Razorwire

No, you need only probes so you can Jump to them with Jump Drives or whatever.

Gates connect together, Probes are ONE WAY jump, if you jump through you can't jump back without a probe sent back to your original star system. You jump with the probe and build the gate on the other side.

So, any player, with the skills trained and the equipment, can jump from system to system on their own. Which also means, that's how PvP in large scales will go down, since you can't use Stargates the owners don't allow you to use.

Those people are called Loot Pinyatas  

500 years is huge at this point in time. You can't look back for pointers either, since technological progress is not linear, it's exponential. Citing the crossbow is a bit disingenuous, as it's pretty good at doing what it does. Better to think about something we can only just do, and see how that worked 500 years ago, like getting me to listen to your favourite band/composer's latest piece in seconds from my car compared to going out and finding a performance and waiting weeks or months to both physically attend it. On top of that, we've not got a huge drive for survival and space technologies right now, not like a "cataclysm threatening the entire Earth" kind of drive anyway. It is most likely that thrusters, ship systems and life support all got a huge boost in both scientific interest and funding in the run up to the evacuation.
 
I disagree that the DU tech is grounded; millennia-long cryo-sleep, ships that fly sub-sonic and hover in atmosphere and gravity using only thrusters with (relatively) tiny fuel tanks, nano-tech, ultra-miniaturization and re-expansion, plus we've got FTL and jump-gates on the horizon... At the same time, you've got little automation, manually controlled turrets, restricted telepresence etc. In short, we have a whole bunch of stuff we can't see a way to get to from here, and a lack of a bunch of stuff we can do right now.
Not my definition of grounded, but, and this is the important bit, it doesn't have to be in order to be fun.

As for EM drives in DU, yeah, they could work as expensive stealth engines, or as alternatives to other types to keep your fuel requirements down at the cost of seriously reduced thrust, or low thrust for low weight, or... Balance it how you like, plenty of niches it could fill.
 
Writing this I realise that I actually only care that we have a choice between variants of parts, and reasons to make those choices. Do I want to keep the fuel cost down, or keep high acceleration? Frankly it doesn't matter to me at that point whether I'm choosing between conventional or EM drives, or whether the choice is between H2O2 or Hydrazine propellants, or even between Variant-A and Variant-B. As long as the choice is there and I'm not just stuck with Small, Medium and Large versions of the same engine.

500 years is huge at this point in time. You can't look back for pointers either, since technological progress is not linear, it's exponential. Citing the crossbow is a bit disingenuous, as it's pretty good at doing what it does. Better to think about something we can only just do, and see how that worked 500 years ago, like getting me to listen to your favourite band/composer's latest piece in seconds from my car compared to going out and finding a performance and waiting weeks or months to both physically attend it. On top of that, we've not got a huge drive for survival and space technologies right now, not like a "cataclysm threatening the entire Earth" kind of drive anyway. It is most likely that thrusters, ship systems and life support all got a huge boost in both scientific interest and funding in the run up to the evacuation.
 
I disagree that the DU tech is grounded; millennia-long cryo-sleep, ships that fly sub-sonic and hover in atmosphere and gravity using only thrusters with (relatively) tiny fuel tanks, nano-tech, ultra-miniaturization and re-expansion, plus we've got FTL and jump-gates on the horizon... At the same time, you've got little automation, manually controlled turrets, restricted telepresence etc. In short, we have a whole bunch of stuff we can't see a way to get to from here, and a lack of a bunch of stuff we can do right now.
Not my definition of grounded, but, and this is the important bit, it doesn't have to be in order to be fun.

As for EM drives in DU, yeah, they could work as expensive stealth engines, or as alternatives to other types to keep your fuel requirements down at the cost of seriously reduced thrust, or low thrust for low weight, or... Balance it how you like, plenty of niches it could fill.
 
Writing this I realise that I actually only care that we have a choice between variants of parts, and reasons to make those choices. Do I want to keep the fuel cost down, or keep high acceleration? Frankly it doesn't matter to me at that point whether I'm choosing between conventional or EM drives, or whether the choice is between H2O2 or Hydrazine propellants, or even between Variant-A and Variant-B. As long as the choice is there and I'm not just stuck with Small, Medium and Large versions of the same engine.

