Short version, please make a Linux crowd fund so that we can put our money where our mouths are.
Top aim would be a native client.
Secondly, approaching Feral to help port the game.
Third being a supported Wine wrapper.
Finally, the lowest rung, some cornered off time that a developer writes guides or answers some questions that we can try get it running on Wine or in a virtual machine.
It has been two years since I played EVE. When they sold skill points, that was a goal post moved that I could not accept but this game seems to hold a possibility of not only filling that hole in my mind but scratching an itch that I didn't think was there.
What I can find about it from you looks positive.
I can not promise that it is all sunshine but if you can become platform independent, surely:
Windows + Mac + Linux > Windows only revenues.
Vulkan has opened up a huge path for making platform independent games.
Many Linux gamers are counted in statistics as Windows players because we resort to virtual machines and Wine.
Statistically, we also spend more given the opportunity on our hobbies and passions.
Linux statistics can be surprising.
Personally, using myself as an example, I am on the following machine:
Intel Core i7-5820K (6 cores, 12 threads) @ 4.1GHz
Mobo: ASUSTeK model: X99-E
Memory: 16201.8/64335.1MB
Graphics card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Hawaii PRO [Radeon R9 390]
(I won't be buying MSI aka Micro Sun International again, the build quality does not impress me).
GLX & Vulkan Version: 3.0 Mesa 17.2.8
HDD Total Size: 2000.4GB (12.7% used)
ID-1: /dev/sda model: MZV6E500BW size: 500.1GB
ID-2: /dev/sdb model: ST500LX025 size: 500.1GB
ID-3: /dev/sdc model: ST500LX025 size: 500.1GB
ID-4: /dev/sdd model: ST500LX025 size: 500.1GB
(That is an M.2 for boot and some games + 3x SSHDs in ZFS RAID 5 for bulk storage.)
My Steam account is also rather healthy.
We bought into a vague promise from Star Citizen and we are still waiting.
The key to this request is that you can see the direct contribution that Linux players make and adjust what you do for them accordingly.
Dear ladies and gentlemen,
this offer is for German speaking players only, please respect that:
Hallo liebe Mitstreiter!
Die Hyperion Corporation ist ein eigenständiger, deutscher Flügel innerhalb der Terran Union.
Wir haben es uns zum Ziel gesetzt, gemeinsam, große Bauprojekte im Hauptspiel "Dual Universe" zu realisieren.
Mit dem starken Partner TU im Rücken, haben wir die Möglichkeit in wirtschaftlicher, militärischer und infrastruktureller Sicherheit,
Projekte zu erforschen und zu entwickeln. Wenn du also mehr als nur eine Zweckgemeinschaft suchst, dann bist Du bei uns genau richtig!
Was bieten wir?
Ein freundliches Team deutschsprachiger Spieler, organisiert mit regelmäßigen Sprachmeetings, welche als Gemeinschaft große & spannende Projekte umsetzen möchte.
Bei uns kann sich jeder frei entfalten und seiner Kreativität freien Lauf lassen, solange es dem Wohl der Gemeinschaft dient & die Gesetze/Richtlinien der Hyperion Corporation, sowie auch der Terran Union eingehalten werden. Des Weiteren bieten wir Sicherheit und Territorium durch die TU. Dies ist eine Organisation aus bereits über 600 internationalen Spielern, welche 24/7 für uns verfügbar sind.
Was suchen wir? Vorallem kreative und baulustige Teamplayer, die eine Gemeinschaft zu schätzen wissen und bereit sind, das Abenteuer "Dual Universe" mit uns zu bestreiten.
Du solltest das Spiel "Dual Universe" besitzen oder ein ernsthaftes Kaufinteresse bekundigen. Außerdem wünschen wir uns eine gewisse geistige Reife, Teamfähigkeit und natürlich Spaß am Spielen! Uns ist ein gutes Betriebsklima sehr wichtig.
Was ist unser Ziel?
