Tordan

Let's be clear here, it is no secret that I have been a HUGE advocate of this game. I love playing it.

But I am now, at least partially, on Hiatus until we have the ability to turn off the hand tool graphic effects while in build mode (and frankly the hand and tool themselves would be nice too.)

The constantly bobbing hand and gun that takes up a third of the space is bad enough while building, but adding strobing, rippling, distortion causing effects that bleed even further into the build space is absurd. 
 
Dear devs, Imagine you're at your desk, you're trying to program, concentrating hard, and someone comes along, sticks his hand over your shoulder and starts waving around a LED strobing nerf gun covering up a substantial portion of your work space. Would you be happy?

Please, pretty please, add a checkbox to settings YESTERDAY to turn this obnoxious bit of useless silliness off. I really want to be able to continue building and designing, doing the Voxelmancy that I love so much. Right now, it is impossible for me.

Thank you.
Tordan

Let's be clear here, it is no secret that I have been a HUGE advocate of this game. I love playing it.

But I am now, at least partially, on Hiatus until we have the ability to turn off the hand tool graphic effects while in build mode (and frankly the hand and tool themselves would be nice too.)

The constantly bobbing hand and gun that takes up a third of the space is bad enough while building, but adding strobing, rippling, distortion causing effects that bleed even further into the build space is absurd. 
 
Dear devs, Imagine you're at your desk, you're trying to program, concentrating hard, and someone comes along, sticks his hand over your shoulder and starts waving around a LED strobing nerf gun covering up a substantial portion of your work space. Would you be happy?

Please, pretty please, add a checkbox to settings YESTERDAY to turn this obnoxious bit of useless silliness off. I really want to be able to continue building and designing, doing the Voxelmancy that I love so much. Right now, it is impossible for me.

Thank you.
Tordan

Thank you for doing these threads. They are an excellent idea, and a large step forward in community wide communications.

Thank you for doing these threads. They are an excellent idea, and a large step forward in community wide communications.

When salvaging first arrived I was expecting something completely different. I envisioned a world scattered with small wrecks. Wrecks you have to find by eye without any UI assistance or directional cues. Something that is balanced with mining but a little less rewarding so it's not the only thing people do. The small reward of the discovery of a wreck would offset the small difference in reward compared to mining.

 
The wrecks
The wrecks should be xs cores with a few voxels and elements on them. Not even a complete ship. Depending on how many elements a wreck has and how well you can see them they should be spread out differently. I imagine maybe 3 wrecks per hex depending. You would mostly salvage basic items from them, maybe the occasional freight xs engine or s atmo engine.
 
In order to have wrecks be diverse and surprising enough there needs to be a great variety of them. To create all those wrecks we could announce a wreck creation event for the community with specific guidelines. The reward for this event is simply having the wreck be part of the game.
 
Regeneration
To ensure that salvaging remains a constant activity especially for starting players they should regenerate. I imagine something similar to how the spawning and regeneration of surface rocks works. Though wrecks should not spawn in the same place over and over but rather be random so you always have to keep looking for them.
 
Deconstruction
Because I think the market doesnt have a high enough demand for xs elements, especially on other planets, I think it might be difficult to make money selling the salvaged elements. So we probably need to have a way to deconstruct the elements into base components or even grind it back to ore.

Thank you for chiming in, Tordan.  I've shared this with the team.

This is my opinion.

NQ wants this to be a community game. They want folks to play together and build relationships.
 
We are building relationships... in Discord. We can't build relationships ***In Game*** because the communication tools in game are awful.  This is, IMnsHO, the single biggest mistake that NQ has made, and is continuing to make.
 
If they want this to be a community building game, then they need to provide the communication tools to actually build communities. This includes mission terminals, player market terminals, etc but it also includes, threaded chat, tags, filtered customization chat tabs, in game email, ship hailing, and proximity voice. Without these, we are alone in game, and together in Discord.

This is my opinion.

NQ wants this to be a community game. They want folks to play together and build relationships.
 
We are building relationships... in Discord. We can't build relationships ***In Game*** because the communication tools in game are awful.  This is, IMnsHO, the single biggest mistake that NQ has made, and is continuing to make.
 
If they want this to be a community building game, then they need to provide the communication tools to actually build communities. This includes mission terminals, player market terminals, etc but it also includes, threaded chat, tags, filtered customization chat tabs, in game email, ship hailing, and proximity voice. Without these, we are alone in game, and together in Discord.

