PetdCat

Here is my build in progress over at Landmark on Determination/Whistling Tangle (SE of the spire). It should be fairly obvious from the map view.

[indifferent]

Well, I guess we will find out for sure in a year and a half.....now where did I put my coffee.

Eventually, a nice little bar of questionable character, for questionable individuals called "The Cat Box" or "The Busted Screw" stuck on the side of an asteroid somewhere.

it would be a weapon if mounted down at the end of the hallway and clicks on once the unauthorized party gets halfway down the hall

My opinion is that you will be able to "build" anywhere. Now the question will be--in a sandbox universe--will you want to? It will be like changing a tire on the driver side of the car on the shoulder of the freeway--doable but not normally a good time. Given that in that type of situation you will be vulnerable to anyone coming by who may wish to....ummmm....acquire your vehicle, I think that there will be a market for spacedocks, open stations, co-op docks, etc...that provide some level of security (and access to materials, technology, assistance). Of course that will then create some little "gem" of a place that a group may want to raid, take over, lay to waste for giggles, you name it, if not defended. I think that the ability to modify something will end up not being limited by world/server mechanics, but by how social interactions start coming about in DU. Tons of pirates, or organized groups that do play well in the ether together--guarded outposts/stongholds. A general "I'm okay-Your okay" commune attitude--build anywhere. We will probably end up being somewhere in the middle with someplaces being more dangerous than others.

I have found that the players are going to use whatever term they wish over time Heck, that is how the term "voxelmancy" came up with to begin with I'm not sure that us deciding at this point is going to have any impact on what people decide to call it down the road. They would probably just pick another term to be contrary given human nature LOL. As a Babylon 5 fan, I would be happy with something simple like -- TechnoMage (I just don't want to have to shave my head). Voxel Boards--anything you can do so we do not need to have voxel boards would be awesome. In the other voxel based game I had a claim that was nothing but all my voxel board templates. It was huge, it was ugly, it was necessary, I hated it. I ended up building all my workshops underground or inside mountains so people would not see the various bits of flotsum.

I think that API export would almost be necessary if you are managing a huge guild/corporation. And let's be honest here, DU is looking for those huge groups to create that massive bits that require tons of materials. Those large groups are going to need some mechanism for keeping track of all their assets from a far reaching area, and those assets could be radically changing on a daily basis. As long as you have security for some level of local control over the information that an API can touch (for your account, location, assets, whatever) I think that would resolve the bulk of the griefing. Yes, I am sure that at some point some ingenious idiot will figure out a way to get around that security and cause a headache, which will require someone stepping in from NQ and doing something dramatic, but hell--it's an MMO--you should just accept that it will happen sometime/somewhere The secret is having everything tight enough that the only person who will be able to find a workaround will be someone living in their parent's basement, playing 20 hours a day, peeing in a bottle, --and has the fire in their belly to try and screw the world. Probably going the be a fairly small group to worry about.

Technically, the voxel is not the cube but the underlying information that defines the coordinates in a three dimensional grid. Yeah, I know, it's a mouthful But if you are building in a voxel world and your really want to understand how things interact you cannot just think of the voxels as "cubes". Voxels are the information that is represented by the cube in space. Gawd......this is painful to try and explain. Anyway, try not to think of a voxel as just a cube, but information that is going to react with the information of the voxel that is next to it....why you say? Well, depending on the engine, a voxel may react differently (change its shape) depending on which voxel is next to it--and its position in relationship to that voxel. If any of you have been in Landmark, that is how you get anti-voxels, putty voxels, prime voxels, and the like. Now, the size of the space that a voxel can normally take up is governed by the engine and is normally set by the game developer. They can have multiple default sizes, but the smaller you go, the more the server has to keep track of all those little bits--and all the information that lives in them. Depending on the voxel engine and how the developer sets the defaults, voxels can also have mass, gravity, inertia, rotation, all kinds of things. All of those things have their own processing costs on the server and your local machine. So, really, when it comes down to it, when you say "voxel" you are really just saying "a virtual blob of stuff". Until we get more input from NQ on what they are going to give us to play with, we are just guessing. Given that they are working with a server architecture that I do not believe any of us have worked in, I don't think we have a clue what those blobs of stuff are going to be able to do and not do and what the limitations will be Unless of course, there someone from NQ drops that information to us at some point <nudge nudge, wink wink> <taking off nerd hat>

It has been a number of years since I was seriously in EVE (back then GoonSquad were the new kids on the block), but I enjoyed the "player created" stories that EVE had that fleshed out backstory and ongoing stories. Instead of walls of text they actually had some formatting involved and seemed to follow the basic canon of the game. That would be an interesting thing to have in DU, but that would need to be driven by the player base and have enough members of the player base with good enough writing skills to make the content interesting and compelling.

