Thoger

I think the reason behind this is to make a big task like going into space an advancement that takes time, right? I agree with others that a "skill level" system or "research trees" to delay these advancements are the wrong way because they are zero fun. Instead, give the players something to do over a period of time to achieve these goals. Like:

All technology should in principle be available from the start. But in order to, let's say, build a space ship, you will have to achieve a lot of things before. You start on day one with barely any technology or ressources. So the first thing you have to do is to explore the environment where you have been placed on the planet by foot to look for water, food, raw materials, etc. You have to build a base starting with basic elements like housing, power generation, greenhouse, mines, refineries.
 
Then a point should be reached where the local ressources become insufficient to build more / bigger structures, so the last thing you can build is a vehicle (fun!) that allows to explore a larger area of the planet to find more and rare ressources. Not before these are found and harvested, you can build production facilities for components that can be used on a spaceship, like engines, computers, pipes, weapons, etc.
 
Once you have built a space ship, you can put some technology and ressources in the cargo bay, so that you don't have to start over from scratch on a new planet.
 
Some things, like highly advanced weapons or shield generators, should require ressources from different planets / moons / asteroids / gas clouds.

That way it also takes time to achieve something, but you actively work in a logical way to get there, which is way more satisfying than chosing a tech or "skill" level and watch the timer bar. If some elements of real research can be included to spice things up, perhaps including try and error allowing results that are unpredictable, all the better.

To me, the Lego example looks more complicated than code. ;-)

The Scratch example looks quite interesting, only the garish colors hurt my eyes.
 
Perhaps  a system like this could even speed up things for experienced coders; they might use it to get the backbone of a script done and then switch to the code editor for details.

Really not keen on slaves. Robots, cyborgs, drones and any other manner of technological subservience is fine in my view, but human (or even alien) slaves, really don't like it. 
 
Robots would be a lot stronger than humans. Harder to break, tougher in a fight, easier to fix. 

Hi,
 
I know that DU is not planned to be easy, and scripting will be irremovable part of game mechanic. It is something cool... but write hundreds lines of code can be bothersome task for non-programmer players; beside this, scripting is quite boring in form (you know - lines and lines of numbers and letters, nothing fancy).
 
So. Maybe we can made scripting mini-game itself and give it some interesting graphical interface, easier to understand by "normals"? Of course "text hard mode" will be always available as second option  and even "graphical programming" can have less options than text one, like "beginner" and "veteran" versions
 
I not talk about simplification of programming language itself, but more about some kind of GUI/IDE for that - with auto-complete and - most important - easy graphical interface like "blocks" of code for building apps. I know at last two projects, which use this kind of editors ; LEGO Mindstorm and Scratch. Here are pictures of programs build in them:
 
[sCRATCH]
 

 
[LEGO]
 

 
EDT: Here is wiki about this style of programming. And you can even use some like this for LUA, too!
 

 
In my opinion it will decrease "starting cost" for lot of people, and it can be even inspiration for someone for start learn "true" programming
 
Toughs?

Every few months I look for a single shard space sim MMO that is a player-driven sandbox without predefined factions. For a while I thought DU could be this dream coming true, but I had to learn it falls short on the sim part with EVE-style tab targeting and timer-bar-"skills". If they don't reconsider these decisions, I guess I will have to go on googling every few months.

Good graphics, promising video. I am slightly worried though: Building and stuff is great, but you also need interesting and challenging gameplay, otherwise you end up with something like Second Life. Like, why must docking be automated? It should require some actual piloting skills, where you have to consider the weight of your ship depending on cargo (inertia, breaking distance) - interesting gameplay right there.
 
Also transit into orbit was way too fast. In the finished game, one should have to have an eye on the temperature from friction with the atmosphere, in space one should have the option to switch off computer aided flight to experience real Newtonian physics (which is beautiful), etc.
 
If flying is too easy and too unrealistic, this integral part of a space game becomes dull, you don't develop a "connection" with your ship, etc. Please Novaquark, make this also a decent simulation and don't just focus on the building. Thank you.

Concerning size of planets: I want them in realistic size! There will be fast vehicles and ships, and radar, so you will find things also on a realistically big planet. At least way bigger then just 30 km! Concerning performance: Only details of the planet that are seen by players must be rendered.

Google results for "single shard MMO", after I realize that in EvE I will not find all what I expect for a space game

Yes the building attracted me. I like to build big for the most part, but building with voxels alone isn't enough, there has to be a point to it. I need purpose and a sense of direction. A sense of "I'm building this or doing that for survival or strength, or trade, or industry" will give me that meaning and ingrained sense of purpose I desire as a builder-type.
 
