dualism

For me, cloaking is about either mimicking your background so as not to show up on passive measurement devices, or trying to minimise any reflections from active scanning systems such as radar. I realise we've been talking about 'ship radar', but that is more a convenient term rather than physically accurate, surely? At space distances, isn't the fastest thing we know about light? That means that at even something as close as a Sun/Earth distance, a 'radar' is only going to tell you that something was 93 million miles away 16 minutes ago. I expect that most space travel will be at faster than light speeds, so virtually all radar type information is going to be useless, partly because ships won't even be getting their own return signals for a start. Thus, if ships generally only need to mimic backgrounds by passing on whatever they measure in all directions to the other side of the ship, I guess that technology would not that difficult to accomplish, especially with space - just go mainly with cold=black :). Sure it might be nice for protection to be pre-warned of incoming ships, but for the most part won't physics (and time) be doing the cloaking anyway unless DU wishes to introduce especially unrealistic super-duper sensor systems?

Thanks, good references (your t=x don't match by the way, but ppl can edit to 600s easily ). He says to begin, element damage first, voxel damage will come after the alpha. I wonder if that means missing misses altogether and doesn't hit something else... behind or to the side. Repairs look interesting too - I wonder if you will always need direct proximity or if you can repair from the pilot's seat, for example (see 3:06 of damage model vid). On big ships, can crews repair during ongoing battles? I wonder too about being stuck in space with no working engines, or the ability to salvage/tow someone's ship. Might pirates grow varying degrees of honour about forcing you down to a planet or onto their ship for repairs, but not kill you or take all you have? If NQ put so much effort into levels of damage, then there could be a lot of complexity in the gameplay too if done right...

(on targeted damage). Oh, ty. What I'd read was about spaceship battles and calculating a hit chance rather than tracking the shot or whatever. I thought I'd also read about destruction of ships as a whole, but could be mistaken. If you can specifically aim at each voxel (when close up?), then depending on how much of a shockwave your weap produces, you could be quite specific about trying to damage the core or an entrance to get inside maybe.

Ok, yes, so on the honourable partnership side of things a ship owner can transfer your goods at a destination if you die - and it doen't block his/her storage bay. There won't be targeted damage though iirc, so it will be a case of destroy, salvage, rebuild (to a different bp)? On NPCs/bots: I consider NPCs to always be platform side avatars, while bots on the plaftorm side can just be operations of some kind such as markets, and bots on the player side usually against the rules. It will be interesting to see what scripting freedoms are, as scripts certainly automate functions and a player on acceptable autopilot is thus also a bot at that time.

Thanks Meldrik. vylqun: I see your point and I agree with your opinion, but even asking people to give positives is still talking about real world stuff, and if the answers are public it would probably draw lots of argument. As we move further into the virtual then knowledge about the virtual will grow and replace lost common knowledge from fictional works. Instead of George Orwell, will discussions about politics in Eve be ok?

Yes, thanks. In part it is indeed about what happy and healthy is for a community as a whole, but also its individuals. I also specifically wonder why the words 'real life' are included before the word "politics, ideology and religion". Does that mean we can take Star Trek ideology and talk about that or DS9 religion even, if we choose to? Or even more freely about how we would like our communities to function 'politically'? I appreciate that when topics become risky, one person might be able to carefully keep within the lines, but others are tempted outside. This makes life difficult for mods and those tempted, other readers and the original person - that's everybody! Some people might be able to have a calm discussion about a group's ideology, but not about whether a sporting official's decision was right or wrong. But how do we find out about each other well enough to make better decisions about our group members who we share actions with, if we cannot assess what some of their ideologies are, for example. It is, of course, possible that a forum decides it cannot afford that, but this is a forum for a very complicated universe of future cooperation and many many interactions, not all of which will end well...

Hi, I can understand that many big topics in society should be kept out of forums and thus certain categories may not be discussed. Is there any space for reflection on virtual realities and communities which grow online? These are places where many people nowadays experience things and people outside their normal everyday lives. I have been put into a thoughtful mood today by 'events'.... thoughtful.... does anyone know of bodies which are looking into rules and behaviours in online spaces? Please keep answers GENERAL in keeping with the general question!