Both NASA and China have found mN (that's micronewtons,  more or less, a fart) of push on EM Drives - which was also a fluke, caused by the very energy going into the object to produce the Newtons of push. EM Drive is not based really on physics we don't know, it's developed and tested based of physics we do know, and in physics we do know, it doesn't really work. NASA does test all possible scientific methods of procurring more push out of engines and so they did with the EM-Drive (Elon Musk doesn't test his rockets on his own after all, his company researches and developes, not tests, NASA does the test cause ICBMs are a scary thing). Saying "EM Drive has something going for it cause NASA done tests on it" is like saying "I was mugged, called the police, thus the criminals are caught already"  

Funny enough though, Planck-Length is a thing in real life, and planck-length machines (shrinking machines for ease of understanding) are not an "unknown physics", but a very known physics. All we need is a way to engineer such things. It's the same thing with time-travel and teleportation ala star trek, we know how they work, the mathematics behind it are solid, but we do lack the engineering or power source to fuel them. Same goes for the Warp-Drive, the math is solid, all we need is fuel for it.
 
And even if the EM-Drive (somehow) worked as intended and procurred more than a fart's worth of newtons, the fact you need an equal or more perpendicular force to steer a ship or "strafe" it in space, means the EM-Drive suffers from the same issues for "dodging" in Space that normal thrusters do. So, even with EM-Drives, you would still be an easy target if you were to "barrel roll" agaisnta  long-range ship.

Just wanted to clarify

P.S. : Planck Length (named after Max Planck) is the shortest possible distance between two atoms. This is why the nanopacks also have a limit, there is a limit on how much you can compress an object, it's called a Schwartzschild (Austrian names ~_~ ) radius, aka, the point of which an object becomes so compact, it turns into a black hole. So... yeah, in DU we carry possible black holes in the form of nanopacks :|
 
Let's hope future tech doesn't run on Windows. 

Not in DU's programming model, which is based on pure math and predictions.

Actor Model is essentially a really advanced and - very - convoluted mathematical model.

Things like "bullet speed" are abstracts that are converted into adjacent partitions on the greater set of "effective range" on a weapon.

Let's say you got a 1000 m/s ballistic shell (a giant bullet) you fire off your space artilerry piece on a ship. That bullet, witihn 1 second, has an optima lrange of 100 meters. If the target is not moving at 1000+ m/s they will be hit. If they move at 1000++ m/s they will take reduced damage (cause of net forces, etcetera, long story, your momentum helps you "glance off" shots fired at you).  This is just one part of a static model. and only works on 2D, not 3D planes of motion. That being sai,d when you add Degrees (tracking) for guns, you also have to add angular velocity to the receiving end and so on. This has been excellently recreated in eVE Online's combat model - which DU looks to emulate and hopefully advance on.

What's that have to do with your A. and B. you may ask.

Well, the actor model works like this :

1) you take a shot at a person 100 km off. That person is on another partition of the server, so you watch them wita delay on their updates towards you. 
2) you let the server know what you did, and the server, - which keeps track of both of you "in real time", measures the target's speed, vectors, and the such, and your current dsitance to them and tracking and all of your associate stats, rolls a "dice", and says "hey, it's a hit, yo udeal X dmaage".
3) target gets damaged the same time you see dealing dmage to it, regardless of how the partitions update each of you with a delay.

What's the catch. The server - like any computer - needs time to compute the calculations of the hit formula. That means, the moment you hit "fire", youy lock the server on a computing cycle. Even if the defender was to do a "barrel roll" or a "Spiral" after you hit "fire", they won't avoid the shot, no matter what.

However, if you are Jedi or your favourite wizard of any literature with precog abilities, you can indeed "do a barrel roll" and gain a significant amount of "dodge chance" as the server would see "the defender has a HUGE boost to angular velocity" as you do have, for the brief moment of "turning" a ship around in a barrel rooll.

But even that, won't work, if the target is shooting you from a very VERY long range, with some very VERY powerful long range guns (long effective range, as their bullets fly insanely fast), since your "huge boost" to them is but a minor change in vectors - same way you can see a shooting star in the sky and observe it as it flies by "slowlly", even though it's probably hurling through space at 100000 km/s.
 
So, the moment you see someone "locking" you, start moving erratically, to improve your dodge chances - by reducing the neemy hit chance on the formula, it takes two people to dance a waltz after all.

