Shynras

They said they may add some kind of istance where you can design ships and create blueprints safely (you don't create a real ship, just the blueprint that you have to build later in the real open world). So it's basically a construct editor, we don't know if you can actually use those constructs and test them in that environment.

-you can chat -you can interact with far away elements in a certain range (like you can access a market unit on a distant planet, if your communication technology has a good enough range, so you can check your auctions, order stuff, look at the bounties, ... since there are going to be many elements there could be a ton of stuff like those to do) -you can walk inside the ship, you can play minigames i guess if you built them -you can build. I'm not sure you can modify your main ship while it's travelling, but you can build a small fighter or something else inside your ship. -you can check, arrange your inventory, craft stuff, and so on. -various dangerous encounters (maybe aliens, wormholes, and stuff like that) after release The only doubt i have is, since there's no complete automation, maybe one player would be required to stay in the cockpit controlling the ship, so you may be limited in those activities if you're playing solo.

there's a lot of ship designers already, i guess we'll all fly in beautiful ships xD

Sometime is probably inefficient to deconstruct an old design ship, so there could actually be a used ships market for those xD

Ye i'm ok with the "bigger the element" better the efficiency, as long it's a possibility. Imagine people building large ships at start, they don't have the tech yet for that, so they'll use a large amount of small thrusters with high fuel consumption; after a few months the tech will be finally ready, and the ship will be upgraded or abandoned. One day you'll see that wreck on an asteroid and you'll tell your son "this is how we used to fly" xD. Btw it's not only an improvement on customization, it changes the hard cap of the tech into a softcap, you're still limited but if you really put effort on it, you can overcome that cap a little bit. It gives space to some new interesting design, better reusability (when you upgrade your market to tier 2, what do you do with the tier 1 you had?) and more

Some elements can be combined to get a greater effect, this is what i'd define as scalable (i.e. a bunch of small thruster on a ship, forces are combined and the resultant is the same of a bigger thruster) We know that thrusters work this way already (i'd guess that bigger ones are more efficient, or something to give a reasons to players to use the bigger stuff for immersion and lag purposes) but what about other elements? -Can we add market units of different sizes to get more buy/sell order or do they have their own "information storage" and "item storage"? -Can we add multiple sensor of different sizes and capabilities together to get a bigger effect? -Can we add multiple core units of different sizes to a central one (that is in control of the ship), to improve the size of the construct we can build? And so on for all the other elements...This would let us customize constructs better, because we could "subdivide" elements.

What is confirmed :The alpha is meant to fix bugs and test things, it's not early access and some features necessary to make the sandbox work will be missing. There'll be a wipe at the end of alpha and at the end of beta. My guess: they'll make us play the base game with all the features they have ready, like building and mining, since they decided to delay it to september specifically to give us a better experience, so they'll likely use it not only to test but to promote the game (so probably no NDA, i mean JC has never been scared of showing the state of the game). As far as we know (from the first devidiary i think) they already have a testing server with bots running fulltime (not sure if it's still the case), so since alpha players are not that many, I wouldn't be surprised if they'll keep the servers running most of the time. Another reason for that to happen is to test stuff you'd need more time to develop (big ships, rare bugs, ...) and to understand better how the player behaviour will shape the sandbox in the long term

Ye i know and i agree with that, but if you just let 1 player to control a single turret at any given time, i think it could even be better (your arguments would work anyway). The reason is that combat is not going to be exactly like eve, so there's space for that: -in Du ships are going to be way smaller than eve ones (because it's not that easy to build one at that scale) aswell as ranges (because the server update rate frequency tech and because if you're playing small ships you don't even get a chance to see your opponent if you're fighting at kilometers). -Ships are customizable, it's not like eve where you have cannons everywhere to always have the same amount of cannons shooting (so no fov gameplay) This makes it that you may have to choose between having 3 turret on top, 1 each on the sides and none below, or some other configurations, so it's not guaranteed you have all the turrets available to shoot at the same time. If you have 1 guy controlling 5 turrets, with 3 players you already have 15 turrets in your ships, this makes it that fov obscuration is way less likely and requires less skill for the pilot to move the ship accordingly to turrets fov (both allied and enemy). A good example is planetside 2 where multiple people fly on the same ship, and the pilot need to fly in a certain way to give fov to 3 turrets, and if he doesn't only 1 or 2 turret may be able to shoot.

That doesn't really solves the problems i mentioned. Anyway there' s a case in which this could work, and is when it gives some kind of disadvantage to make using 1 turret only a viable choice. But i wouldn't like it anyway, since if you can shoot from different turrets at the same time from different position, there's less skill required from the driver to keep up your turret fov and the enemy skill to outmanuvre you is less important too. This would make this game an even more "stats win you the fight" game, and i don't see the need for that, it would even kill a lot ship diversity.

