Poljack

Dear Noveans,
 
Update 1.3 is on its way! As we finalize the Maintenance Unit and prepare for its public test session (more on that below), we are excited to share the details of update 1.3 with all of you.

We also want to thank you for your patience as we work towards bringing you a new PvE system in Dual Universe. Our development team is working hard to create an exciting and enjoyable feature that provides the best gaming experience for everyone. We are prioritizing PvE and are working to bring it to you as soon as possible. In the meantime, you can still look forward to other new features (like the ones below), with more details coming on our Social Media and teaser livestreams on Twitch.

With that, let’s look at update 1.3!
 
THE MAINTENANCE UNIT

We’re replacing Repair Units with Maintenance Units, giving players more flexibility in maintaining their constructs by allowing repair and disassembly.

Repair:
You can choose to repair damaged elements, honeycomb, or both Use scrap to repair damaged elements or replace them Choose what happens to extra elements: If damaged elements are not part of the original snapshot, they can either be recycled or repaired with scrap and recovered. They will be recovered if they are undamaged but not part of the original construct snapshot. Destroyed extra elements (those with no remaining repair counts) will be recycled.  
Repairing honeycomb structures requires the exact amount of honeycomb missing, and elements still need the same amount of scrap to fix.

Disassembly:
You can remove all honeycomb and elements on a construct, including the core. The maintenance unit will use its linked container to retrieve all items instead of using it to repair. Damaged elements can be repaired with scrap before recovery or recycled. Destroyed elements (those with no remaining repairs) will always be recycled.  

 
THE CONSTRUCT SCHEMATIC CONTAINER

Following popular demand by our community members who grew tired of manually inserting schematics into industries, we’ve now added the option to designate a single container on a construct to act as the schematic provider for all industry units on the construct.
This feature is accessible by simply right-clicking on a container and selecting “Set as schematic container” from the context menu.
 
UEF SHOP EXPANSION

Looking to buy ships from Aphelia? We’ve grown the UEF shop with new floors and a Blueprint Basement that sells copies of all outposts and speeders. Before launch, we ran the ‘Build Your Legacy’ contest, giving DU builders a chance to be woven into the game by building speeders and outposts for new players. We’ve added the winners to our First Time User Experience and into the Blueprint Basement of UEF stores. We’ve also added four bonus speeders and an extra outpost!
 

 
INTRODUCING EASYANTICHEAT (EAC)

Accessing and manipulating game files is critical to many disreputable players who want to cheat by automating actions or gaining hidden data, for example. To combat this, we shortlisted EQU8 and EasyAntiCheat (EAC) when implementing our original solution for Dual Universe. With the sale of EQU8 to 1047 Games and the closure of their service to third-party customers, we will switch to EAC.
We want to thank EQU8 for their amazing service and responsive support and are excited to transition into EAC. The only change that should be visible to our players is seeing EAC instead of EQU8 as the anti-cheat system in Dual Universe.
 
UPCOMING PTS SESSION

Many of you have requested a PTS testing session, and our goal is to open the PTS to the public between Friday, February 10th, at 10:00 UTC and Monday, February 13th, at 10:00 UTC.
The PTS will allow you to test all features of Update 1.3 and help us with information and feedback on the PTS Forum thread to tune the features.
Your involvement has been invaluable in helping us shape the future of Dual Universe. As we progress with development, we want to thank you for your continued support and engagement and invite you to share your feedback. We’re working hard to give you all an enjoyable and immersive gaming experience and look forward to introducing more upcoming features.

Thanks for playing, Noveans!

I'm actually totally stoked that this happened in game. I am 100 percent all for this kind of content, having fought legion and i think empire a bit at the old serenity alien core on PTS, this is actually making the game feel somewhat alive. I for one think these cores are a great addition to the game. I'm not sure what other people think but i would have liked to have seen the current solar system broken up into zones/areas with one of these cores giving you control of  1 said area/zone each. Maybe you would take 2 cores that hold 2 zones so you could run a specific mission route and offer it to all your friendly org's, there would be a bit more reason and thought behind holding certain cores. This for me would have created interest for org's that are not necessarily pvp interested, to be allied with the zone owners to run either trade routes through friendly areas or mine asteroids etc etc. It would encourage people to have pacts and help smaller groups maybe to feel safer venturing into zones of the game they may not normally because of pvp. It would also have encouraged pvp orgs to protect their solo/small org's (the pve crowd if you like} when in their zones (maybe offering some sort of compensation if they are destroyed) I do think these core are a great addition and i do welcome them, I would just like to see a bit more of a reason for owning them or taking them. But GG all round i shall applaud you for what looked like a superb fight. big thumbs up from me.