I was thinking about "cloaked" barriers the other day as a result of no actual gravity allowing the smallest possible volume of stuff to be left "hanging in mid air" all over the place if you want. Wouldn't they stop vehicles from flying at much of a speed due to constant stops by collision detection? I wondered if the same applied to space after the info that the whole of big ships will really be moving across the single shard. Could they be stopped by 'mines' simply in the path of a ship? I realise it's not the same way round that is probably meant here - cloaked ships, but maybe as a result something is needed for ships to be able to 'slip' through too...

https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/13407-docking-mechanics/ https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/13325-question-on-losing-inventory-upon-death/ I see a bit of a link between these two topics of docking mechanics and inventory volumes (=potential loss on death). Also related, of course, is the volume and weight of cargo. As already stated, there is the problem of when tasks become tedious and unenjoyable. Thus, a base criterion is how many trips must be made by what means to be able to fill your small, large or huge ship, and where is that ship 'docked'? The goods might include already crafted items (less volume and weight but more value than raw materials). My assumption is that you will be able to transfer from personal inventory to a small, personal vehicle simply by being present on it, but to transfer from construct to construct or to a bigger ship, you will need to 'dock' them. Mixed in with this is the personal property problem. I assume I can transfer from personal inventory to a 'group-owned' (somebody else's) vehicle/ship. If I die, then I lose ownership of all the material stuff that my character has in inventory, right (with exceptions of whatever, DACs, quanta...), but not what is cargo somewhere else? What happens to a vehicle I may have nearby? Can it be easily stolen/destroyed if not 'docked' to a bigger, safer construct? In other words, what are further consequences of death on my stuff? Do I have to hand over control of my things in a cargo bay so they can be removed, or will they block up a ship's capacity if I am somewhere else? Also, on docking mechanics, if there is some kind of automatic transfer system, the speed of transfers may affect what gets transferred to where in base battles. In an RL evacuation you are ordered NOT to take possessions with you, but in DU, might you want to quickly share out stock if you are about to lose control, and have everybody 'run' in different directions? What do people think? Is it an important balancing area for NQ?

Thanks again for that - and the links . Ok, so I guess I did 'know' that about NQ, but maybe I hadn't taken it fully 'on board' that all the complexity of all the ships will be moved iteration by iteration across the galaxies!!! I wonder if there will be any lag if a local farmer looks up and says: "That's a mighty fine datastream coming our way." ...

As has been mentioned before, if each subscriber has 3 characters, then one could always stay in safety with most of the quanta you have (if that bit of storage is unlimited). If bulk items/resources cannot be 'magically' carried around in inventory (apart from some arbitrary amount presumably still higher that real human carrying capacities), then I guess those things will need other ways of finding safety even in safe areas, right up to the scale of massive warehouses within territory units. How much should death be more than just an inconvenience...?

Yes, thanks for the clarification. I actually meant if instanced - but I don't know what NQ is doing for the insides of things. Both approaches provide a frame of reference, so you can move freely, but there is a difference of how much of a vehicle needs to be moved around the voxelsphere database (outside visual shell, or the whole thing). It is, of course, neater if you can look into/out of windows and see what is going on directly because the database says that IS what is there, instead of it being some kind of projection screen to somewhere else in stored memory... If you and the OP don't mind looking in more detail, will spaceship size actually be limited to 128m or whatever precisely because each detectable movement will move the whole bloody thing for all frames of reference? Would NQ even consider 'encapsulating' environments such as big ships, so that they can be moved as "hollow hulls" for the outside frame of reference, but be nicely filled in ones (with the outside world blank or remotely videoscreened) for those inside?

Well, I am used to being in a 'bubble', as they say, where the inside of a ship, including flyable hangar area is basically a server instance whose external 'body' can move around in space. I imagine this makes relative movement within the construct much easier too - when piloting or manning guns you are sort of pasted statically in your seats onto the outside of the ship, as it were, but inside you have freedom of moment just like in any building on land. I see no reason why constructs should not be stored in server memories pretty much as instances, even if they are only 'single instances' each. No idea on what NQ have done, except that you'd probably notice the 'seams' as your avatar crosses them. An entry sequence or airlock would disguise this....

Ok, I certainly feel fairly beaten by the logic of that one - high five to you bro! However, it looks like people are making mistakes with the arrow of their logic as well today, a bit like driving a racing car around the track backwards or something: great vehicle, and going in the right direction... and yet something is still wrong! If a place doesn't like strangers and kills people on sight then it won't be a marketplace - and the people killed will probably land right where what they wanted is available anyway... Making a massive profit from crashing a market also seems to be a strange outcome unless we get really wonderfully bad market instruments like in the real world ... but that has already been mentioned. As the discussion stands I can't really see what is actually prevented by having DACs lootable - and there is a clear case for having some safety associated with them too. Maybe that is what NQ figured too before a fuss was made by the announcement.