This is my opinion.

NQ wants this to be a community game. They want folks to play together and build relationships.
 
We are building relationships... in Discord. We can't build relationships ***In Game*** because the communication tools in game are awful.  This is, IMnsHO, the single biggest mistake that NQ has made, and is continuing to make.
 
If they want this to be a community building game, then they need to provide the communication tools to actually build communities. This includes mission terminals, player market terminals, etc but it also includes, threaded chat, tags, filtered customization chat tabs, in game email, ship hailing, and proximity voice. Without these, we are alone in game, and together in Discord.

This is my opinion.

NQ wants this to be a community game. They want folks to play together and build relationships.
 
We are building relationships... in Discord. We can't build relationships ***In Game*** because the communication tools in game are awful.  This is, IMnsHO, the single biggest mistake that NQ has made, and is continuing to make.
 
If they want this to be a community building game, then they need to provide the communication tools to actually build communities. This includes mission terminals, player market terminals, etc but it also includes, threaded chat, tags, filtered customization chat tabs, in game email, ship hailing, and proximity voice. Without these, we are alone in game, and together in Discord.

This is my opinion.

NQ wants this to be a community game. They want folks to play together and build relationships.
 
We are building relationships... in Discord. We can't build relationships ***In Game*** because the communication tools in game are awful.  This is, IMnsHO, the single biggest mistake that NQ has made, and is continuing to make.
 
If they want this to be a community building game, then they need to provide the communication tools to actually build communities. This includes mission terminals, player market terminals, etc but it also includes, threaded chat, tags, filtered customization chat tabs, in game email, ship hailing, and proximity voice. Without these, we are alone in game, and together in Discord.

This is my opinion.

NQ wants this to be a community game. They want folks to play together and build relationships.
 
We are building relationships... in Discord. We can't build relationships ***In Game*** because the communication tools in game are awful.  This is, IMnsHO, the single biggest mistake that NQ has made, and is continuing to make.
 
If they want this to be a community building game, then they need to provide the communication tools to actually build communities. This includes mission terminals, player market terminals, etc but it also includes, threaded chat, tags, filtered customization chat tabs, in game email, ship hailing, and proximity voice. Without these, we are alone in game, and together in Discord.

This is my opinion.

NQ wants this to be a community game. They want folks to play together and build relationships.
 
We are building relationships... in Discord. We can't build relationships ***In Game*** because the communication tools in game are awful.  This is, IMnsHO, the single biggest mistake that NQ has made, and is continuing to make.
 
If they want this to be a community building game, then they need to provide the communication tools to actually build communities. This includes mission terminals, player market terminals, etc but it also includes, threaded chat, tags, filtered customization chat tabs, in game email, ship hailing, and proximity voice. Without these, we are alone in game, and together in Discord.

The points will be applied after a brief downtime starting at 9 am UTC | 4 am EST on December 17th.  
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
 
Hello Noveans,
 
December is halfway over, meaning the arrival of the new year is tantalizingly close! 2021 is sure to usher in some big changes, and we couldn’t be more excited to experience those with you. ?
 
While we were rolling out 0.23.1, we noticed that players who had talents in training lost what was accumulated during our downtime. So, in the spirit of bringing out the old and ringing in the new we would like to offer everyone 1 million talent points (~1 week’s worth) to not only replace lost points, but also as a bit of a holiday gift! Build, explore and be merry!
 
Thank you for your continued support. We sincerely hope that you and yours enjoy a restful holiday season!

Sincerely,
The Novaquark Team
 

0.23 and What We Learned

In reading through the reactions from our community regarding the recent 0.23 update, we’ve gained some valuable insights. 

Before we talk about the changes we’ll make in our processes going forward, let’s get back to the fundamental reason behind the update itself. What we did in 0.23 is at the heart of the vision for a game where a society of players is interacting directly or indirectly with each other through an elaborate network of exchanges, cooperation, competition and markets.
 
As it was, the current state of the game consisted mostly of isolated islands of players playing in almost full autonomy. A single-player game where players happened to share the same game world but with little interactions.
 
It’s hard to imagine how the appeal could last for more than several months for most players once they feel they have “finished” the game. It is also a missed opportunity to try something of larger proportion, a society of players growing in a fully persistent virtual world. For this to work, you need more than isolated gameplay. Players need to have viable reasons to interact and need each other.
 