I like the idea of battling for resources if necessary, of obtaining and defending your territory, of exploring vast spaces and seeing how others build up their own piece of civilisation.

Hmm... Planet looks a bit small. But graphics is cool!

In a building game... Of Which This Is...  Progression can be handled differently.
 
What we build... together... which allows us to build more and better and different things that we couldn't before... that's the progression.  I don't think this game needs to have our characters have Levels... and in fact I'd be disappointed if our characters have levels.

Indeed! The concept of "spell-casting and rolling the dice" by clicking on enemy ships has been done for over 10 years in EVE. Simply reusing those archaic mechanics takes away much of the novelty and appeal of the otherwise fantastic concept of DU.

I understand the motivation behind it, but the lockon mechanics take much of the immersion away from actually experiencing the game as a first-person avatar.
It would be IMHO better if Novaquark would compromise by scaling down the size of players in an instance to allow for manual aiming and real-time projectiles during combat.

Jumpgate was 1 shard and delivered great fps experience for about 30 pilots in the same sector with the technology of 15 years ago. Today battles between 100 ships shouldn't be a problem. I don't need bigger battles.

Sorry for my imperfect English, I'm not a native speaker.

This is so strange to me. While there have been one-shard space sim MMOs with skill based targeting even 15 years ago despite the old hardware and dial up connections, nowadays it should be impossible? I don't buy that for a second.

A game as old as Jumpgate is still the benchmark then which all of the new space games miss. Surely it was not as massive as WoW or EVE, and the devs did probably not become millionaires, but it worked very well and was profitable for more than a decade. It is such a fine niche game that I am yearning for today.

Nowadays there are only instancing hells like Elite or Star Citizen, games that claim to be multiplayer but put ridiculous distances between players to avoid interaction like No Man's Sky, or games that sacrifice something as crucial for immersion in a space game as manual piloting and fighting for the rather silly goal of having "hundreds or thousands of players in one battle", as EVE or DU.

I tried EVE, and coming from the highly immersive Jumpgate, couldn't believe the success of this boring eye candy interface to a spread sheet program.

It would be so easy with the giant procedurally generated game worlds that are possible nowadays to hit the sweet spot of distributing players in a way that avoids loneliness as well as overcrowding.

Instead of cramming hundreds or even thousands of players in the same place, why does no game come up with intelligent game mechanics to spread people before overcrowding up to the server limits takes place?

You can make use of the vast game worlds to spawn new players not too close and not too far away from each other, have a nav computer offering alternative similar destinations if the first destination is becoming crowded, a dynamic mission system to lure players away from places that are in danger to get filled up, have a readout of ship density in the map, you can have random hits in battles at distances at which even skilled pilots can't hit other than randomly instead of precise tracking and calculating, and avoid unique attractions in the game that everyone wants to visit, like planet Earth.

Just a few ideas to avoid instancing even without mind-blowing new server technology or sacrificing highly immersive game mechanics. I am sure if dedicated game devs would just decide to think in this direction, a real one-shard space sim MMO can be achieved easily with the technology of today.

It is especially strange to me that a game as ambitious as DU in many fields throws in the towel so quickly when it comes to the basic quality of a space sim - piloting your own ship and fighting in a way that is fun.

I don't want to be a tiny cog in a monstrous machine like a "battle of thousands", I don't want to build a gigantomaniac bloody death star - my prime objective is to simply FLY my ship in a an open world without dreadful instancing again before I die. :-(

Concerning 2D I was referring to ground combat which you brought up. There is considerably fewer movement in the third dimension on the ground compared to space. But I'm afraid with EVE-style combat, it really would be EVE 2.0, even to the point of making three dimensions in space rather pointless, since there would be no need to be a skilled pilot making effective use of them during battles.
 
Ship size is quite irrelevant for the server load, it is the complexity and speed of movements in combination with the amount of ships taking part in a battle that determines the strain. You did not read this thread, did you? There was quite some detailed discussion about it already.
 
Again, not at all relevant for the server load.
 
I already adressed that: "Neither in a movie or TV series nor in a game the fight mechanics should be realistic, but immersive and fun. I agree having the computer fighting the battle and the pilot leaning back - or rather having unmanned drones - will be the most realistic form of air or space fight in the far future. But it won't make a satisfying game."
 
That's right. I was talking about small and agile fighter crafts. In Jumpgate, big freighters carrying heavy cargo had an enormous inertia (breaking distance), which, because of full-blown manual control, required specific skill and experience to handle - which was great and fun, and allowed pilots to specialize in space trucking since not everyone could handle it.
 
