Haunty

Ever since I stopped playing an mmo a long time ago I went on an MMO hiatus to figure out why I had the urge to quit.  Long story short, I figured it out, so for a good while I have been seeking a new MMO to play, but I was unable to find a good one.  I thought about what theme I wanted, and what kind of gameplay I desired. 
 
I became interested in Elite: Dangerous and have been playing it for a good while but getting my bearings in that game has proven pretty difficult, even when it became easy to get currency.  It wasn't a true mmo either, so it felt more like a tolerable grind.  I liked the space sim, but I wanted to  feel more immersed, so I decided to look at different space-themed mmos. 
 
Eve looked too much to join, different steam games were mostly in early access, and most of those ended up having a game destroying patch.  I saw certain non-mmo games have certain mmo elements I really liked, like player-driven stories and economy, player building placement, etc.  At my core I'm a builder, whether it's small like gadgets or big like buildings or ships, but never found a game that I could really get behind that incorporated all of those ideas.  I also love exploring, seeing the game environments for what they are.
 
There have been potential games, but like I said, early access on steam, and one game in particular that I felt had everything I wanted had a lot of negative reviews.  This left me disheartened about what I could play...wanted a game that felt real, where I can treat it like reality where I have to be careful and do whatever I can to progress.  Many games didn't feel that way.
 
Having been shown the kickstarter for dual universe, I took immediate intrigue.  Not only does it seem to have everything I wanted, but the avatar development looks great.  I played entropia universe, and while I liked the possibilities, I disliked how the game felt like gambling.  I liked how there are no leveling up avatars, but just developing skills, but it felt far to grindy to be something worth investing into.  Dual though seems more refined in that area...can't wait to see the details on that.
 
Overall, I backed dual universe because I am sick and tired of mmos being so mediocre...i'm basically backed against the MOBA wall right now, along with Elite, so if dual becomes the game I sincerely desired, I can finally be properly entertained...
 
One last thing...I also backed the game Eco because of how micromanaging it is...basically that is a non-mmo game where every little action could have consequences and destroy the world you made.  I like that pressure.  Dual seems to have that as well.  I have high hopes, but from my experiences, I will keep expectations at bay. 
 
Hopefully those who I meet here on the forums and in the game can be great game friends.  Let's immerse.

Well I did it. 
 
I've punted some cash and got myself invested. 
 
I'm really looking forward to playing the game!
 
 

Welcomes. I also played Eve in beta and alpha, but quit 6 or 7 years ago.

Since the new version of the website is now giving us the option to back the game via paypal (https://community.dualthegame.com/pledge), I have now done so.
Very much looking forward to the alpha!

I just wanted to show my progression on a wallpaper for my pc of the core unit I have been working on, Most of the model is finished but I need to add small textures such as the "D" and the "dynamic core unity" text on the outside. Also planning to add some nano former effects floating around it (as seen in some of the published videos) and alter the colours and make some for the static cube unit.
 
Thoughts on which style would look better.
-Lighter Background Variant

 
-Darker Background Variant

https://youtu.be/18AzodTPG5U

Considering the lack of pre-made content making ancient ruins or random derelict ships a non-pissibilty, but also considering how cool and exciting it is to find stuff like that, I have been thinking about this and how I think, as a more long-term goal, it's something if a necessity. Since the devs won't put anything player made in the game then it's up to the players to make exploration more interesting. As much as I cringe at the concept of vacuum inexplicably decaying metal, I would be fine with it if it meant that ancient ships could be found floating through space.
 
It's not something I would expect at launch, and I'm sure it could be annoying and require balancing, but I feel that it is something that could really make the game more interesting!

Here's a game that I have played through EA and it just released this week.  Maybe I have been playing it too much the past 24 hours but the menu song is peacefully addicting.
 


 
Oh yeah and it is a good game at $25 on steam. You create your own armor, weapons, vehicles, create settlements assign people, really cool for those waiting for DU's alpha!