Mittelfristig möchten wir, gemeinsam mit der Terranischen Union, eine Heimat aufbauen, um weitere, spannende Projekte voranzutreiben. In mehreren Teams aufgeteilt, realisieren wir Raumschiffe, Stadtkonstrukte und diverse, andere Bauprojekte. Die Möglichkeiten für andere Geschäftszweige sind schier grenzenlos und somit liegt es auch an Dir, welche neuen Ziele wir uns setzen.
Langfristig wünschen wir uns, im besten, wirtschaftlichen Idealfall, unseren Membern die monatlichen Kosten für den Serverzugang per Spieleinnahmen bezahlen zu können.
Was muss ich tun, um beizutreten?
Du kannst dich förmlich auf der DU Communityseite bei uns bewerben, schreibe dazu einen kleinen Text, wer du genau bist.
Die bessere Variante: Besuche uns auf unserem Discord und schreib uns persönlich! Die Links findest du weiter unten.
Schau dir doch auchmal unseren Trailer an:
Ich hoffe, wir konnten Dir einen guten Eindruck von uns übermitteln. Hier sind alle Links, die du benötigst:
(EDIT 30.05.17: Further development on the original proposal is suspended, as there were no players willing to join this kind of organization... But for reference I will not remove anything said in the original post)
(EDIT 28.12.17: After joining ODY, I'd still like to promote the core idea of this proposal. My new goal is to create separate standalone open-source-projects which are loosely inspired by AI, just without the whole organization idea. Players will be able to repurpose these programs for their own use. I only wish for my programs to assist players in their everyday DU activities. For more information refere to the new project list at the end of this post.)
================================================== Original Post ===================================================
Greetings,
Dual Universe is the perfect setting for a little social experiment. I love boundless sandbox games, like this one, as they really promote creative gameplay.
An often reoccurring theme in science fiction is the dream of a perfect society...
I strongly believe that the only way to get closer to that vision is to create an artificial intelligence especially dedicated to take all important governmental decisions of a society. All mistakes that happen in a society because of human errors could be prevented!
So what would be better opportunity to test this statement, than to actually play around with this idea in a game? Nothing can go wrong here!
As you might've guessed this is an organization proposal, even though I don't have a name yet. I think a sort of research institute would be quite fitting.
But this can be decided later by vote of the members. The name is actually not that important.
Most important is how the AI is actually going to work. The ultimate goal is that the decisions of the AI are as reasonable as the decisions a human leader makes. Luckily DU is still quite limited (relative to reality) according to the possible decisions an organization can make. Therefore only simple programs are needed to get to the "right" decisions.
Also important to note is that the purpose is not to micromanage everything the player does, but to only give high level supervision like a real government. So the players will still have private ownership and private sub-organizations e.g. a security service.
How it works
I've already set up a core framework for the AI based on a Discord Chatbot written in Python 3.5. A direct integration into DU will probably be very difficult as external programs are often used for cheating, and I hope NQ is well secured against this.
However some abstract information of the game given through Discord are all that's necessary to make reasonable decisions.
The easiest tasks for decision making are reactive decisions. In most cases there is only one correct reaction to a problem, which can be programmed by simple if/else statements.
In the following picture I've tried to visualize how several aspects of the game could be handled by the AI: (sorry for the plain appearance, it's only a placeholder which will be replaced with the actual features of the AI)
These are only some examples that came to my mind, and not necessarily the most important ones!
What I'm really eager to see is how the AI will manage more vague decision processes, e.g. who is a trustworthy ally and who not (like indicated in the 1st picture). This will no longer only be an If/Else decision. The AI will need to adapt its decisions based on previous experience (so called "reinforcement learning"). Therefore I integrated the machine learning library "tensorflow" which is basically the brain behind all Google AI projects. They actually just open sourced it last year! This library is probably a little overpowered for the current tasks, but I'm sure we will use it more in the future!
On the economic side the AI will automatically create jobs based on the needs of the organization and pay for every accomplished task.
