Thoger

I like to be in a good guild. But I am quite picky and not likely to join an organization on day 1 of playing a new game. And I left organizations in MMOs when their policies deviated to something I no longer wanted to be associated with.

sounds interesting here. BUT...I've been playing games and MMO's for 20 years. I've been in Societies, Gilds, and Unions on many different games. But remember, we all start out as solo players. Some stay that way for a few hours, some for days and weeks. Its their choice. I see people saying that solo player and ...by hinting seriously ...people in general...cant do what groups can do. Who made and invented Microsoft? Some big research team at a major corp? Nope, some of the richest people on the planet are solo people, people that went it alone and made it big. Its not any more impossible for a player to build a custom cruiser that everyone wants alone rather than sponging off friends to get it done then selling it himself. If I see new player enter a game and 2 minutes later start asking...begging...to join a group I feel sorry for them, they admit openly they are worthless alone, how sad for them.
 
In an open world game people can do what they want, and should. I believe in helping others, I have many times, but when I joined groups one person stood by saying 'go here , do this, do that' and did little or nothing themselves. I will help others, but demand from me and you'll be fighting alone. Period. If you need a big group great, I'll watch and see what you accomplish as a group, and if its truly grand I'll applaud you all, or whoever takes credit for it all at least. But dont think for a second a single person cant do well, as Elon Musk or the many like him, I dont see him taking a back seat to some group he 'needed' to win, and we shouldn't think people here should need one either.

My main draw to this game is the possibility of crafting my own unique designs and seeing them (hopefully) become popular and ubiquitous.  I am also compelled by the sheer potential this game has to be something so much more than so many games that are out there right now, including EVE.  I think the one skill training at a time thing is a mistake because it limits character growth and forces newer players to compromise between surviving in the game and training the necessary skills they need for what they want to do, which may or may not be obvious when they start.  Skill progression is a logical thing and I understand why the devs want to have it but it could be so much more organic.  I don't want to see this game become like EVE where you have to play for 3 months to learn what you have to train to be an effective player, then go create a new character and do it right.

It seems we agree on a good few things.  I think that specialization is a necessity in a game of this magnitude, unless you want to do many things poorly.  What I am against however, is the kind of specialization that requires mindless repetitive actions or an arbitrary timer.  Skill should be determined by one's peers and the market, rather than by a game statistic.  In other words, The ability to build a sexy looking and fully functional ship should not require me to build ugly, crappy ships, nor should it require me to train a selection of time based "skills" that give me percentage bonuses and unlock voxel editing tools that others can't access.  Specialization should be a result of a discovery of a person's actual skills as they relate to the game, rather than a dedication to a particular "skill tree" that excludes other aspects of the game by nature of the skill system.

Should I decide to play the game (still on the fence), I will probably also be in a ship most of the time. That's why I hope for satisfying Newtonian flight mechanics and a better alternative to dull, EVE-like tab targeting in the finished game.

And some people become uncritical fanboys too fast, wasting the opportunity to give the devs valuable feedback about weak elements of their concept early in development, and to propose better alternatives to consider as long as things need not yet be carved in stone.

That Bluedrake guy is just an inflated ego. He spread terribly false accusations about the game and was proven wrong.

His first reaction after he was proven wrong was ok, but then he held a long speech spitting on a peace offer by Novaquark which was pure disgusting ego inflation.

Another interesting thing which definitely exists are rogue planets - planetary objects not orbiting a star. I read somewhere these would outnumber the stars in the galaxy. As in Oort clouds, it would be pitch-black there - one would have to rely on radar, night vision, searchlight, flares ...

In Jumpgate, there was one big dark asteroid between two jumpgates, lovingly christened "Emma" by the pilots; countless ships were lost by "kissing Emma" if one forgot to watch the radar carefully.
 
So, there could be dangerous places "out there" which can only be handled by experienced pilots with special equipment, who take their time to caerefully scout routes to rewarding destinations.

It has been said a thousand times that you don't need skill trees to specialize. Just put interesting, demanding game mechanics in place for the different activities in the game and people will specialize by practising the things they like most instead of emulating practice through a skill tree.

Absolutely. There is something highly enjoyable and aesthetic about true Newtonian physics that is hard to explan - I guess nature came up with something our brain instantly recognizes as "the way it shouold be". Fire the main trrusters, turn them off, drift alongside the space station due to inertia, spin the ship while drifting to have a better view on the station - just beautiful, as it could be experienced in great space simulation games like Jumpgate. Ridiculously powerful maneuvering thrusters as in some games do indeed destroy the beauty of it. For quick breaking I want to see maneuvers like turning 180 degrees and firing the main thrusters, as it was common in Jumpgate or as it was depicted in the Battlestar Galactica remake series.
 
I'm not sure if something like a restricting "vertigo simulator" is necessary to avoid stupid movement patterns. Overpowered maneuvering thrusters play a part here, and also another factor: Smooth movements were happily in place in games for a while already, but then people became to stingy to purchase a joystick and started playing even flight or space sims using only keyboard and mouse. Steering a space craft with a mouse is immersion breaking for me. And it results in unpleassant, sharp zig zag movements in all sorts of games, which also makes most game videos on Youtube ugly. First person view where the camera moves like a mouse cursor is outright disgusting. So the flight mechanics should be optimized for joystick use, then mouse steering should be tweaked to achieve similarly smooth movements as with the joystick.