I am 48 and I want to play with my reflexes involved as long as I have them. But full-blown nanual space flight and battles are not so much about reflexes, more about a steady hand, situation awareness, and, would you believe, a lot of tactics: chosing the primary targets wisely, chosing the effective weapon and movement pattern depending on speed, armor and distance of the enemies, estimating the amount of missiles and afterburner fuel they have left, etc; a lot more tactical decisions must be made when not flying solo but in a squad: what combination of different ship types is most effective, be aware who needs urgent support to allow him to back off to regenerate the shields, be aware not to "steal a kill", is there time to dock / repair / refuel or is it better to sacrifice a ship and return to the battle in a new one, etc.

I get what you mean. The problem I have is that a system like you describe actually involves walling off content in order to create a false sense of specialisation.

If the gun controls are being made smoother for one player, then they are being made artificially clunkier for everyone else. Why should one player designated as a 'builder' have access to the full range of tools just because they set 'building' to train to max for the first few hours of the game?
 
To my mind that is unintuitive. And it obfuscates the fact that true player skill isn't based on numbers on a character sheet. The best builders in Space Engineers and Minecraft use the same blocks as everyone else. The best pilots in EVE don't win because of training hours, it's because they know how to fly their ship and work as a team.
 
The other problem I have with that sort of system is that once you commit to one path it gets increasingly costly to change specialisation. Either training time (ala EVE) or through grinding up a particular path. If you're part of an organisation that needs to change tack in a hurry, you've suddenly got a lot of people with a very unfun training regimen ahead of them that gets in the way of actually playing the game.
 
That's why I'm for putting all the tools in the hands of the players from the get go and letting things play out as they may.

This is why I'm posting about it now.  Throw your ideas out while they're still at an early stage. Maybe they'll change direction if you make your points well.

I just hope that those skills are not going to be limited by time, like EVE Online is, the game would feel "limited" to me in a certain way. I don't want to be forced to choose a path and stick with it, while switching would be so much punishing. Depending on my mood of the day, i could build, farm, fight, trade, explore or swim, it's just not fun to be forced to fight every day, or mine every day because all your skills are on a specific tree. That's even one of the main reason people don't like starting a new account in EVE Online. Skills make the game extremely slow, grindy, and limited to new players. 

Basically the crux of my problem with having a more traditional skill path in a game like this is that its a relic of older games that don't simulate things to the degree that Dual Universe will.
 
It seems like they want to lock technologies behind the skill trees so that everyone can't do everything at once. But I think the nature of the infrastructure needed for advanced technology and space flight will be enough of a barrier in of itself.
 
In Space Engineers for example you technically have the ability to build a jump capable spaceship as soon as you spawn. Except that you're on a planet, with very little refined minerals to hand. And you need a significant mining operation. And a lot of rare elements that take ages to refine. And the rarest elements for the best engines can only be found in space. So you have a long path ahead of you before you can even dream or making that first jump.
 
And that's without contending with potentially thousands of other players and their organisations.
 
As for skill specialisations. I don't think that handing out skill based stat bonuses is the way to go. You don't become the best fleet admiral in the verse because you have a leadership bonus +5. You get there through experience leading fleets of other players into battle. You don't need an arbitrary number to tell you because you are doing it yourself.
 
Likewise tech specialists, artists, and engineers will arise naturally if the crafting system is deep enough to allow for it.
 
For combat specialisation I think in a sci fi game your special abilities are better defined by your equipment. How well you fight (and the gods of ping) will be the real measure of how good you are in a fight.
 
Honestly this is what I think you need on your character sheet for a game like this:
 
Page 1
Bio (name, appearance, backstory etc
 
Page 2
Assets (money, controlled organisation ships/stations etc)
 
Page 3
Status (organisations, granted tiles etc)
 
Page 4
Contracts (buy/sell orders, jobs, alliances etc)

When we hand build everything, negotiate with other real people, and fight with our own reflexes, that's all we need.

I'm interested to see what the devs say on the matter when they blog about progression in more depth.

I think the reason behind this is to make a big task like going into space an advancement that takes time, right? I agree with others that a "skill level" system or "research trees" to delay these advancements are the wrong way because they are zero fun. Instead, give the players something to do over a period of time to achieve these goals. Like:

All technology should in principle be available from the start. But in order to, let's say, build a space ship, you will have to achieve a lot of things before. You start on day one with barely any technology or ressources. So the first thing you have to do is to explore the environment where you have been placed on the planet by foot to look for water, food, raw materials, etc. You have to build a base starting with basic elements like housing, power generation, greenhouse, mines, refineries.
 