Another important factor would be the spatial awareness and building functionalities. Buildings and infrastructure should be build using predefined blueprints and functionalities, so the AI knows exactly what infrastructure is available. To keep the program simple everything in the world is reduced to an object-type (e.g. city/ mine/ military outpost) which has specific attributes (e.g. storage capacity/ defense turrets/ position).
Each of this information has to be kept up-to-date by the players.
Security Issues
And in here lies a weak spot of this system. Our enemies and griefers will probably try to harm the AI by feeding it false-information, and thereby causing false reactions. So only trusted Members should have access to change critical information... However this will turn to a more and more time consuming task, as the overall information in DU continues to grow. Hopefully we'll find an alternative solution for this in the future.
The decisions regarding the further progress of this project will be made by the programmers which are participating in the development of the AI. We could form a sort of democratic "Coders Council" in game, which will also decide on matters where AI is not able to make meaningful decisions. However the AI will always be the official leader of this organization, also for roleplaying purposes.
Lore
Apropos roleplay: I created a little backstory that would fit quite well to the great DU lore. (read here: https://devblog.dualthegame.com/2016/11/16/official-lore-bible/ )
"During the anti-AI-riots in the year 2145 there were still people who supported the sentient AIs. A group of scientists thought the fear of AI was only caused by human ignorance of their thought-structure. Certainly the phenomenal advancements of the AIs were scary, and made them seem acting strange, but only because the humans could not catch up with their development.
During that time it was too late to stop this overhasty destruction of all AI. The scientists had to go underground and swear to rebuild AI, but this time without letting their mental abilities run out of control. They tried to hide forbidden AI technology, but the [UMF] soon discovered their hideouts and purged every bit of knowledge that was left. The whole mankind was under continuous oppression by the [UMF], right until the Great Exodus.
But even though all technology was lost, the idea survived. A few scientists of the secret society decided to found a research institute on Alioth dedicated to rebuild an AI from scratch. This time they would be more cautious. Even though they admire Aphelia as she is the only (proto) AI on Alioth, they also fear her because she might be programmed by the [UMF] to make sure the colonists will follow the AI ban that is officially still in place on Alioth." (to be continued)
Development Participation
This stuff has probably never been done before, so it's very likely that it might not work out as planned.
But if you like to develop your own AI, or you'd like to see a leader who is online 24/7 you should join us!
It's also no problem if you are already member of another organization. I uploaded the AI on GitHub as open source project, so you can use it for your own organization as well. I welcome everyone who is willing to contribute to the project: https://github.com/CyberCrunch/DU_AI_Gov
I skipped a lot of details of the development, so if you want to know more feel free to contact me. Maybe it would be helpful to even open a new thread on this forum exclusively for the programming part.
I'm probably more into programming than into the actual playing, but I'm sure there are some like minded coders/engineers who would also like to see this happen!
I invite everyone to test out the AI on this public test server. Currently most functions are still placeholders, but you can try to do some Smalltalk with the AI.
The first thing that actually works is you can register yourself to its database, and the AI will remember you when the game launches. Link removed! (discord-bot has been shut down)
I've got the feeling this is already getting to long, so I'll try to update this section further while the project continues.
(EDIT 08.01.17: added overview) Chatbot Feature Overview
Input Interfaces: Discord messages, Teamspeak PMs, Console commands, RSS feeds
Output Capabilities: Discord messages, Teamspeak Text-/Voice-chat
Economic Management: Keep track of resources, and assign players to specific tasks, according to their job-preference
Entertainment Features: Conversational Chatbot, TTS of the DU Lore, TTS of input text
(EDIT 28.12.17: Restructured Project List)
================================================== Project Overview ===================================================
Web interface for management of Dual Universe organizations: https://github.com/CyberCrunch/DU_AI_Cloud
Dual Universe themed tts-chatbot to assist players ingame: https://github.com/CyberCrunch/DU_AI_Adjutant
A post regarding these new projects will follow soon...
meigrafd reacted to yamamushi in The Alioth Open - 1st Division Races - For Pre-Alpha Members On May 13th