In many single-player space games, you have ways to make money, and the game then offers you ways to convert this money into whatever you need in the game to progress, mostly via markets. This is the state in which we should end up for Dual Universe once all the necessary ingredients are in place, You get into the game, you farm a bit of money in fun ways, and you buy more and more powerful ships, equipment, weapons, etc., to help your character grow. The difference is that here, the ships or equipment you buy have been made by other players, instead of the game company. On the surface and during the first hours of gameplay, to a new player it would look similar to any of those other space games, but it would in fact reveal itself to be much deeper once you spend a bit of time in the game. Everything you would do would be part of another player’s or organization’s plan, everything would have a meaning. And soon you would realize that you too could be part of the content creation and, somehow, drive the game in the direction you want.
 
In its current beta stage, DU doesn’t have enough ways for people to make money because we haven’t yet had the opportunity to implement all of the necessary features. There’s mining, of course. Trading is not as good as it will eventually be because markets are not really used to their full potential. As a consequence, players rightfully turned to a solo or small org autonomous game mode. 
 
We tried to nudge people out of this with the changes introduced in 0.23. While necessary, many players expressed that the changes of 0.23 came too soon because it lacked a variety of lucrative ways for people to make money outside of mining.

What We’ll Do Now
 
The vision expressed above still holds. We want people to consider going through the industry specialization only if they intend to become industrialists and not necessarily to sustain their individual needs; however, we understand that it’s too soon to press for intense specialized gameplay considering the lack of sources to earn money. 
 
Here’s our plan for now. We will modify the formula of the schematic prices to make it considerably more affordable for Tier 1 and still challenging and worth a commitment but less intense for anything Tier 2 or above. 
 
This will allow most factories focused on T1 to resume their activities rapidly while keeping an interesting challenge for higher tiers, spawning dedicated industrial facilities aiming at producing to sell on the markets. We will also reimburse players who have bought high-priced schematics since the launch of 0.23 (please give us some time since it may take a few days as we go through the logs).
 
We will keep monitoring the price of schematics to see if it makes sense to increase or decrease the costs. The right approach to set such a price would be to evaluate how much time it takes to recoup your investment by selling the products that the schematics allow to produce. It should be a few months so that the investment is a real commitment and it makes sense to plan for it.  We currently lack the metrics to properly assess this return on investment time. We need a player-driven market price for the components and a market price for the products to assess the profit made by each run of a schematic. This will come when the markets start to work as intended, and we can gather more data about them. 
 
Feedback and Testing

The release of 0.23 also taught us that we need improved ways to test new features, both internally and with community participation. The Upvote feature on the website was a good start, but it’s not enough. 
 
To address this, we have two courses of action that will be taken. The first will be to set up an open public test server, hopefully with shorter release cycles, for players to try out new features. This will also allow us to explore ideas and be more iterative. If all goes according to plan, this test server should be introduced for 0.24, the next release. It will mirror the content of the production server with regular updates to sync it. 
 
The second important initiative is to revise the role of the Alpha Team Vanguard (ATV), getting them more involved in early discussions about new features and the evolution of the game. We are still defining the framework, so more information will be released as available. 

What is to Come
 
In the short term, we will push a few corrections to improve 0.23, which include:
 
Ships will now stop (be frozen) when their core is destroyed in PvP, making them easier to catch. Element destruction will impact the restoration count only when it occurs through PvP, at least for now (not when the ship is colliding/falling as we want to avoid having players penalized simply for crashing their ships because they’re learning how to maneuver them, for example). Recycling of un-restorable elements through a recycler that will take an element as input and grant a small amount of the schematics required components as output.
The next major release is already in the making and will be about the mission system, a first step toward giving players more fun ways to earn quantas. We will reveal about it shortly so that we can get as much feedback as possible.
 
We also want to reassure you that the mission system is not the only answer to offering more varied ways to earn revenue in Dual Universe. Things like asteroid mining and mining units will be introduced in the next few months. 

This list is by no means complete, but should be a good jumping off point that gives players reasons to fight and to explore, opportunities for pirates, new ways of making money, and a plethora of other activities our creative community will think of even if we didn’t. 

That’s it for now! We want to thank you again for your support and patience as we progress along this beta road! See you soon in Dual Universe!