I have it: https://youtu.be/VVkbdfxiKxM
At about 17:40

I have it: https://youtu.be/VVkbdfxiKxM
At about 17:40

I have it: https://youtu.be/VVkbdfxiKxM
At about 17:40

https://youtu.be/18AzodTPG5U

Deleted
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

the fifth of November
 


 
 
 
Because .... why not?

I wouldn't be worried with the "ugly" wastelands. You must realize that the world will be huge and there will be many areas. One of those will be industrial and same as in real world, you will see huge craters from stuff that was mined/harvested out. It's ok. Many areas will transform into wasteland, but many things will be built on top of it and there will also be areas terraformed into something beautiful. People will create those landmarks, cities, whatever.
 
And it will also help the economy. Once the materials are harvested, companies will have to relocate to build another bases and continue the harvesting. And they can sell the old bases cheaply or keep them for any other purpose:-)
 
I want this world without regeneration, where every change is permanent.

https://youtu.be/18AzodTPG5U

This was a weekend project of mine, mainly fueled by boredom, to build a scale 1 Voxel model of a Dynamic Core Core Unit .
 

 

 


 

 
I was planning on building a 3d printed model of one to look nicer, but I haven't gotten around to doing that yet :-/
 
 

Should sum up everything quite well - we all can not wait for the alpha. . .

I imagine I'll start out as a carebear and eventually be in some kind of org/alliance as a grunt soldier or reservist at least.

Welcomes. I see you already found the Discord. Check out the DUE weekly roundtable: https://www.twitch.tv/duexplorers
Developer interviews if you haven't seen them: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2LK1bjuMG3zwX3u59ANlCQGzETQ557Vy

The wider gaming community has long displayed some negative characteristics. One that springs to mind is the desire to see a project fail. So these type of questions are going to arise again and again and again and if NQ are not careful they will be feeding into fears. And that's not helpful when you are trying to crowdfund.
 
Let me put it this way. When I see a well-considered post such as the OP's go largely unanswered by the community (and that's not an attack on anyone here) or ignored by the devs a horrible question arises in my mind: "have I may have bought into another Starforge, NMS or any other turkey I care to mention?" And I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking this. Of course, there might be many legitimate reasons why the OP can't be answered and I've not lost faith in DU as a concept. However, I do think it would be very wise if NQ broke their radio silence very soon and started addressing such questions on a regular basis.

They have already answered really, not much more they can do right now besides releasing the source code, it's just a question of believing it. And if you don't all you can do is wait until you can see it for yourself.
 
The way I see it, there are no issues with massive universes and procedural voxel planets in other games. The issue is scaling the number of clients in a single shard. NQ have focused on those issues and come up with their dynamic space splitting for the server side, and what I call "Network LOD" for the client side. In theory it makes sense.

They have already answered really, not much more they can do right now besides releasing the source code, it's just a question of believing it. And if you don't all you can do is wait until you can see it for yourself.
 
The way I see it, there are no issues with massive universes and procedural voxel planets in other games. The issue is scaling the number of clients in a single shard. NQ have focused on those issues and come up with their dynamic space splitting for the server side, and what I call "Network LOD" for the client side. In theory it makes sense.

The planets in game are not life size, I believe the starting planet is 100km in diameter, if that helps. That is the same size as the planets in Space Engineers and there aren't any server issues in regards to modified planets and asteroids even without the zoning tech that DU has (SE is open-source btw), in SE the issue is mainly with active floating player-made constructs that does not scale; but in DU the player constructs use the same voxel tech as the planets. I don't know any of the technical stuff so that's just my outside observation. Hope you can get some more detailed answers.

Ok i'm a developer myself, oddly enough this is my dream and I have been crunching this problem for years trying to wait out hardware that can handle the kind of workload involved here so please don't take this as an insult but I'd like to see some rationality here as to how this really works (although I accept that there's some reasonable limits due to IP protection on your part).
 
So gut feeling here ...
Take Minecraft and smarten up the voxel tech a lot adding LOD and lets face it much better volume management (that should help it scale a little bit) and then allow the creation of multiple "volumes" within the game world. 
 