From what I saw of it the main skills in eve were learning how to fly, manage people, and work as a team. The training trees got in the way of actually playing the game.

Absolutely. There is something highly enjoyable and aesthetic about true Newtonian physics that is hard to explan - I guess nature came up with something our brain instantly recognizes as "the way it shouold be". Fire the main trrusters, turn them off, drift alongside the space station due to inertia, spin the ship while drifting to have a better view on the station - just beautiful, as it could be experienced in great space simulation games like Jumpgate. Ridiculously powerful maneuvering thrusters as in some games do indeed destroy the beauty of it. For quick breaking I want to see maneuvers like turning 180 degrees and firing the main thrusters, as it was common in Jumpgate or as it was depicted in the Battlestar Galactica remake series.
 
I'm not sure if something like a restricting "vertigo simulator" is necessary to avoid stupid movement patterns. Overpowered maneuvering thrusters play a part here, and also another factor: Smooth movements were happily in place in games for a while already, but then people became to stingy to purchase a joystick and started playing even flight or space sims using only keyboard and mouse. Steering a space craft with a mouse is immersion breaking for me. And it results in unpleassant, sharp zig zag movements in all sorts of games, which also makes most game videos on Youtube ugly. First person view where the camera moves like a mouse cursor is outright disgusting. So the flight mechanics should be optimized for joystick use, then mouse steering should be tweaked to achieve similarly smooth movements as with the joystick.

On the topic of physics, I hope their ballpark for 30 days until space was for the technology that allows interplanetary travel by just pointing at the planet desired. Whereas more Newtonian-aware players, especially those who have played KSP would be able to use chemical rockets to get themselves off planet much earlier using, much more crude in comparison, chemical rockets, proper orbital mechanics and a concept of deltaV.
 
I feel like this would cater to both player bases - ones who come for an EVE-like game, and those who come for a space sim.

While there is a lot of interesting theoretical discussion here, I don't think any variation of unlimited speed is even on the table.  The reason space MMOs have embraced the unrealistic notion of a speed cap in space is because unlimited speed--no matter how you balanced it for gameplay--would be impossible from a technical standpoint.  There will be a speed at which the game itself simply won't be able to keep up (try playing Space Engineers with extreme speed mods, for example).  This is why it's necessary to have different speed "tiers" that are governed by different game mechanics.  It's a workaround dictated as much by technical constraints as by gameplay.

Some people don't wanna live in spawn. As soon as we can me and my friends are gonna build a fleet and head out into the unknown. try to find a place to claim for our selfs. in order to do so properly we are gonna need supplies and maybe an oort cloud could be one way of getting some of those supplies.

DU definitely comes across as space sim-ish at first sight. For potential customers lurked into the forum by this, reading about tab targeting, tech trees and skill bars is a painfull process.

Another interesting thing which definitely exists are rogue planets - planetary objects not orbiting a star. I read somewhere these would outnumber the stars in the galaxy. As in Oort clouds, it would be pitch-black there - one would have to rely on radar, night vision, searchlight, flares ...

In Jumpgate, there was one big dark asteroid between two jumpgates, lovingly christened "Emma" by the pilots; countless ships were lost by "kissing Emma" if one forgot to watch the radar carefully.
 
So, there could be dangerous places "out there" which can only be handled by experienced pilots with special equipment, who take their time to caerefully scout routes to rewarding destinations.

but He's talking about it being natural and tied to the player... where as you're talking about it being codified into game mechanics. 
 
In his system the intricacies of how each system works and how well a person knows and can manipulate them to achieve results determines whether other people recognize them as being skillful... not the game applying any label. 

I gave up on getting what people chose and don't chose long ago. When no space sim MMO was out yet, people yearned for one years and years, like, "Imagine Elite, but every other ship is controlled by a player - wow!". Than Jumpgate came out delivering exactly that - even improving on other space sims in many aspects even if it had been just a singleplayer game. And nobody cared. It stayed a niche game for more than a decade despite it's briliance - for me it is still the best space MMO that ever existed, and I think most of those who played it would agree. But most fans of Elite never played it or even heard of it. (It would have been easy to find at the time by just googling "space MMO".)
 
A small (but still profitable) niche can actually be a good thing though. Like, if thousands of ships in one battle (which I think is a silly and overrated goal anyway) won't happen simply because there are not enough players to make this a likely event in DU, there is no longer an excuse for dull tab targeting instead of satisfying combat mechanics.

I gave up on getting what people chose and don't chose long ago. When no space sim MMO was out yet, people yearned for one years and years, like, "Imagine Elite, but every other ship is controlled by a player - wow!". Than Jumpgate came out delivering exactly that - even improving on other space sims in many aspects even if it had been just a singleplayer game. And nobody cared. It stayed a niche game for more than a decade despite it's briliance - for me it is still the best space MMO that ever existed, and I think most of those who played it would agree. But most fans of Elite never played it or even heard of it. (It would have been easy to find at the time by just googling "space MMO".)
 
