Haunty

Which they do. If you pay per month you end up paying 15€. If you pay yearly you end up paying 10€. You have choices.
 
If you have a family, expenses and limited gametime but can't afford 10 or 15€ per month, you shouldn't play video games. Get your life sorted first. As I said in another thread about this "mimimimimi, I don't want to P2P": I smoke and the sub is 3 packets of cigarettes. That's ~ 3 days worth of coffin nails which I could just NOT smoke and instead pay my sub. I would do smth for my health and as a side benefit could play DU. But hey, that's just me - people spend more money on bullshit which they don't even realize.
 
You just have to look at some very basic and very simplified numbers (just to get an idea): 25 employees, think the std rate for dev is 100k per year = 2,5million. +office +electricity + server +PR +other expanses.
with 50k (!!!) ppl playing they would get 6million. Which would barely cover everything imho

Lore wise it doesn't make any sense, that's true
 
Plus you have to make absolutely sure that no one can RMT DU to death - which will happen at some point with such a system.
 
As for the playtime idea: please no. You pay because the servers are running 24/7. Your skills train with time. All your work is stored on the server. There will be patches (for free). So if someone plays 50h/year or 2000h/year doesn't matter - we're all in the same world with the same rules. You just can't split the playerbase or server into some guys who pay full, some who pay a little less and some who don't pay much at all.

You guys seem to think I know nothing about Voxels / rendering.
The fact is even with things like occlusion you still have to compute what's been occluded and what hasn't, and with Voxels you normally render chunks, so if any piece of a chunk is visible then you need to render the whole chunk at a given LOD you can't "quickly generate a single mesh at various LOD's" you generate the whole mesh at a given LOD.

My understanding is that to make the data editable something has to store "the edits", from my own tinkering in building voxel based worlds I've figured out that on day 1 for an entirely generated volume (like the planets would be) you'd effectively have a storage requirement of 0 bytes as you only need to store the changes made that deviate from the algorithm / generator.

With something like a space station though, there's never any part of that that's procedural, you effectively always have to store every Voxel.
You could store only the mesh data but then you need a means to "figure out" the volume data when the mesh gets edited, which is a considerably more complex task than generating a mesh from Voxels in the first place.
The other way is to store "actions" and use things like run length encoding to reduce the storage load ... but that's still a lot of data  

...

So here's where i'm at ...
As you guys should be able to see from my Avatar ... I'm IN ... i'm taking a gamble ... it's (i think) a risky one but if these guys deliver even a fraction of what i've seen so far I still like I'd get value for money.
So ... @novaquark ... I donated up to Ruby, the money was going to in to my own game project but i've decided to start a new game dev project ... developing LUA driven DU stuff  
I can't wait!

I feel like a broken record going over these things over and over, so instead, I thought I'd just write up some of the more interesting things I learned at PAX this week. 
 
Now, I certainly am not at liberty to discuss everything I learned from PAX. It's also worth pointing out that many of these things are likely subject to change:
 
Ships have 3rd person view (at least in pre-alpha).  We may see more complex forms of linking elements, aside from Lua/power/fuel (no promises, and not going into details, but fingers crossed regardless) "One Week" means "One Week"   The number of TCU's we get in pre-alpha will probably be limited to 3-4, or thereabouts. Much smaller than the several thousand available to players at PAX. Ship combat will not be automated. If you see a ship with 30 cannons on it, it's likely there are 30 people onboard manning those cannons.  Avatar combat may have some automation in the form of simple base defenses that fire on people who aren't allowed in your territory. The game will be roughly a 10gb download, and those with pre-alpha will likely get a day or so to pre-download it. Flying in the first-person mode is much easier to get used to rather than 3rd person mode.  Celestial bodies like Asteroids cannot be moved, which is to say that attaching several rocket boosters to an asteroid won't just make it start moving. Asteroids will be in pre-alpha The scroll wheel is currently used as a speed throttle in ships, which takes a little bit to get used to. Fingers crossed that this changes, as it's a bit weird. Atmospheric and Space thrusters are two separate items. Just because a ship can fly in the atmosphere doesn't mean it can fly in space.  In the same vein, Atmos and Space fuel are two separate things.  Star probes will not be physical things flying through space, so no tracking them down to destroy them as they fly through space.  A question came up about how far they are along with the skill system, the answer is "almost zero". They're just not at that point in development yet, which is understandable. Digging to the center of a planet should result in players bouncing around like a spring around the absolute core. However, we'll have to test this to see if it actually works.  Of course the closer you dig the center, the harder it will be to reach because of the way that territories stretch all the way to the core.  Planets were not rotating in the PAX Demo, unclear if this will change in pre-alpha on the 30th or if that's planned for Alpha instead. Coming up with crafting recipes is difficult because of the balancing required for them.  Making ships is not going to be easy, people are seriously underestimating just how difficult it's going to be to get into space. Even in creative mode people had a very hard time doing it.  Water is extremely difficult to get right. The water in the pre-alpha is just a placeholder texture for now, and their plans for water sound awesome, it's just not an easy task at all.  
 