We recently announced that an additional update, Ares, was added to our public roadmap. Many of the features and changes for Ares will be available on our public test server (PTS), when it is updated and back online tomorrow, September 15th, at 10.00 UTC. (See the roadmap here.)
 
In that announcement, we promised a devblog that would talk about the big-ticket items we plan to deliver with Ares: the new Core Combat Stress victory condition, more functionality for shields, and PVP-related fixes. (Inside Ares, Part Two will cover warp improvements as well as boarding and docking changes. Watch for it on Thursday.) 
 
Without further ado, let’s dive in! 

CORE COMBAT STRESS 
In a nutshell, core combat stress represents a core's ability to keep functioning under prolonged weapons fire. A core unit that takes too much stress will be destroyed and will be considered a PvP destruction.
 
Core combat stress will be used as a second loss condition on constructs during PvP, working in tandem with generic core unit destruction. It does not matter which one happens first, only that one happens eventually. This will allow us to support larger fights and ensure that everyone's weapons are doing damage, even if it is only against core stress.
 
Stress will be accumulated as the construct takes non-shield weapons hits, taking the form of a gauge that starts at 0% and goes up to 100%. Non-shield hits on a construct will make the gauge go up. The core stress gauge is affected by a weapon's raw damage and is unaffected by the resistances of the element or material the attack hit.
 
Example: A weapon hit does 1,000 thermic damage. It hits an element with 50% thermic resistance doing 500 damage to the element; however, the core stress gauge will count 1,000 damage for that hit.
 
When the core stress gauge hits 100%, the core unit will be destroyed and will be considered a PvP destruction (as if it was destroyed by a weapons hit) and everything that implies.
 
The value of the stress gauge will be defined by the following:
The base of the core stress gauge value will be the health sum of honeycomb materials on your construct. The quality of the material used will provide multipliers to the value. Higher honeycomb tiers will provide better multipliers. The type of material used will provide a different multiplier, with products having a better multiplier than pure materials.   
Finally, the stress gauge will gain health linearly with honeycomb until a cap, at which point additional honeycomb will have diminishing returns.

SHIELDS v2
The fundamentals for shields were unveiled in this devblog and made their initial debut with the Apollo update in August. The time has come to increase their potency and value with some new features. 
 
Shields v2 brings adjustable resistances and venting. 
 
Adjustable resistances Shields have a base resistance value of 10/10/10/10 with an additional resistance pool of 60% that players can assign in 5% increments to any of the four resistances. (Examples: 10/10/10/70 or 25/25/25/25) Once players have locked in their resistance selections, those choices will be active and cannot be changed until the cooldown time of 60 seconds has expired, at which time the resistances will remain as set unless they are recalibrated. Shields UI will display which resistances are taking the most damage on the shield, allowing pilots to make an informed decision regarding the settings. Venting Pilots may vent their shields at any point, the exception being when the venting cooldown is active. Cooldown duration varies per size, with smaller shield variants having lower cooldowns. Venting shields will do two things: Turn off the shields, bearing in mind that they can’t be active during venting.  Begin shield regeneration of a certain percentage per second.  Venting may be deactivated at any time. Deactivation will occur automatically when shields have reached maximum capacity.   
We highly encourage pilots to explore the use of shields and venting while it’s available on PTS. Since there’s a bit of a learning curve involved, the test environment is the perfect place to experiment freely without any real cost to your ship on the Live server. 
 
