase/decerase in framerate.
 
3: lights glitch thru walls/objects. this is another big issue in many games, if you're behind a wall and looking at light source, then that light shouldn't even render in, it should be invisible and only known to game/server that there is light with xx properties, only when you move so that light is about to become visible, should it be rendered by graphics card. by doing that, GPU doesn't have to do any work until up to very last moment before object is about to be rendered in.
I would rather have some stuff not rendering in-time, than have lag. then they could add option to adjust the hidden objects draw distance, so if you have issue that objects don't render in when you look at them, you can increase that option a bit or vice versa. this can find balance between rendering objects and framerate.
 
4: impossible to have DU on HDD, it has severe stuttering and screen freeze all the time, because game constantly reads/writes from/to HDD, which is clearly bad optimization, that's what RAM and pagefile is for. my pagefile is on SSD, yet DU still uses HDD over RAM or pagefile. Dying Light 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 require massive amounts of data to be loaded too, but they have made it work with HDD. in fact dying light 2 is on my HDD and when i start the game, i have to wait about 2 minutes before i can move, otherwise it will stutter and lag, but after that wait time, it runs smooth with no further stuttering or lagging, same goes for cyberpunk 2077, sometimes it does have issues catching up, but then it just loads very low quality models, like traffic lights or NPC cars are very low quality until HDD can catch up, but it doesn't stutter ... but DU? it just straight up stutters and stops me in my tracks, entire screen just freezes until it can do whatever it's doing.
 
5: turning vsync on causes me to lose about 10fps in most areas. turning vsync on/off shouldn't affect performance in any way, vsync is only designed to prevent GPU from rendering more frames than your monitor can display, which in my case is 60fps (60hz monitor). so with vsync ON, i get about 35fps and with vsync off i get 45fps in SAME exact area. i literally didn't move at all, just pressed ESC, went into menu and changed vsync. i've seen this in some other games too, that having vsync either on/off causes lag. in some games its other way around, that vsync off causes lag, while vsync on works fine.
 
 
IDEA about terrain rendering:
terrain is currently loaded in "default" state and then player changes are loaded, why is this needed? DU is persistent universe, just save the changes permanently. i've had this idea for a long time "dynamic game engine" that re-writes itself as you play, which would be perfect fit for DU.
right now entire DU world is kept in some kind of database, but that's already a big lag maker. instead of keeping things in database, make it render into permanent model. so if someone does work on terrain, then those changes will become permanent part of game, even if they hard wipe, those changes would never get wiped. this method would remove any and all lag that is related to terrain that has been altered.
 
 
but bottom line here, is that early access didn't lag so bad, i'm not talking about in extremely populated areas, i'm talking about like on sanctuary or haven. i was able to play in 1440p 60fps on same PC, no issues. it only lagged near markets cuz they were FULL of builds, way more than now as there was no 7 day park timer, so everything was just abandonded all over, yet it still ran better than now. so what have they done?
 
and don't forget that i had it on HDD before, but full release doesn't work on HDD at all, it stutters so bad that it's not playable. i see no visual improvements at all.
wish i could buy new GPU, but my income is below cry-worthy, i can't even afford proper food. i think its quite important to have optimized games.
 
new GPUs might be powerful, but that's not an excuse to have badly optimized game or just because SSDs are very common nowdays, doesn't mean that game should be unplayable on HDD.
also i wanted to mention that my GPU has 8gb VRAM and game barely uses like 3-4gb, yet i see some textures unloading, like if i switch between 3rd/1st person view, i see some textures unrender, if there's enough VRAM, why not just keep them in VRAM and re-use when needed? that's again more work for GPU and SSD/HDD, it has to reload those textures. if you're flying your ship, it should keep textures in VRAM and re-use them when needed, no need to unload them if there's enough VRAM to go around.
 
If any developers are reading, please focus on optimizing the game. with these basic graphics game should run smooth as silk on GTX 1080.
 
 

Not for games. Determining that your fancy new algorithms and ideas for a game can realistically run smoothly, is something that is done at a very early stage since it will have HUGE ramifications on the entire game. And if you don't... Well you risk getting another Dual Universe.

It's beyond stupid to ask players to read and obey rules that can easily be integrated into the game itself...but this is something that's been said many, many times.
 
