Haunty

Hi Everyone,
 
I realize that this was posted before, but for the life of me, I can't seem to find the original thread. If this one could be merged with that one if it is ever found I would appreciate it :-)
 
I wanted to give up an update about the Community Discord that we've been hosting :-)
 
It is a non-official community discord that several of us from this forum set up several months ago, but we've done our best to uphold the spirit of Dual Universe within it and to bring as many people as possible together under one place where we can chat openly about the game.
 
We're now at 317 Members in Discord from all sorts of alliances and groups. Kickstarter was certainly an exciting, if not stressful, time for all of us in Discord. I also find it amazing that we still manage to find something to talk about every day surrounding Dual Universe.
 
There have been squabbles and rants back and forth, but I think it's refreshing to see people settle out their differences in real-time, and ultimately realize that we're all in the same boat heading towards Alpha/Beta/Release.
 
I look forward to continuing this trend of open discussions and keeping everyone enthusiastic through this long wait ahead :-)
 
 
 
For those that aren't currently aware of the Discord that I'm referring to:
 
http://discord.me/dualuniverse
 
 
 
 

Yeah I believe in the DU Explorers interview with JC he confirmed this, because having it split into multiple constructs (like Space Engineers) would be too computationally expensive for an MMO. Not sure what it will look like in final game, if voxels can be destroyed and disappear, or if they just become damaged and not disappear.

So when talking to JC, as some of you heard, this fact is completely set in stone pretty much, as it's both a performance sacrifice and gameplay enhancement. We know for a fact that there will be hull repairs and so on, but the fact is that voxels are connected to their core no matter if they are physically attached to it. Popular examples of this include Starmade, a game where you build a core, construct voxels around it and some more. The principle of voxels not having to have direct attachment is the same, and it works out fine.
 
It's something that while I can not say on with sure knowledge, I am very certain that this voxel system won't change or have different attributes to affect it.
 
However, with the knowledge that there will be connections between systems, you don't have to worry about people building disconnected engines. 

The way we will likely see this implemented, is in the construction process, each of the elements of a construct will have to be connected. On the other hand, if a part of a construct is damaged "severing" it from the rest of the construct, we will see one of two outcomes.
 
1. The "severed" section is still effectively connected to the rest of the construct, and moves with it despite the voxels holding it on being destroyed. This is probably the most likely outcome, and even though it will be visually jarring for the elements at the end of my wings to continue functioning despite having lost a slice of that wing, it will allow players to construct ships that don't look like cubes or cylinders without fear of losing key components to minor damage. There is a break in immersion, but it can be explained away by having shields maintain structural integrity.
 
2. The "severed" section vanishes as part of the damage. Repairs will be a matter of restoring a construct to its "complete" form, so rounding-up damage like severed parts could work by simply considering anything no longer attached to the core unit destroyed. I don't think this is the likely solution since it'll require more work server-side, since the game will have to check for disconnected parts every time damage is applied, and for rapid fire weapons (like a scatter lazer or gatling gun), that will be a lot of checks. This kind of mechanic would heavily influence ship design, we might just see a whole lot of cube-of-doom ships like in Space Engineers.
 
3. Another possibility when CVC drops is having the damage allocation not fully destroy any voxels, only distort and damage them unless the elements attached are also destroyed.
For example, lets say I've got an arm on the underside of my ship where my landing gear and Gatling gun are attached. If the arm receives damage, the voxels in that area would get bent-up and twisted (to show that they are damaged, and would-be destroyed) but they don't vanish entirely because the gatling and landing gear are still intact. Then when the arm is hit again, the system re-assigns those hits further down the arm (adjacent to the destroyed voxels), damaging the gatling gun and landing gear. When the gatling gun and landing gear are both destroyed, the whole arm vanishes, as there is no longer any healthy voxels or intact elements left. This idea of re-assigning hits to intact areas instead of severing sections would maintain immersion.

Yeah I believe in the DU Explorers interview with JC he confirmed this, because having it split into multiple constructs (like Space Engineers) would be too computationally expensive for an MMO. Not sure what it will look like in final game, if voxels can be destroyed and disappear, or if they just become damaged and not disappear.

Welcomes. Oh wow, I remember Infinity's combat prototype, which had some very cool ideas. I kinda forgot about that game because it never seemed to gain any momentum in development.

I don't think so - otherwise you need to start thinking about aging characters - if the game ran 10 years (which it could), any 18 year old character would be 78...
 
 
True - that will really determine (staying on topic) the logical number of "hours" in a day once we know that measurement.
 
 
It's better English than a lot of native speakers on the forums (Only correction I'd make - it is "get it" - not paste tense in this particular case as "get" is a synonym of "understand" - (you can test this by substitution - "I didn't quite understood (got) it" makes no sense, so we leave it as "understand (get) it". But I digress.
 
In terms of Role Play - implementation is by consensus - we use these dates in our background stories etc.
 
For visual display in game, on the forums etc - we do a simple transform using seconds.
 
All modern computing / digital systems generally use seconds, converting to different time/calendar formats (for instance, the Gregorian calendar we use, or US date format, or Japanese Imperial Calendar format, Stardates etc) as required. It's actually quite simple to customise or use these same bits of code/common functions in a range of programming languages, or write your own, to format the seconds into a date / time pattern that you like.
 
 
As an SI second is "the time that elapses during 9,192,631,770 (9.192631770 x 109 ) cycles of the radiation produced by the transition between two levels of the cesium 133 atom" , and these rate of these cycles are unaffected by gravity, Earth, the Sun etc - the second is a non-derived unit measured relative to something that is unaffected by the presence of the Solar System or indeed, gravity or pyhsics on Alioth. So SI seconds are unaffected.
 
Stardates are completely made up to suit each TV show in the franchise. There is no "standard" or consistency - it's a pure TV convention with each show in the franchise having it's own "Stardate creation rules". The MMO probably follows the rules for one of the shows.

Stardates were nonsense numbers that constantly jumped around, just like warp speeds before TNG (where warp 10 was defined as infinite speed, which also messed with time and thus people's evolution, and was the subject of a Voyager episode). In the alternate movie timeline, it's Earth dates. 2135.32 is the year 2135, February 1 (the 32nd day of the year). I don't remember how/if it accommodates leap years.
 
I don't understand everyone saying that SI units would change. Six of the seven are currently based on universally demonstrable processes. The oscillations of a caesium atom (the definition of a second) doesn't change just because we spent 9000 years in cryosleep. The only unit currently dependent upon some prototype is the kilogram, and that will be redefined next year to a universal constant.

Forget the promises made for distant future. If you have alpha/beta access, join Alpha Academy, org where you can play & test with others as soon as alpha starts and decide what exactly will you do much later. No promises, no commitments, no limits. After release you can keep playing with those you met or just do whatever you want.

Hello. Have you played any other voxel building games before? Even if you find out you don't enjoy building things it sounds like you can just buy pre-made ships/blueprints. And programming/scripting is not necessary, just something that is available to customize functions afaik.

Hi, I'm fairly new also. I've read something about a Discord; here it is: https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/828-du-discord-community/