Just don't expect "twitch-reflexes". They really can't work in DU's model of programming and netcode.

Why, out of interest? Surely it's incentive enough to not have to repair/rebuild, or to not lose a ship?
Personally I love to tinker; in other voxel games, I'm rarely ever actually finished with a vehicle. Would that not put me at a huge disadvantage to those who buy a complete vehicle and never change a single aspect of it? If I can change a progressed ship, where's the limit? Can I turn my groundcar into a battleship and keep the progress?

Upgrading by swapping out elements for better ones I can live with, as long as those better elements come from crafting via some player's skill tree, at a fixed cost with fixed stats, knowable in advance. The RNG part of ED's 'engineers' was bobbins.
I also really hope I won't be able to buy flat-out upgrades. I don't want to see a purple-con Epic Railgun that's all-round better than a normal one, I'd much rather see -Damage/+FireRate kind of trade-offs. Side-grades are better for games than upgrades, imo.
 
I strongly suspect that progression for a construct is going to be mostly the crew learning it's quirks or redesigning them out. Or maybe better scripts.

Bastille
 
This short story (around 5000 words) is set on Earth before the technology required for the Arkships (and more) were entirely completed. This story does not include any DU organisations nor does it reference any arbitrarily named gaming organisations outside of DU.
 
Enjoy.
 
---------First paragraph snippet---------
I am a broken man. At least that is what the shrinks say. They say I’m too broken to continue in the Centauri Special Forces. But if one of the powerful nation states pays for your training, they own you. So that’s how I became stuck as a Tester, a guinea pig, for Centauri scientists. On the bright side, they gave me a place to stay, even if it is a single room apartment that you couldn’t swing a proverbial cat in. Centauri also provides a seemingly unlimited cereal molded into multicolored letters of the alphabet. Today, the cereal spells out “freedom” which quickly sinks away and then spells “dominated”. I stare at the word knowing if I blink it will instantly rearrange itself into the usual random jumble of letters. For taunting me, I teach it a lesson by biting into another mouthful. It might look colourful, but it tastes like week old sweaty socks.
-------------------------------------------------------
Novawrimo 2017 - Bastille by Kurock.pdf
Novawrimo2017 - Bastille by Kurock.docx

Why, out of interest? Surely it's incentive enough to not have to repair/rebuild, or to not lose a ship?
Personally I love to tinker; in other voxel games, I'm rarely ever actually finished with a vehicle. Would that not put me at a huge disadvantage to those who buy a complete vehicle and never change a single aspect of it? If I can change a progressed ship, where's the limit? Can I turn my groundcar into a battleship and keep the progress?

Upgrading by swapping out elements for better ones I can live with, as long as those better elements come from crafting via some player's skill tree, at a fixed cost with fixed stats, knowable in advance. The RNG part of ED's 'engineers' was bobbins.
I also really hope I won't be able to buy flat-out upgrades. I don't want to see a purple-con Epic Railgun that's all-round better than a normal one, I'd much rather see -Damage/+FireRate kind of trade-offs. Side-grades are better for games than upgrades, imo.
 
I strongly suspect that progression for a construct is going to be mostly the crew learning it's quirks or redesigning them out. Or maybe better scripts.

Why, out of interest? Surely it's incentive enough to not have to repair/rebuild, or to not lose a ship?
Personally I love to tinker; in other voxel games, I'm rarely ever actually finished with a vehicle. Would that not put me at a huge disadvantage to those who buy a complete vehicle and never change a single aspect of it? If I can change a progressed ship, where's the limit? Can I turn my groundcar into a battleship and keep the progress?

Upgrading by swapping out elements for better ones I can live with, as long as those better elements come from crafting via some player's skill tree, at a fixed cost with fixed stats, knowable in advance. The RNG part of ED's 'engineers' was bobbins.
I also really hope I won't be able to buy flat-out upgrades. I don't want to see a purple-con Epic Railgun that's all-round better than a normal one, I'd much rather see -Damage/+FireRate kind of trade-offs. Side-grades are better for games than upgrades, imo.
 
I strongly suspect that progression for a construct is going to be mostly the crew learning it's quirks or redesigning them out. Or maybe better scripts.

Shooting mechanics and time-based skill training aside, Mastering a ship and/or ship XP etc are going to be problematic in DU purely because the ships are voxel constructs and can physically change over time.