You can't map a 3d volumetric world with a 2d map, the games that have this, have "fake" 3d worlds.So, there's no other way to di it. Other than that DU doesn't have fixed routes (used for istancing) so there are no lines between solar systems. Btw, since we're not leavig alioth and the first solar system for the first months/years, we may get a simplified map at the beginning that would be improved later

by the graphic i'd say google sketchup

That doesn't work, actually it makes things even worse. If a player can control 5 turrets at the same time, everyone would do that. This means that a turret would be 5x less effective than a turret you'd have in a 1 guy 1 turret scenario, for balance reasons. Other than that, more lag, small groups able to control giants ships (or gunbeds) with dozens of turrets and less skill related to turrets positioning (ship design) and crew positioning (crew management)

A single player should not be able to control more than 1 turret at the same time, or the "1 player manned titan" would become a "2 players manned titan", not a big difference, the problem persists. It would be cool and balanced if you could switch between turrets from distance with some sort of cost

DU is not similar to SE, I don't understand why people keep comparing it. The best way to describe it is "Eve Online with Minecraft features", and it's way different than "Minecraft with Eve Online features". I'm saying that even because I'm afraid someone could get the wrong idea about this game. Regarding Op question, mining elements that you can mount on construct have not been confirmed. I think I heard them saying something like "maybe, as long there's a player manually mining", that considering their vision about the game, it's a realistic assumption even if I remember wrong. As long as it doesn't break the game, they'd like to add everything (following a list of priorities though) Mining with a ship would consume more energy (if you'd mine more than by hand), the equipment is expensive, it's more risky since your ship is valuable and mining is mostly a pvp activity, so there's no need for further balance to reward the "by hand" mining players

ok then, sorry but i didn't have time to read it

You can call it energy, fuel, computing power or like you want, it's the same thing. It's a limited resource used to balance constructs.

Just download google sketchup, it's free. You don't know the elements anyway so you can't design in details, just shapes and colours is what you need. The game uses dual contouring, you can design any 3d shape, there's no need for a specific Du editor.

What I was stating in the other thread was the same thing, you're using a core unit, i was talking about the energy unit. You say that a medium ship core has 80 cells, i say that a medium energy unit has 80 energy, same concept. Since we know energy will be in the game, the only occasion in which you'd add something like computing power is if you want 2 resources to balance ships. I don't know if that's good or not, depends on many factors regarding elements that are not created already. Why would you add 2 resources to balance the same thing? It gives devs more options to create a larger variety of elements (like a very low energy consumption turret, that would be broken if energy would be the only thing able to control ship designs), but at the same time limits a little more the players I guess and make game balance a little harder too, so I'm not sure about that.

You call it computing power, i call it energy, we're talking about the same thing. The only thing i do not agree on, is that i don't want a fixed number of turrets on a given core unit tier, but let the computing power (aka energy) limit that. You can't use infinite turrets anyway since they require a lot of energy when active, like eve. If there's a fixed number, like 5 turrets on tier3 core unit, the best ship for that specific core unit will always mount 5 turrets, while if you use computing power (energy) to indirectly limit the amount of turrets someone can use, maybe you'll encounter ships with 6 turrets that gave up his shield system to get that energy they needed to make it work. Or maybe you'll find someone with 4 turrets because he wanted to make his ship sturdier and he needed a better repair unit. Eve works the same way, there are slot indeed, but you still can't activate all your modules if they consume too much energy, that's enough to balance the game. Fixed caps are good only in games where devs need to control the balance, while in Du balance comes naturally from the players through the quality/price equilibrium.

I don't like the "computing power" idea tbh, it's like in robocraft, and feels rather limiting. I think there are better solutions to that. @Twerk I'm not a fan of SC, actually i don't think I'll ever play it xD