Game rules are meant to be integrated into the game, and if NQ doesn't want to do that basic thing, at least they can have a lighter hand in enforcement. 
 
Hope you have fun in whatever game you find, @Cergorach! I'm sure there's plenty of other studios that would work much harder for your sub money. 

I would like to thank NQ for being reverse-toxic enough to finally break through my DU addiction and make me quit! I can't thank you enough, another game/publisher will also really appreciate the €500/year that will go to them instead of NQ...
 
I've been unhappy with DU (and specifically NQ) for a while now. The 180 degree turnarounds on things they announce/say in an official capacity, the wipe... My gawd the wipe! The wipe announcement! The 5+ months of 0 motivation due to the wipe announcement... The talent points after wipe. The 2.5 years of downgrading DU instead of introducing new interesting stuff... But even with the lack of actual enjoyment and the constant feeling that all I've build in DU will be taken away again, I was still here, probably because I was addicted enough to DU to keep coming back. I've done the asteroid mining thing again and that was kinda disappointing with the 5000L-6000L nodes, but maybe if I gitgut the experience might be more enjoyable (like in the old days)... Every time I need to extend my subscription I think more and more about the option of quitting, but I can't do that because reasons... (addict reasoning)
 
But this morning I got a ticket from NQ support... But I didn't submit a ticket and the email I initially got wasn't clear about it either (system not designed for reverse tickets). So I log in and I see the claim that my Airdock at Alioth Market 6 is above the 1000m limit. And I get a REALLY negative feeling, not specifically because I need to move my airdock to a lower altitude, the person at NQ that submitted the ticket to me could probably do that for me (and they can, I just need to move the dynamic cores)... But because of, why the heck could I deploy that there in the first place? That 1000m height limit didn't feel correct, I thought it was 1000m above ground level (but that was wrong as well). Why didn't that 'feel' correct? Because we get blasted with a TON of conflicting information all over the place and I loose track of what the 'current' rules are... So I went digging, this is what I found:
 
 
The 1000m height limit was posted during an Ask Aphelia sessions (by NQ-Deckard) and it was 1000m above sea level (5th of August):
 
Then we have NQ-Deckard's announcement (23rd of November):
"We will allow these constructs to remain for two weeks beyond the implementation of the new height restriction system."
 
Patch notes (24th of November) state:
https://www.dualuniverse.game/launcher/patch/release-1014
"Alioth: 1300m"
 
The 'new height restriction system' hasn't been implemented yet, so structures placed should be OK (according to NQ-Deckard) two weeks after the 'new height restriction system' has been implemented, which again, it isn't.
 
Even IF that did happen in the last two weeks, that was never mentioned in the patch notes, heck the whole issue was not mentioned in patch notes known issues section. The patch notes actually say that the limit is 1300m (which I'm still above) and not a 1000m as the support person mentions and wasn't changed in later patch notes, it's also the most recent height limit that NQ mentions and I could find.
 
The issue for me is not the having to move the dynamic constructs so the support person can move it to the proper height. But that this isn't the issue, it's the issue that I have to dig through all kinds of NQ publiced information and even the lastest info there (1300m) doesn't conform with what the support person is saying (1000m). That says a couple of things to me: It's a mess internally at NQ as they can't even coordinate among themselves the proper values that things should be and they can't communicate with us correctly either (known issues), as I was under the assumption this issue was fixed a while back. So that was pretty much the straw that was breaking the camels back for me. But maybe I'll calm down before tonight, the deadline to extend the subscriptions for two of my accounts....
 
Then I get the support ticket back... Which it short, doesn't address my issues and pretty much states "Thank you for you detailed response, it's appreciated. Now you have 24 hours to move those dynamic constructs away or we have to delete (the static constructs?) as they violate the rules. Thank you."... Yeah, I'm out, no waiting for this evening.
 
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Option 2, make it simple and make it possible to canabalize the npc ship so new players actually have something to do and not first work their asses of to get a dsat warp ultra ship. Since we dont get crashed ships on planets (missed opertunity) atleast make these npc ships a possibility in safe space for early players, sure make it harder and harder for older players and give them a mark I-IVm gradation on difficulty and reward.
 
 

Am I the only one wondering who is at this "round table discussion with members of our PvP community"?