A small (but still profitable) niche can actually be a good thing though. Like, if thousands of ships in one battle (which I think is a silly and overrated goal anyway) won't happen simply because there are not enough players to make this a likely event in DU, there is no longer an excuse for dull tab targeting instead of satisfying combat mechanics.

TIL; OORT clouds exist. 
 
also I hope so i really want space to be  as diverse as possible with all sorts of things to find other than just planets and asteroids. 

To me, any system which places artificial walls in front of player progression should be avoided. So tech trees based on timed unlocks, or grinding meaningless activities are out. 
 
There seems to be this underlying idea that letting players have access to the whole tech tree at launch is a bad thing for some reason. But I think Knowing which pieces we need to build a rocket is not the same as successfully launching a mission to space. 
 
In a building game like this the true progression is the infrastructure you build to support your projects. It's the difference between mining every block by hand in Minecraft and creating a gigantic ship in Space Engineers that eats asteroids whole and 3D prints space stations. 

In a Massively Multiplayer game creating and/or gaining access to the infrastructure you need for space travel and exploration will be a huge undertaking in its own right just because of competition with other players and factions. Forcing everyone to go through the tree punching stage isn't going to improve the experience in my opinion.

I think a better way to simulate technological progression is to increase the complexity of the crafting system at the fundamental level. Instead of building ships out of engines, cockpits, and reactors, plus voxels, build ships out of machine parts combined in different ways. Players will experiment to find the ways the parts work for the constructions they want, and specialisations and knowledge will arise naturally.

I've explained it in more detail here:
https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/833-component-elements-building-with-smaller-parts/

From the info we have so far it looks like we'll have a set of skill trees that determine tech level and a set of basic pre determined elements to combine into ships and stations.
Maybe there will be ways to get higher tech elements of the same type through research? I remember someone saying something about levels of weapons in an interview but there isn't much to go on yet.
 
Personally I'm in favour of making the crafting system more sophisticated so that specialisations arise naturally among the player base instead of through arbitrary skill allocation. This strikes me as the sort of game where progression through player skill would be a better fit.
 
To that end I propose that the pre built functional elements be smaller components with set properties instead of full parts.
 
So for instance instead of just throwing on a single engine block that takes up a large amount of space you would build an engine out of smaller parts stuck together that function as an engine. 
 
To build a basic engine that works you'd only need a handful of parts. Say an ignition block, propulsion unit, stabilizer, vector cone and control unit.
But you could add more parts to increase it's performance in different ways, with the better ones made of rarer elements. Each component would add weight and energy/fuel requirements. Some might also need a certain amount of space around them to function correctly(eg heat sinks) or have interference with other more sensitive parts. After you'd built the guts of the engine you would then use standard voxel tools to give it a casing and incorporate it into the ship.
 
And this would be the case with every part that creates function. A cockpit would be a pilots seat(with control surface), computer, life support monitor, oxygen tank, heating element, hinged canopy etc. Extra parts could be holographic projector, rangefinder etc.

Some common parts would be found in multiple devices (like power cells) whereas others would be specialised to certain devices (matter transmitter coils). 
 
Each part would have multiple connection points so that they can be configured in various ways. The game would have a master list of devices and when the minimum number of parts are connected together via their ports for a particular device it would treat them as that thing when powered up. Or alternately you might include a way for the player to tell the computer which device they are building (perhaps by including a control chip in every device)
 
Technologies that the devs want to be harder to master (like FTL) could have a significantly larger number of more sensitive parts. And they could not include a standard template if they wanted to make it take real research.
 
The end result of this is that as well as ships and stations players could also become experts at creating ship parts and the complexity of the interactions would create genuine expertise in the player base. When your organisation's engineer tells you the reactor can't take it anymore it's because she designed it. When the ship takes damage, you would replace the destroyed components in a device to get it functioning again.
 
At launch the developers would have a no frills version of each device blueprinted up for each player to start off with so they don't have to become an expert just to begin building. The players who are interested in that side of things would experiment with all kinds of configurations. Later on people would buy device plans off the market if they want to build their own ship without starting from scratch.
 
You could create the coolest looking hyperdrive on the market. Or the cheapest. or the most powerful. And you could create your brand for advertising. 
 
The other benefit of this system is that you don't need weapon tiers or constant injections of tech from the devs. Make up a list of weapon and defence types that are interesting, with their own strengths and weaknesses. Break them into bits that make sense, with lower tech weapons like projectiles requiring less exotic materials for their components. Then let the players experiment with what you give them. 
 
I guarantee you a Blastcorp Annihilator Cannon is way cooler than a tech three plasma cannon. 
 
Just my thoughts.

I hope in-game physics adhere at least to the basics of Newton's laws. Additionally, I hope flight  will be main-thruster centric with only believably strong but not(!) overpowered maneuvering thrusters. Thirdly, I hope the effects of g-forces on the pilot (vertigo, red & black out, etc.) will be modeled correctly and thus dictated "smoother" flight patterns in combat; instead of erratic twitch shooting, circle-strafing, zigzaging, etc.