PVP FIXES
We’re closing the loop on some “unintended” uses of these game mechanics. 
Speed Resume deactivated on construct death: When a core is destroyed, that construct will be incapable of benefitting from speed resume in any way. This will avoid and fix various exploits in regards to “ghost-riding” destroyed ships into safe zones. Offline player deaths on construct death: Offline players on constructs will now be killed on core destruction. This will avoid logging off characters that can then log back in, repair the core unit, and attempt to flee.   
Originally, the plans also included a change that would cause ownership loss on core unit crash destruction. Thanks to our intrepid PTS players who tried it out and promptly let us know the problems such a change could cause, we pulled it from the Ares update. (Read the related post from the Game Design team’s NQ-Entropy.) 
 
This is exactly why we have a test server and why we value those who do reconnaissance there before the updates are released on the Live server. We offer sincere thanks to the players who took the time to give us candid, constructive feedback. 
 
SEE YA THURSDAY
Inside Ares, Part Two will be published on Thursday. While you’re waiting, why not head over to the forum and share your thoughts about Part One? 
 

The three-part devblog series we published in April, “The Future of Dual Universe”, addressed the cost of doing business and our plans for the ramp-up to launch. We took the first steps in delivering on those changes in May with the incremental 0.25 updates, adding more gameplay content and improving both performance and visuals.
 
Our 0.25 updates brought players:  
Voxel compression  Constructs LOD  Hauling Missions The Job Forum The first of a series of Challenges The integration of PopcornFX for visual effects And, of course, many bug fixes and additional improvements  
If you haven’t had time yet to check out these changes, we released some videos showcasing them. Watch this video for a closer look and missions and challenges and this first look at the new visual effects. 
 
About the latter, It was fun to watch the real-time reactions from our Twitch streamer community as they saw the changes for the first time. 
 
Now that 0.25 is wrapped up, development is underway for our next big milestone. Codenamed Apollo, the update centers around the first phase of a major mining revamp. The addition of asteroids will provide rare and precious ore, which in turn will create opportunities for conflict as the hunters become the hunted. To that end, PVP will receive a first wave of balancing changes and the introduction of shields. Keep an eye out for devblogs on these topics! 
 
In the meanwhile, we’d like to invite you to post your follow-up questions about the changes we introduced in 0.25 in this thread. In turn, we’ll take the best questions for an upcoming Q&A. Your insights and constructive feedback go a long way not only in helping us identify any lingering issues that should be addressed but are also helpful in how we can make things better in future updates. 
 

Space can be lonely, and, if some adages are to be believed, no one can hear you scream out there. You may want to bring along some friends, maybe not so much for the screaming but for sharing fuel and good times. That’s where docking and boarding comes in. 
 
Previously referred to with the blanket term “parenting”, breaking them off as boarding and docking clarifies what they are and what they do. Just as the name implies, boarding allows passengers to come aboard your ship. Docking makes it possible to have ships connected to other ships, even when both are moving. This boarding/docking relationship basically has the same functionality and behaviour as before but with the added benefit of rights management.
 
In its original design, boarding or docking a construct was not consensual. Neither the player who owned the construct being boarded/docked nor the player whose construct was being attached to another could decline. They may not have even been aware it had happened in some cases, it simply occurred due to their proximity. 
 
This was a problem for a few reasons, most notably that it opened the door for bugs and exploits. In addition to negating those, revisiting the feature also gives us the opportunity to make it more intuitive and purposeful. 
 
ASSIGNING RIGHTS
Owners can use the Rights & Duties Management System (RDMS) to assign Right to Board or Right to Dock to their constructs that will let others board or dock, or to forbid such requests. 
 
Dynamic constructs have the ability to move, as opposed to static constructs - like buildings - that are immobile. With the necessary rights, avatars will be able to board dynamic constructs, and smaller dynamic constructs (let’s call them shuttles) will be able to dock with bigger ones (aka carriers). When boarded or docked, the player or the shuttle moves with the carrier, and their mass is added to the carrier’s physics. 
 
A player or a shuttle will need to be near the carrier in order to board or dock, it can’t be done from a distance. The distance is commiserate with the size of the target vessel, the minimum distance being 32m and 128m being the maximum. 
 
BOARDING
Players are able to board any inactive dynamic construct. This makes it possible for them to tour constructs on display in a marketplace or the like. The construct will go into the “active” state when the owner or someone else with piloting rights jumps into the driver’s seat, and unauthorized passengers will be automatically ejected.
 