Then a point should be reached where the local ressources become insufficient to build more / bigger structures, so the last thing you can build is a vehicle (fun!) that allows to explore a larger area of the planet to find more and rare ressources. Not before these are found and harvested, you can build production facilities for components that can be used on a spaceship, like engines, computers, pipes, weapons, etc.
 
Once you have built a space ship, you can put some technology and ressources in the cargo bay, so that you don't have to start over from scratch on a new planet.
 
Some things, like highly advanced weapons or shield generators, should require ressources from different planets / moons / asteroids / gas clouds.

That way it also takes time to achieve something, but you actively work in a logical way to get there, which is way more satisfying than chosing a tech or "skill" level and watch the timer bar. If some elements of real research can be included to spice things up, perhaps including try and error allowing results that are unpredictable, all the better.

@TrihXeen


More like learn what X materials work better with Y materials. What I don't want is a "recipe book" in the game, throwing out any expertise the player has out of the window, making crafting items and building a dull process. For example, having certain materials being more tuned towards energy absorption if they are blended together with another material that makes them more sturdy. That kind of thing. Not making the research into "Gather 10 of X, 30 of Y, 40 of Z, and voila, you are a l33tzor builder, congrats, you waited 24 hours to upgrade". 

It won't have to be what I described, but certainly not a "Countdown to Victory" kind of upgrade.

I have to ask... Why?
 
This isn't doing research, it's waiting for research to be done. Yes, there is an advantage in different players having the capacity to do different things, but the rpg elements take care of this anyway, and tech tree "research" is the most passive way to go about it.
 
Experimenting with LUA code, trying out in-game mechanical parts, exploring for new materials to try out or ruins to salvage, that has a lot more in common with the activity of doing actual research. From the described demands of exploration, this alone can be an undertaking just as demanding and cooperative if not more. And the level of experimentation would alone provide us with completely different skillsets as builders and completely different technologies as factions. Look at the SE workshop: The death lotus, torpedo designs, robots, various ship automation, drones, in-game Tetris, a plethora of mining techniques and armor designs and plenty more, each of those demanding hundreds of hours and going through dozens of failed experiments (if you are lucky).
 
So what's the benefit of adding a layer of waiting for research to be done over that? Why does it add to the game?

Research should be experimental, not a bar with a timer. You either Git Gud at making cool shit or go mining. And I can see experience voxelomancers do insane things. Things that not many can replicate.
 
 
And please, no EVE wait-five-mins-to-learn-shit logic. It's so 2003.

I think two things

1: The tech research should exist on EITHER a guild level or a player level, take warframe for example, where you can research for your clan and such.

2: I hope it is more a case of WORK then a case of waiting, cause that is SUPER annoying.

Like research goes further as you work with new metals, new plants and new designs and such.

Well... It will be always our word against his.
But here is our side of the story.
 
Just the facts:
- We posted two comments on his second video asking why he was deliberately spreading disinformation and diffamation about our game.
- In both comments was a link to our video proving the big spaceships were voxel-made.
- They weren't validated to become public, despite the fact that comments posted after by other posters were.
We don't exactly know how BlueDrake42's channel is configured, but if comments require validation to become public, that means he sees every comment before chosing to validate one (or not). It seems to us really unlikely that, in this situation, he hasn't seen the comments who were pretty straightforward and posted with the name "Dual Universe". Maybe there is another explanation but from our side, we don't see any.
 
In the end, with his video "GG Dual Universe", BlueDrake42 showed he didn't mean to misinform (despite the fact that the result was exactly that). We personally recognize we were wrong in thinking he had ill intentions toward our game. Sketpicism in his first video was totally ok and we perfectly understood that (as not much about our game has been presented yet). Presenting personal assumptions as the truth (saying our ships were just meshes bought from turbosquid put in our game and not voxel-made spaceships) in the second video was where a line was crossed.
 
There will be soon a blog post explaining our unexpected presence at E3 (that wasn't even expected on our side a month ago) and how it came to make some choices that seem weird from the outside. We also totally agree that there have been several mistakes in our communication like the fact we should have pointed out that the big spaceships design weren't home made but available on Turbosquid. There was no intention to hide it. We truly didn't see it as a problem a few weeks ago, as the teaser was meant to present what players would be able to build, not to present what the players will find in game.
 
So there is no hypocrisy here.
 
To avoid feeding the troll any further, this topic will be locked now.
 
Best regards,
Nyzaltar.