What happens if I level an atmospheric interceptor, or master it or whatever, then transform it into a huge destroyer? Does the ship keep it's XP and I effectively get a pre-levelled Capital ship? What happens if I level an interceptor and just stick an extra gun on it? Have I lost the Mastery progress? Is there going to have to be a set of rules that defines how much a ship can change and still be the same ship? Does it become impossible or impractical to modify or repair or even paint a ship once it starts levelling? What if I have two identical ships, does my mastery skill transfer?
 
Ships and Orgs are going to get a reputation, by actually getting a reputation. You know, actual people actually talking about actual events in game.

I'll take "people are genuinely terrified of the famous pirate ship The Black Pearl and it affects the opposing player's decisions in combat" over "the Black Pearl has +10 armour because it's survived ten fights", any day.

Shooting mechanics and time-based skill training aside, Mastering a ship and/or ship XP etc are going to be problematic in DU purely because the ships are voxel constructs and can physically change over time.

What happens if I level an atmospheric interceptor, or master it or whatever, then transform it into a huge destroyer? Does the ship keep it's XP and I effectively get a pre-levelled Capital ship? What happens if I level an interceptor and just stick an extra gun on it? Have I lost the Mastery progress? Is there going to have to be a set of rules that defines how much a ship can change and still be the same ship? Does it become impossible or impractical to modify or repair or even paint a ship once it starts levelling? What if I have two identical ships, does my mastery skill transfer?
 
Ships and Orgs are going to get a reputation, by actually getting a reputation. You know, actual people actually talking about actual events in game.

I'll take "people are genuinely terrified of the famous pirate ship The Black Pearl and it affects the opposing player's decisions in combat" over "the Black Pearl has +10 armour because it's survived ten fights", any day.

That doesn't need to be suggested, it's an inevitable outcome, lol
 
Each ship design in DU will have its own quirks and "personality", due to the variances in mass, distribution of that mass, the elements used, where they are placed and which scripts are used on the ship. Both pilots and crew will HAVE to "learn the ship" to get the best out of it.
 
The only time you will "know" exactly how a new ship flies and performs is when the "new" ship is an exact copy of the one you knew previously (i.e. made from the same blueprint).
 
But if you're suggesting a "learn through use" mechanic (e.g. +10 to reactor power for every 25 hours spent "operating the reactor"), then I don't think that will fit in DU. The "learn by using" mechanic always leads to grinding and encourages silly things like AFK botting...

Shooting mechanics and time-based skill training aside, Mastering a ship and/or ship XP etc are going to be problematic in DU purely because the ships are voxel constructs and can physically change over time.

What happens if I level an atmospheric interceptor, or master it or whatever, then transform it into a huge destroyer? Does the ship keep it's XP and I effectively get a pre-levelled Capital ship? What happens if I level an interceptor and just stick an extra gun on it? Have I lost the Mastery progress? Is there going to have to be a set of rules that defines how much a ship can change and still be the same ship? Does it become impossible or impractical to modify or repair or even paint a ship once it starts levelling? What if I have two identical ships, does my mastery skill transfer?
 
Ships and Orgs are going to get a reputation, by actually getting a reputation. You know, actual people actually talking about actual events in game.

I'll take "people are genuinely terrified of the famous pirate ship The Black Pearl and it affects the opposing player's decisions in combat" over "the Black Pearl has +10 armour because it's survived ten fights", any day.

Shooting mechanics and time-based skill training aside, Mastering a ship and/or ship XP etc are going to be problematic in DU purely because the ships are voxel constructs and can physically change over time.

What happens if I level an atmospheric interceptor, or master it or whatever, then transform it into a huge destroyer? Does the ship keep it's XP and I effectively get a pre-levelled Capital ship? What happens if I level an interceptor and just stick an extra gun on it? Have I lost the Mastery progress? Is there going to have to be a set of rules that defines how much a ship can change and still be the same ship? Does it become impossible or impractical to modify or repair or even paint a ship once it starts levelling? What if I have two identical ships, does my mastery skill transfer?
 
Ships and Orgs are going to get a reputation, by actually getting a reputation. You know, actual people actually talking about actual events in game.

I'll take "people are genuinely terrified of the famous pirate ship The Black Pearl and it affects the opposing player's decisions in combat" over "the Black Pearl has +10 armour because it's survived ten fights", any day.