Lets put some real numbers in to this to exlain the problem I am facing ...
Take the moon (that's 3474km in diameter), now lets assume that the voxel data is the same as Minecraft's where "each voxel is 1 cubic meter" so you need a volume of 3,474,000^3 which is a total of 41,926,580,000,000,000,000 voxels to represent the moon (ever seen a planet that small? ... hmmm, no i heaven't either).
 
Lets be reasonable about this ...
Even at 1 bit per voxel that's a lot of data to crunch but the reality here is that you would need more than just 1 bit per voxel, with the bulk of voxel engines I've seen or written using at least 1 byte usually 2 per voxel.
 
Taking a "non uniform object" example ...
In one of the videos you guys said the space station was 4km in size (so that's a cubic volume of 64,000,000,000 voxels asusming I did my math right), even that seems to raise a few red flags for me but that volume is mostly empty space so i'd estimate you're using maybe an 8th of that or less but that's still a station with actual values for maybe 8,000,000,000 voxels.
 
I just bought a brand new nVidia 1080 GTX graphics card and even if I have that crunch the numbers on each of its 2.5k+ gpu cores it's still going to busy for some time handling that amount of raw data for a whole scene so it's unlikely any client ever sees that raw data instead there must be some magic going on on the server to only send "mesh data" / some form of "view data" from a given view of a volume at a given LOD.
Doing that though, puts a hell of a lot of computation on the server farm when you have say 1,000+ players all editing stuff in a small area all that computation is going to get pricey, and farming that load only adds network traffic and the need for more copies of that data to reduce data access overheads!
 
...
 
Speculation:
A view of a "planet" is generated by using a fractal algorithm that describes the shape at varying levels of detail depending on how close you are and then any changes are applied to that using some clever "this 1 Voxel change isn't visible here but that 1,000 Voxel change does X" type algorithm.
 
The raw Voxel data is only stored when edited / player created ... but that could get expensive over time as Voxels are easily editable and very fast raising the question is this a sustainable platform or is there some plan to "retire old data"?
 
Large "ships" / "stations" are beyond me ... you can't "algorithmic-ally compute" those so how does this all work without going beyond the laws of physics for computing the data or network load?
 
...
 
The raw numbers are massive but computers are good with raw numbers and large data sets so the problem appears to be "interesting" to say the least.
 
The closest we have seen to this is something like Everquest Landmark and the failed Everquest Next project, those games were built on the Voxelfarm engine. 
http://www.voxelfarm.com/
 
I once had a discussion with the Creator of Voxelfarm by email when doing some research in to Voxel engines (I was debating writing my own or using one someone else wrote to build a pet project) and 2 key points came out ...
  1. Small or big, apparently doesn't matter if your search algorithm is smart enough you have a fixed cost (but that lost me)
  2. Physics is where it gets hard not simply drawing!
 
I tried landmark out but it suffered from some serious limitations ...
  1. The sharding issue (to handle the network load) which you have somehow solved (or claim to) yet not even the eve team with it's years of experience has cracked that particular problem (simulations don't count).
  2. The game ran slow, even on a high end PC typical frame rates were poor <30 fps was normal (although I admit I was playing with it in beta)
  3. Persistence just didn't happen ... I would dig a tunnel, walk away from it, come back ... and the hole is gone! ... and why ... disk space is expensive when you need that much of it.
  4. The raw numbers here just don't add up unless you have massive voxels (like greater than 10 cubic meters) or you have a chunking algorithm that can spread the load over many servers (something landmark didn't do), the problem there of course is network load leading back to point 1.
 
...
 
So i'd like to ask for more details on how this actually works as looking at raw numbers for Voxel data clearly is not helping me and you guys must have some answer to this raw scale problem!
FYI: I wanted to pledge during the Kickstarter and this is the reason I haven't yet ... really hoping you guys can put my mind at ease as I'm seriously considering pledging enough to get me alpha access (if that's still an option).