Does that make day and night cycles either 'cheating' or impossible? Come to think of it, I think I'd prefer to have fixed planets and light sources that move around them.... so I guess that's the 'cheat' I'd go with for days and nights..... Edit: oops, @AzureSkye has already explained this well earlier in the thread: https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/13258-physics-n-stuff/&do=findComment&comment=84713

While agreeing with most of your post, I don't think you are right about markets. I'd say it is a great deal more nuanced than you say, but ok, the availability to stockpile rises to everybody everywhere if they are unlootable. It makes sense to make them lootable in general, but also absolutely safe to buy and consume as long as ALL players, including newcomers, are made aware of the dangers of having them simply in inventory. However, I've not yet seen comments against the idea of 'safe until first trade'. My understanding is that DACs can be bought with cash and added to the game in some way. If this is possible anywhere, then there is not much scope to have market price differences in far-away places, as people will just introduce them with no risk whenever there is a short-term imbalance of supply and demand somewhere. The ability to transport safely until a first trade merely increases the number of people who will have reserves and take minor market opportunities if they come across them before a bigger price difference begins to set in. The logic of this tends towards suggesting that purchasing of DACs with cash can only take place when an avatar is in an area guaranteed by NQ as safe - and transportation is dangerous. I would extend this to the DACs received from supporter packs too - with the exception that they stay safe until brought into the game in such a safe area. You could understand those as being 'safe until required', yes.

Thanks @CalenLoki For me the bit which is impossible to know is the 'unintended' use of features, especially as combinations. Some combinations may stay pretty secret, thus undiscussed, and thus we won't know the level of dev awareness or intention. In advance of systems actually being in place I think it is more valid to try and draw devs' attention to areas of potentially high imbalance. Perhaps the biggie for me is the lua functions, as they are within the game and not keyboard macros or whatever. If we are given great freedoms, then the results will not be exploits, but cleverness. As a major aim of DU is to have emergent gameplay, then in a sense the idea is for complexity to emerge with advantages that others do not have. Thus my biggest single combo question is: how much can we automate, in what circumstances, and to what extent?

So far I've read that rock will become harder as you go down, so it may not be so easy to excavate at any depth you like. Other than that, I've also been wondering about how good buried sites will be on defense advantage. Will attackers really have to strip away the ground above to stand a better chance of being successful? On the other hand, it's not exploiting to get somewhere first and prepare yourself defensively, but I get the point that (some/lots of) people will want battles to be at least somewhat even...

Does this mean planets don't spin or orbit either? I would have thought that char coordinates are relative to whatever main ship core unit they are with, regardless of whether logged in or not. If the ship is destroyed, then the database needs to transfer the bodies to whatever res node they have active, but I don't think that is a problem. I know nothing as yet about any bed/capsule mechanics, but I assume passengers on flights will be pretty common and they won't be restricted to seats necessarily. I've also not yet seen info on ships with hangar bays, so the ability to tie smaller ship constructs to a bigger ship coords, but I imagine this is fully in the plans too. After all, the whole scripting thing is about linking units to each other with command connectivity, so I see no problems with docking of some kind and anchoring your own little ship. I have no idea whether this will give passengers additional safety or not, or whether the insides of ships are like mini-TUs with their own permissions...

From what I've read up on the tag system, it will allow very detailed permissions of who may access stuff such as in group depots. I've no idea how much currency transfers are to be scriptable, though, and how many 'jobs' need to be organised by hand by someone as a service within DU. I somehow doubt that the idea of emergent gameplay is to have everything automated, however...

I also didn't realise the section when I commented on the article that was linked to - that this is just an "introduce yourself, your organization (guild/clan)" section. So the note to mods is that it was my mistake and @Vyz Ejstu wanted to make me aware of that.