I'm sure I'll have more info to add to this thread as I remember it over the course of the day.
 
As for my thoughts on how the pre-alpha played at PAX....
 
Many people who didn't know anything about Dual Universe sat down to play it and were kind of left dumbfounded as to what to do. The open world aspect of it without any tutorial was a bit overwhelming, and people were left clicking random buttons and walking away confused. Those that did understand Dual Universe, however, seemed to have a blast playing around in the world. Despite complaints I've seen to the contrary, I didn't find the UI to be overly complex or confusing. Just looking at screenshots is pretty self-explanatory. It takes a few minutes to get the hang of things, and there are certainly some terms you should be aware of, but it certainly wasn't this monstrously complex thing that warranted the complaints I've seen. On the topic of building ships. Many people sat down expecting to just have their hands held building a ship. It's not easy at all, which I think is a good thing. If it was such a simple process that any random person could do it in 5 minutes, it would be a whole lot less impressive to actually build one that works. I am happy with the way this works out. Not everyone is going to be able to build a space ship. The game played rather fluidly. There were some trivial bugs here and there, but nothing that brought down the server (which is the key point here).  Again, building a ship is not a process that someone can just explain to you in 5 minutes. If you're expecting to just jump into the pre-alpha right away and be flying off the planet in a few minutes the first time, it's not going to happen.   
 
Overall I was very pleased with what I saw at PAX, I think that anyone coming into pre-alpha with leveled expectations (not a complete game) will be very happy with how far they've come. It's going to be a very fun time for all of us. The game has a learning curve, even at this point in creative mode, so if you're expecting something where your hand is held and everything is as simple as WoW or No Man's Sky, you're going to be disappointed. I know others will disagree with me, but I found it just as easy as learning to play Everquest Landmark.
 
 

I'm guessing that's what the intention is, to make it difficult for solo players to just go wrecking people's stuff while they are offline. But you will still need shield to be able to protect your stuff from large groups.

This is one of the most common concerns that come up.
 
I'm not too worried myself because the game world is so huge, and I plan to spread my assets in multiple locations so they can't all be compromised at once.

Personally I'll never go back to that game no matter what they add, I just got bored with its fundamental design.

Collab fom the discord: Yama and CommanderLouiz

You really need dedicated graphics, Intel HD won't cut it

Yes he's said this before in interviews as well   Space Engineers is based on Minecraft and I've spent more time playing SE and Eve than any other games, which makes DU the perfect game for me.

This is one of the most common concerns that come up.
 
I'm not too worried myself because the game world is so huge, and I plan to spread my assets in multiple locations so they can't all be compromised at once.

The DU gameplay at Gamescom was really amazing. I learned so many new things from talking to JC and actually playing the game that I would like to share them with you.
I’m very surprised no one else started a topic about the Gamescom jet, as there were people who spend much more time at the NQ booth then me…
 
Disclamer: None of this information is official! It’s just my interpretation of the conversation I had with JC. Also none of the features are final! I got the impression that a lot of details are not fully thought out and will be changed during development.

I hope we can freely discuss features “as seen in the Gamescom” without violating any pre-alpha NDA… I just think this will be interesting for those who were not there.
 
Orbital mechanics:
In space there are actual physics calculations like in Kerbal Space Program! I managed to catapult my ship into orbit with atmospheric engines, but it was pulled back in a parabolic curve by the gravity.
JC said that atmospheric engines are actually a bit overpowered, as you could reach escape velocity with them and fly straight into space… without any control… because the engines only work in atmosphere… xD
I have to say that I really liked the atmospheric flight mechanics; they felt very realistic just like a real airplane.
 