In either case, the baseline code for the Cobmat is in the game already, as they have sohwcased on the videos.

You raycast a person,  and depending on your weapon stats (like how fast you can track targets with it, an appproximation of the weapon's mass and size on its dataset of "tracking), modified by your skill training (like X-Weapon-Type Training 4/5 giving 205 more trtracking with said weapon) + gear (muscle enhancement on the armor to withstand recoil? I don't know) and depending on the enemy's movement and angle, you either miss or deal reudueced dmage or hity them really hard, depending on if NQ will utilise inverse moduli for the sniper gameplay ala EVE Online, where you hit people in ranges you'd "miss", but due to the stat based system ,yo uhit the m REALLYY hard, but your accuracy is crap if the target mvoes too fast at said range, so it's only good for ambushing people with a LOT of alpha damage.
 
Regardless, NQ indeed has to test construction, before moving to deconstruction. I mean, tihn kabout it, isn't the average game of Rainbow Six : siege, just Extreme Home Makeover? And the same thing will apply in DU, walls can be blown off in combat - since they are made out of voxels- , angles can be exploited by people with vertical motion (like jetpacks) and - hopefully - like EVE online, if you don't react, you die in seconds.

So, everyone will end up being happy eventually.
 
 
What I personally hope, is for NQ to add to the weapon's dataset of "optimal range" thingsl ike enviromental factoers, like "atmoshperic desnity" increasing the range of Ballistic weapons + Hybrid (railguns, blasters) and also reducing the dmage falloff of laser weapons, while also ALTITUDE (Yes, how high you are) making Ballistic + Hybrid weaponry able to hit further, since they utilise the planet's gravity in their fgavor - something that Lasers can't get an advantage off, the bonus on Lasers being they are VERY good at tracking ragets, since laserrs, got no recoil to contribute to the "tracking loss", netting Lasers an innate tracking bonus.

But that is just wishful thinking. NQ is the final word on such things -b but they are totally possible, given their model of programming being heavily dependent on datasets as the ones I explained.
 

Hey everybody! so I'm new around these parts...
Thought i'd share some animated forum signature banners that I threw together (in other words I was extremely bored and am impatiently waiting for the alpha  )
 

 

 

 

 

 
Edit: Had some people asking if they need to credit me if they use these banners... the answer is no since most of the content in the banners is already novaquark copyright... so just handle it how you would if it was from novaquark.

The only information we can give you per NDA is based on what was in the dev diaries.  The 25 x 25 x 25 smallest voxel size.  Any other sizes would be information from the game that we agreed not to talk about.

Sup?

Trust in rust.
 

Doubt it. Those kinds of offers are expensive for the devs over time; they effectively remove a player from the funding stream once their package cost is exceeded by whatever the subs would have cost to that point. They are a reward for very early backers with deep pockets who take a chance on an early concept. Once early backing is done, the life-sub offers always vanish, and never return. 

Doubt it. Those kinds of offers are expensive for the devs over time; they effectively remove a player from the funding stream once their package cost is exceeded by whatever the subs would have cost to that point. They are a reward for very early backers with deep pockets who take a chance on an early concept. Once early backing is done, the life-sub offers always vanish, and never return. 

Hi,
 
There is something i would like to see in DUAL: it's water...  Ok  i know that JC said it is very complex to simulate water because many physics behaviors will ruin the server.
 
So...
 
In that case, and because i want a swimming pool in my villa and an aquarium too...Will it be possible to create cube with a "water-look-like", only a visual effect but not the physical behaviors inside, just to decorate> it will look like a cube like other cube in alu, brass, carbon fiber etc..but in false water , just to fill my aquarium and my swimming pool... We can imagine too a fountain,  just with a animation.
 
In the same way, i need torch, and fire to spend my long winter evenings close to my chimney...
 
FIRE AND WATER !!
 
 

Long time Lurker, thought it was time I registered and started looking at... shudder... socialising.
 
So Hi. 
I'm a RL Engineer, a digital-life Space Engineer, Empyrion Designer, Elite Dangerous & Warthunder pilot, an MWO mechwarrior, EVE capsuleer, ARK survivor, and veteran of too many other Sci-fi & fantasy MMOs & FPS to remember.
 
What else do I write here?