I anticipate that there will be people who will complain the voxel size is rather large to provide fine detail, but also keep in mind the you will have tools to modify the shape of the voxel. Usually there are smoothing/rounding tools that allow you to shape voxels. There are usually also voxel primitives for spheres, pyramids, slopes, and the like. I do not know if it will be possible with this voxel engine, but in some engines you can use a "voxel reactor" to actually modify the shape of the voxel from something other than a cube. When you please one of these modified voxels next to another you can get some odd bits, but it does provide a great deal more ability to provide detail on a smaller scale.

I don't know how many people have read the old E.E. "Doc" Smith "Lensman" series, but I always found the idea of tractors/pressors working in conjunction as interesting. Or tractoring to hold a ship while a quasi-energy tube connects the two ships and the torpedo/projectile is launched down the tube. The back of the tube being sealed after launch creating not just the explosion on impact but containing the expanding gases and energy to force through the wall shields of the opposing ship. In essence containing the expansion for exiting into surround space and focusing on the target in addition to any inertial damage. Or, the ability to counter inertia making a body inertialess, towing it to where you want it to be, then re-inerting it so that it once again moves in the vector it originally was. Asteroids, Moons, Comets, would make some pretty spectacular weapons.

Since it is all about the sandbox, I don't think that DU will technically have any ship classes other than what comes from general consensus. And even then, there would be nothing to prevent someone from calling a ship that they built whatever class they wish. That is part of the draw for me, the lack of constraints.

I would think that there could be a point where we "discover" alien technology that allows the growing of organic armor, or organo/mechanical integration.

My assumption is that they misread your concern as being combative and belligerent. Unfortunately the tone of one's message does not translate well over typed messages. Anyway, hopefully, things will go better in the future

Amen.....

Yep, that is definitely voxel tools, kind of gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, <removes tin hat> Thanks for clearing that up Nyz.

As has already been intimated by some, there is software out there that will take a mesh, convert it to voxels and then import it into a voxel engine to have it rendered in game. Where that is probably not a capability that will be allowed to players in the game (due to the developers wanting to maintain look and feel, or prevent any IP problems) that does not preclude the developers from using the tool to use the software to have a mesh rendered in world where they can then apply their existing textures. The voxels would still be rendered in game using the game engine, the original mapping would have been from a mesh that provided the framework for the object to be rendered in game. Not that I know that is the case, it appears to me to be a likely scenario given that they were not planning on having a vid @ E3, but they had to come up with one on a short time frame. Take a mesh, throw it into the converter, import it into the game's voxel rendering engine, paint it with textures, create video. The only difference is that software did the heavy lifting converting an existing mesh into a voxel map that the game could then render instead of having someone individually place the voxels. Given the situation, I'm good with that--technically, it is rendered in game, just not manually. From what I see in the video, and what I have seen so far concerning the voxel engine, I could build that capital ship--it would take time--but I could build it. Heck, I could build the thing in Landmark and that engine has much fewer capabilities that what has been expressed for DU.

Like the Vorlon and Shadow ships in the Babylon 5 series. The ships were "living" ships. The Shadow ships actually required a human wired into it as a CPU, but the Vorlon ships did not have restriction.

I may do some streaming. Unfortunately, I tend to do alot of building (and tend to be rather fussy about it) so it is like watching Golf--or paint drying.

Welcome Metaphase. The DevBlogs will be your friend, that is the majority of the "official" information we have so far (other than the tidbits of information that Nyz tends to drop on us at times). Keep in mind that it is all very very early in the process and pretty much wide open to discuss things. Throw whatever you think might be cool out--none of us are shy LOL

Go through and read all the Dev Blog's. Those will give you a good background on what Dual is expected to be. Keep in mind that we are still in very pre-Alpha, so take everything with a grain of salt, your mileage may very, if you start to experience loss of hearing or vision--then stop taking Vi..... um.....nevermind. Dev Blogs are you best shot right now. If you have questions, things you think would be cool, things you think would not be cool (you get the idea), ask This is right at the very beginning so if you hope to have any type of impact on the development of the game, your timing is good

Keep in mind, that if somebody takes apart Spaceship X and then makes a manual copy, there is no way for the game to know that it is a copy of Spaceship X, so there would be no way for it to know that blueprint A is 10% better than blueprint B. Voxels are voxels, so I am not sure there would be for the system to tell that two builds are exactly the same.

Keep in mind one of my favorite adages, "To an Engineer, Good Enough is Perfect. To an Artist, nothing is Perfect." Where the nanoformer will be able to recreate anything from a blueprint--there should be some kind of functionality that recognizes that rare spark of genius that turns something ordinary into something more. I think that if we want builders to be of value, there has be to something that differentiates those who focus all their talent into a particular area to come up with something perhaps outside the normal bounds of what is created by a blueprint. On the other side of that coin however, there will need to be some kind of balance or people will be upset that the gods of RNG do not favor them, or that they have to spend a gazillion hours to get what they want, but they want it NOW Perhaps, that is outside the bounds of what the developers are looking for from DU, but it would be cool to have a person or persons that are know for making particular things really well.

I would expect we are going to see more traffic in the forums. Between E3 and this interview on the interwebz I bet we see some new faces