Want to discuss this announcement? Visit the thread linked below:
 
 

Maybe you should actually fix the AGG ships falling out of the sky before you introduce this change.  Some of us use this as a workaround to that particular bug, and this will make AGG more or less worthless. 

You are not buying a game. You are donating money to help in developing a game that does not exist yet. 
As a perk for that donation, you occasionally get to test during certain stages of that development process.
 
There is no refund for "here have some money to develop."
 
If you want a stable game, with refunds if you don't like it, wait for release.

Dear Alpha testers,
 
The Beta launch is coming in just a few weeks and as you might expect it, so is the pre-Beta wipe! You will have 2 last test sessions before the wipe, during which we ask you to save all the Constructs you want to keep under the form of a Blueprint. 
 
We know that this official announcement comes on short notice, but as you can imagine, the whole team is on a tight schedule to deliver the Beta at the end of the month and we’re trying to inform you as much in advance as possible with the time constraints.
 
The last test sessions before the wipe will occur will be:  
 
From Thursday, August 6th at 14:00 UTC
To Monday, August 10th at 14:00 UTC
  From Thursday, August 13th at 14:00 UTC
To Monday, August 17th at 14:00 UTC  
Remember, everything will be wiped following this session, except the normal blueprints located in your Player Inventory (Nanopack), so be sure to keep those previously on your character, and not anywhere else (like in a container).
 
Last but not least, we also want to apologize for the inconvenience regarding the very short notice about the extended PvP zone and the issues that may have resulted from the situation. However, if you’re in a situation where some of your Constructs have been damaged before you can make an up-to-date blueprint of the said Constructs, please contact our Customer Support as soon as possible so you can get help from our team before the next test session. If you’re in such a situation, please read carefully the process described in the previous announcement published here.
 
Best Regards,
The Novaquark team.
 
 

The AO heckler grind prepares you for anything ?

Yes, but I've changed my name to protect the innocent. 

30 second ban for advocating bans... /grin.
 
But yup, welcome @NQ-Naerais!

30 second ban for advocating bans... /grin.
 
But yup, welcome @NQ-Naerais!

You are not buying a game. You are donating money to help in developing a game that does not exist yet. 
As a perk for that donation, you occasionally get to test during certain stages of that development process.
 
There is no refund for "here have some money to develop."
 
If you want a stable game, with refunds if you don't like it, wait for release.

(Update: November 12th, 2019: detailing the content that will be released before the end of the year)

Dear Community, 
 
We heard your feedback regarding our communication that wasn't as regular during the past months than it was before, in addition of a few miscommunication incidents. That's why we decided to plan several events to catch up and address that topic before the end of the year:
 
For those who have questions (or concerns) about Dual Universe or Novaquark, we've just opened a dedicated thread here (as many questions may be related to subjects under NDA, and we can't check beforehand, we had to put the forum thread in a section under NDA. If you're not a backer and you have questions on topics that aren't under NDA, feel free to contact NQ-Nomad and/or NQ-Nyzaltar by private message on the forum, and they wil transmit them to the team). No question is taboo. Although we can't promise to give a clear and detailed answer for each question, we will try our best to reply as much as we can.
  Here is the content related to communication we plan to release before the end of the year:
- a video presenting the updated roadmap.
- a Dev Diary video showing the recent progress on the game development
- a PodCast where we will try to answer the most pressing matters (based on the questions posted in the dedicated thread).
- an AMA event where we will try to answer to the remaining questions.
- a Kickstarter update.
  We can't give specific dates for all of this content yet, but all will be released before the end of the year.
 
Best Regards,
The Novaquark Team.

Stadia as any other streaming service is a different story and as i am working exactly in that field i have some insight.
If it's not coupled with high bandwidth, low latency on both sides it quickly becomes a desynced mess.
Can't even tell you how often i heard the phrase "The future are thin clients and datacenters" from salesmen in the last 10 years and still physics butchers the idea.
 
While true, it's possible if you localize all the computing in datacenters and just stream out the compressed video, anybody with less than a 100Mbit fiberoptic connection will be sitting in the corner and be crying like a baby. I streamed dual 4k virtualized programs and complete desktops and if you are adding even the slightest bottleneck, even inside a company everything falls apart really quick.
 
As a gamer  i will always prefer local hardware over virtualization and it should stay where it belongs, company virtualization.
 
There are plenty of reasons to offload to a datacenter but also plenty of reasons to stay far away from the idea.
 
The ramifications of a completely virtualized world are scary at best.