Yes ok. It has been said that the nodes will be pretty expensive, but I guess wherever one is built with fairly open access to it there will be a service for secured chests as well. It would be a bit like a sports club changing rooms/ bank vault where you leave your stuff, and one business element could be a paintball arena alongside. The discussion slowly evolved via ways of not being bored on a long ship journey, though, but it doesn't look like there will be holodeck paintball on a ship as things stand, surely? Other games and activities would seem doableish, however. I think some way of doing construct design while in transit would be really great if possible, like some kind of virtual teleport to some otherwise unused volume of the shard as a virtual environment within DU as it were, but which would not have the problems of you actually being on board a ship officially. Destruction of the 'holodeck' would result in death at the original location, or so, should it come down to that. I don't see why it couldn't be done - and would even be a way of having things like virtual conferences as well.... ____ ***[attempt at pulling across wrongly placed comment from Friday to my own thread without it being thrown up as a new post to the activity area. Sorry mods if this doesn't work as 'quietly' as I hope and sorry also for initial wrong posting in that ark pub area!] https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/11247-the-outpost-called-zebra/&do=findComment&comment=83222 "I have seen a number of comments by people who have pointed out aspects of Dual Universe that they consider boring. Whether is it the length of time space travel takes, the need to mine resources manually or the limit on the weapons one person can operate, they all stress that unless these sources of boredom are eliminated, no one will want to play the game. " I have mentioned travel times a bit recently, yes, but not said that the sources of boredom should be eliminated, nor taken the position that nobody will want to play. I believe that certain paths should involve investment, also of time, but this does not mean that the time spent spending time needs to be boring almost by very definition. I find it crazy that people engaged in a game end up regularly pointing their spaceship in a certain direction and going afk for 30 mins to 'avoid' the boring bit - and that's just in a 'smallish universe' where you may even be killed because you are afk, but you take the risk anyway because even taking the trash out is more 'interesting'! I did not suggest necessarily shortening the journey time, but want the devs to consider what can be usefully done in game at the same time. It could be a mini-game holodeck, crafting, permanent dangers in space which require active piloting similar to driving a car or so, doing ship upgrades, or even switching to secondary chars in game. "If you are tempted to request changing some feature of Dual Universe to make it less boring, ask yourself what you want to do in the game." I don't want to be wasting time needlessly on repetitive stuff if I don't feel like it. Different people will be bored by different things, though, so it's going to be tricky to decide whether good immersion means it takes me 5 mins or secs to dock my ship and get to whatever shop, or my quarters, or wherever else. Generally, if you offer people short cuts, they will take them, however... Edited Friday at 04:32 PM by dualism typos

Hi there, recent posts contain good examples of how good or bad the backdrop mechanics might be. Nice idea, yes, but if the game involves death mechanics, then as it is now you'd have problems with your stuff and where you ressurect. You'd either have to design the paint-ball to work without in-game death, or NQ would have to design in an extra level of 'death for fun=simple ressurect neary' mode. Either could work, but there needs to be 'a way to do it'... I understand your point, but again about the mechanics, how long will short cuts still end up being in total? Using warp gates will surely make the situation similar to having airports - very useful for the very long distance part, but you still have the trips at each end to and from the airports. I'm not saying that any one thing will be a game-breaker, but even if NQ wants to give us the freedom to get emergent systems built by the players themselves, the ground mechanics still need to be thought out and provided with boredom-aversion options. edit: yes @Sparktacus, that's the sort of thing I mean, being able to use transit times in a fun and game-progressing way, but still being able to respond to a red-alert, or whatever.

In my example there are fewer consequences of dying and you don't lose your ship, but it highlights the issue of boredom. DU space won't be much of a happy place if people have to stay at the keyboard because death is a lot more costly and they thus don't want to risk it. I also expect there will be far more multi-player ships in DU which can take on passengers, but again, it is not a great solution to pay your fare and *wave goodbye* to your char for x amount of time while it is boringly in transit. On the number of chars: given it is single shard, I do think that the popping in and out issues will be bigger the more characters one person actually has control over. I believe having 3 chars per account can make many things far easier for the devs, as mentioned, but it has drawbacks for them too in deciding whether to ragdoll, cocoon, vanish chars etc in various environments. Ok, on reflection that is indeed a freedom of reputations which each char you have should have on its own!

Hi, thanks for the article Ben. I'd take some issue with the first quote about boredom: "I have seen a number of comments by people who have pointed out aspects of Dual Universe that they consider boring. Whether is it the length of time space travel takes, the need to mine resources manually or the limit on the weapons one person can operate, they all stress that unless these sources of boredom are eliminated, no one will want to play the game. " I have mentioned travel times a bit recently, yes, but not said that the sources of boredom should be eliminated, nor taken the position that nobody will want to play. I believe that certain paths should involve investment, also of time, but this does not mean that the time spent spending time needs to be boring almost by very definition. I find it crazy that people engaged in a game end up regularly pointing their spaceship in a certain direction and going afk for 30 mins to 'avoid' the boring bit - and that's just in a 'smallish universe' where you may even be killed because you are afk, but you take the risk anyway because even taking the trash out is more 'interesting'! I did not suggest necessarily shortening the journey time, but want the devs to consider what can be usefully done in game at the same time. It could be a mini-game holodeck, crafting, permanent dangers in space which require active piloting similar to driving a car or so, doing ship upgrades, or even switching to secondary chars in game. "If you are tempted to request changing some feature of Dual Universe to make it less boring, ask yourself what you want to do in the game." I don't want to be wasting time needlessly on repetitive stuff if I don't feel like it. Different people will be bored by different things, though, so it's going to be tricky to decide whether good immersion means it takes me 5 mins or secs to dock my ship and get to whatever shop, or my quarters, or wherever else. Generally, if you offer people short cuts, they will take them, however...