This is more of a "how to make it work" thread instead of "there are automated turrets?" or "can we control them with lua?" threads that we already discussed in the past. NQ probably didn't work much on the fighting aspect already, so any kind of information/assumption I make here, may be subject to change. A turret is an element that can be mounted both on mobile or static constructs. Its role is to damage other constructs or players, eventually destrying/killing them, by shooting projectiles or something able to deal damage, depending on its damage type (thermal, kinetic, missiles, and so on). We know that there'll be different tiers/types of turrets that can be researched, they'll have maintenance costs (either energy, ammo or both). We know also that there may be automated turrets, a lot less efficient than players controlled ones. That said, what's your pov? Should we have automated turrets? How would you balance them? There should be a limit to the amount of turrets you can mount on a construct depending on the core unit size (core units have tiers)? Feel free to discuss. My point of view: - I don't think we need automated turrets for mobile constructs, maybe just for static constructs to defend territories, this depends on how the territory system will work. -I don't like much the idea of automated turrets stacking. If you add more and more turrets you'd become eventually really hard to attack, and it's not immersive. I don't like the idea of limiting the amount of automated turrets you can place with a standard number depending on the core unit tier. So the idea is to make automated turrets extremely expensive on the energy side, so that you have to make choice on how to distribute power (no hard cap) but at the same time you can't do a wall of turrets. -I'd like some kind of camera element or control element that let's a player switch between turrets to take control of them, I mean it's sci fi, i can easily imagine a control room where all the turrets get managed without the need of a physical guy inside the turret. The reason is that it gives some space to skilled player to make the difference: imagine a fight between 2 similar ships, one with 10 turrets and 1 player in each turret, one with 12 turret and 4 players controlling 3 turrets each. As you may know, you don't usually shoot with all the turrets at the same time, since they can't rotate 360° in any direction, so having 1 player per turrets is kinda overdoing it. The group of 4 players would have a chance to win, if they manage to control those 12 turrets efficiently enough. The alternative is that those 4 players would run a 4 turret ship with zero chance of winning (still talking about ships of the same size). This makes the turret guy job a little more dynamic, hard and if you want, fun. Ships with more players would still have an advantage, especially if 10 vs 4, but at least you can manage to win a 5 vs 7 or close matches like this one. -Turrets controlled from distance still have the advantage of not requiring position, so the "management system" should consume energy or have some kind of cons (alternatively a manned turret should have some kind of benefit), to avoid everyone controlling turrets from the same room just because it's the best way. I think that should both be possible approaches. So the idea is: high energy automated turret, medium energy distance controlled turret and low energy physically manned turret. Ofc "energy" doesn't need to be the only difference, to balance those there are many parameters that could be changed. -There may be a turret that generates ammo by itself, so it's very efficient and creates gameplay for ships aiming towards a sustain fight (or fatigue fight), but loses a lot of power or consume a lot of energy. For any other turret ammo are required: a player would have the role of refilling not just one turret but a group of turrets, running around the ship with ammo, he need to physically reach each turret. An automated ammo refilling system is also an option, this hovewer has heavy cons, like being expensive in the first place and having mantainance costs like weight, energy and so on (if it comes in a physical form (tubes, conveyors and so on) it would become a weak point of your ship too) I can't think about anything else right know, I may edit this for more in the future.

I mean, there are already similar packages to the kickstarter ones, you can't really ask for more. Then, people don't spend 100+ euros for the lols (usually), and i doubt many wants to call themselves "mefsh" (...btw beautiful name!), so you should be fine. If you buy the gold digital you're still able to create an alt in alpha, so before anyone but the kickstarters (and the kickstarters already have reserved their name, if they took yours there's not much you can do anyway)

Not the same, but still there's still an enormous amount of problem. You need to consider that f2p players don't usually want (or are able to) to stick with a game and play it for a long period of time (that is how Du should be played), they'd leave and give a bad review about it. A freemium system also, give the chance for them to give a bad (undeserved) review about the game around the internet: they'll say "Oh, that game is P2W you can't do much without paying a subscription", even if it is what the game was supposed to be from the beginning (that way they do not think about the game as a quality P2P game, but as a greedy freemium game). You'd need to be careful when parking your ship to avoid being impaled, in the huge jungle of weiners and boobs F2P players will build.

Why do you feel the need for that? Free means cheaters and gold farmer. Free means higher prices on DACs and devaluation on resources for paying players because f2p players will spend their days mining, trying to get a DAC, and having a bad experience while doing so. And you'd need to lock access to each element, because each on its own can provide some form of gameplay (to manage elements on a multicrew ship, or just to shoot with a rifle, you'd not need to pay), since his game doesn't work like eve in this regard. Then the community would become toxic and a lot of people would abuse free accounts to check markets far awsy, "teleport", spy, and do some other tasks that requires a simple puppet standing somewhere. I only see a lot of bad things, just to please a couple of kids that can't afford to pay 10$/month and that wouldn't contribute much to the game, since their gameplay would be extremely limited and they'll spend their time mining for weeks just to be able to come out from the freemium hell. The business model is decided already, give up with this kind of threads.

I wasn't trying to be cocky or hostile, so I'm sorry if that was your impression, but my english is kinda limited.