Damaging system:
Functional parts get damaged on impact and are supposed to lose their function until they get repaired by hand. (currently tweaked as it’s a little bugy)
 
Lua Scripting:
We already know about the minigames you can create in DU, but what about the multiplayer capabilities? Interestingly enough it’s already possible to connect multiple programming units together by just using global variables, which are shared inside one core unit.
Thereby multiple sup-components on a big ship can be interconnected and exchange information between each other.
In theory it could also be possible to communicate to another construct using the same mechanic, but with a growing distance the update rate of the data would be decrease…
They are thinking about creating a component that can be accessed “globally” by any programming unit in range… but the whole topic about distributed systems will be another milestone that has not been considered jet.
Another thing I asked was if we could use an external IDE for programming, as the ingame one was kind of limited… JC said in theory you could import an external library in the ingame interface, which should access the Lua scripts directly from your PCs hard drive.(not sure about the Lua limitations inside DU though)
Or you just copy the code over to the game for testing.
The Lua development is also tied to the ingame IDE as each connected component actually provides predefined event-function-blocks that are triggered by certain events (e.g. a switch has an on, and an off block) and you have to place Lua code in the corresponding function blocks.
I’m sure in the long run NQ will develop a fully fledged IDE for the game, so this will become no issue at all….
The breakout minigame was also simply some code executed in the “start” function that was able to receive keyboard inputs and generated svgs that were displayed on the screen-unit.
 
Rendering/Performance:
Ok, the game is not the prettiest rendering wise.
All vegetation and functional components get only rendered up to a certain distance (few 100 meters) than they get de-spawned. Also all lighting and shadows are only active up to this distance.
Further away voxels also get simplified a lot… I honestly don’t care about the visuals that much, but I’ll admit the space station looked kind of squashed from far away.  But JC said they are working hard on improving the rendering.
On the flip side flying around was very smooth! In god-mode I flew to the moon of Alioth in 2 seconds without any noticeable frame drops!
 
 
So, that’s all that was new/interesting about the game for me. Maybe most of this was already known, but it wouldn’t hurt to share it here…
I actually did not have enough time to cover all my questions. But others are probably able to share a lot more insights from Gamescom, so feel free to post them to the rest of the community!

Yeah we haven't heard much about character creation in a while. I would like to see some customization that you can make unique, instead of just pick 1 of 6 canned bodies/heads/hair. Also the ability to change clothes/suits. It might not be that advanced at release, but maybe it will get there.

Although much is being said regarding the game mechanics, physics this and that, I have heard very little about character creation, clothing fashion and though for the more techically inclined this matters little in the grand scheme, as a female who appreciates a good charactor creator and loves the silly vanity items like jewlery and clothes, pets and lets not forget SHOES!!! I would like to hear some more about this subject.
I know myself well enough to know I will hate to see my char wearing the same space jumpsuit day in and day out and dont even get me started on those helmets. I can see if you have to be out on the dock of a mother ship working in space because that makes sense, or even farming mats on a planet whos atmosphere isnt oxygen based but all the time?!?!
I know after decades of playing mmorpg's that even the gender bending males (Dudes who play only female chars) like dressing up their chars. I would like to hear others thoughts on this subject and by all means post some images of the kind of fashion you would like to see offered ingame. 

Collab fom the discord: Yama and CommanderLouiz

Collab fom the discord: Yama and CommanderLouiz

Collab fom the discord: Yama and CommanderLouiz

Collab fom the discord: Yama and CommanderLouiz

I enjoy religious and other satire too, but this isn't the proper place for it.

Personally I'll never go back to that game no matter what they add, I just got bored with its fundamental design.

Personally I'll never go back to that game no matter what they add, I just got bored with its fundamental design.

I enjoy religious and other satire too, but this isn't the proper place for it.

I enjoy religious and other satire too, but this isn't the proper place for it.

I took out the religious references and any mention of Jay Cee  

Whether people think it should or shouldn't be allowed doesn't change the fact that NQ are accountable to laws and standards. Satire can be taken to unofficial channels if it violates NQ's terms.