If a player enters a dynamic construct with the proper rights or when the construct is inactive, they will become boarded and can move freely around the construct. 
 
The UI display may look something like this: 

This is a sample of the UI that is still in progress 
 
If the construct is active and the player attempting to board does not have the necessary right to board, they will be repulsed. The effect is similar to hitting an impassable barrier with no damage taken. The UI display may look something like this:

 
DOCKING
Once shuttle pilots with the necessary rights are within range, they can manually dock to a carrier. This is done through a contextual menu that is accessed via right-click. The shuttle will then be invisibly tethered to the exterior of the carrier. 

 
Without that clearance, the shuttle will be repulsed.

 
Authorized shuttle pilots will receive an opt-in confirmation to signal when they are within docking range. 

 
The “Docking” widget in the piloting UI informs the pilot of the shuttle when they are in docking range through this small open chain link icon.
 

This is a sample of the UI report to show a shuttle’s docking status.
 
PARENTING ADVICE
The owner of the carrier is considered the parent, and those who are granted boarding or docking rights are children.   
Just as real-world moms and dads, construct owners can give their “kids” the old heave-ho when it’s time for them to leave the nest and fly solo. This is done in a Build Helper’s submenu where all boarded players and docked shuttles are listed.
 

 
Buh-bye! Boarded avatars can be ejected at any time directly through the carrier’s Build Helper interface. 
 
This results in ejected players suddenly finding themselves adrift, possibly in deep space. Here, they have two options. Jetpack to a safe place. Depending on the distance, this could take quite a while; however, it’s safe (they can’t be attacked) and they will arrive with the inventory in their nanopack. The second option, suicide, will get them on terra firma faster, but they will lose whatever they were carrying. Probably a good idea to stay on the good side of the carrier captain to avoid being in this predicament. 
 

 
With a few simple clicks, the carrier pilot can easily de-dock shuttles, too. 
 

 
TAKE IT FOR A SPIN
These changes will be featured in an upcoming release on the public test server (PTS). We highly encourage our community to explore it when it’s available, then let us know what you think about the ease of use and convenience. Until then, feel free to join the discussion on our forums.
 

Despite our recent efforts to expand and clear out Market 6, we are still getting reports about performance and clutter. We want to assure our players that we understand your frustration and are still working to find better permanent solutions. 
 
Meanwhile, we will be addressing clutter across Alioth this weekend. Our plan is as follows:
Dynamic constructs that have not had direct interaction with their owner over a set duration (currently 30 days*) will be hidden.  Constructs at the market that violate our rules,  Code of Conduct and EULA will be removed.
If your construct is hidden, you can unhide (recover) it by using the Fetch tool. To do this, right-click on it in the Construct list on your Map screen. Any constructs that you own, whether visible or hidden, will appear on this list.
 
Fetch functionality now works for organization-owned constructs as well. For hidden constructs that belong to your organization, your legates can retrieve them via that same functionality. 
 
Our customer support team is at the ready if you still need assistance recovering your constructs. Simply ping our Live Support staff in the in-game help chat with “@GM” or file a ticket on our support page and we will dispatch help right away!
 
Please note that this is intended only as a temporary measure to aid performance and improve your experience when visiting these areas. 
 
We look forward to seeing the results from these changes over the weekend.
 
May your frames be plenty.
 
 
*Duration may change based on our findings 

I mean tbh automated mining instantly gives you my vote! love the idea of new players being given a leg up as well i think that's a very positive step to help people on their DU journey starter setups etc i think is an excellent idea . Now as for space pvp if that post is suggesting that space is say sectors or whatever and in each one the materials have a range of rarity and a reason to hold said sectors or nebulas i think that is gonna be excellent i love that idea. And please keep this general comms coming i for one am enjoying it keep it up NQ.

Willie waving is officially my fav comment ever made on this forum haha @GraXXoR

Do you know what Blazemonger I don’t generally agree with you i feel that you bash this game far too often, but for once (and I rarely post here)I feel in this post you have the balance between criticism and being constructive spot on here fair play ..