wesbruce

I think JC's still thinking that through but it looks a bit like he will go with the second life / landmark solution. Someone can go into your claim but can't attack and destroy anything. They may be able to interact with some things: doors, trade machines, repair units, junk chests. They may be able to farm, mine or fell trees. Entropia does this. They may be able to interact with the claim terminal but only to hack it. If they can get to it! They must put virus or worm in it that takes a day to work and tells you offline via an SMS to your phone or an email, somethings up. If the site, claim is abandoned that's easy the hack works. You don't loose the blue prints only the resources. But if you want that base you come back hit the antivirus button in the claim UI and the worm/ virus is gone. There may be some who fight to defend the worm/ virus while it works and those that battle them to keep the claim.

Read my posts I've dealt with many of those points. The kid in the dino speeder is probably the only one that needs more work. The kid is probably below the age threshold in the EULA but no one reads those any way and there will be a lot of kids. He can make a ship in VR and zoom around like a maddy in VR with no fear of a crash or ambush destroying it. You can't lose the blue print on ship destruction. So the amount of effort put into detailed design is retained. Put a Resurrection unit near your warehouse full of resources and rebuild it. A detailed ship with lots of rooms etc will be lighter and more manoeuvrable than the low poly lump with a rocket attached. A detailed ship with lots of rooms etc will attract crew players to man the combat and repair system. You have the advantage. It's very hard to destroy anything: vehicles, building, the ships and stations are not one shot kill. Damage knocks out systems and leaves drifting hulk to be fought over man on man, corridor by corridor. To take a ship or building you must hack the core unit and that may take a whole day. There will be a lot of players who will go after the greifers in their low poly rockets if a crying kid shows up in chat. Also on player made elements, there are a few in the works showing up in various image archives that you will like. Wrap a few voxels around them and you have any style you want but many want DU to have a style and a lore of its own. It can be done but its a lot of data to send player to hordes of players. And other people own the patents. If you want a super smooth voxel warhammers ship it will come. If the combination of JC's server architecture and Dual Contouring voxels works then every major game company will buy it to make their gameworld. mmm playable tyranid ships or Ork hulks. No better D & D spell jammers! Lastly on payments; the main problem is not the payment system but what happens to your stuff if you go off line for months or years. It's the problem of abandoned players accounts. NQ has an innovation. Effectively you licence it all to someone: a friend, a guild or org. A will. They inherit it all. That delays the problem a little. They may have scrapped it all but they owe you one and they may have your blue prints somewhere. Elsewhere I've discussed off line or client side archiving. It's a possibility. I'm not however a dev. Supposedly you can't loose your Second Life character and all his stuff yet I have twice. It's nothing to do with billing.

Eagleone your missing Several points. All those games you say failed covered development costs and made a profit. The fact that busy people move on to other games and other things is normal. Games wain that's normal. It happens to all types of games with all types of billing systems. No one has found the golden key to the metaverse. Secondly NQ can sell DAC in packs of 6, 12, 20, 24, etc the equivalent of a larger B2P price without any trouble. That is also the equivalent of renting the servers. Second life was the first to sell server space represented as rented sim space. The same model you recommend. While people still play Second Life its aged, It's not easy to up date to a much more modern system and some of us early builders never had enough room. We lost everything when the rent came due and we could not find the money. (10000 prims) Renting servers is not a solution to permanent archiving of abandoned accounts. That's a totally different problem to any existing billing system. I've discussed it elsewhere. Likewise Planet Entropia nests its server payments and content creation costs in the form of rent for buildings, and the purchase of ammunition, and mining probes. Again some of the things you talk about. MindArk is doing nicely but it's dated and new content trickles in very slowly. The sales model you want does not guarantee longevity. No sales model does... Sadly. NQ has a staged plan. Four games in one deployed in stages: Planetary survival with a SF theme. First person Sim City! (That will be huge when the city building fans catch on. Yes we will need roads.) PvP combat with large armies and player made bases, gravtanks and aircraft. Interplanetary and interstellar 4X eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate! Also first person. Each stage will get a flood of new people buying DAC. If you can't afford DAC you can get in via one of the org sites and work for your DAC earning them in game from NQ or orgs.

I've found the duel contouring paper and a few others. Interesting stuff. http://www.frankpetterson.com/publications/dualcontour/dualcontour.pdf Not easy to implement for an armature like me.

There were not many surprises for me. Everything is limited by server size and team size and the need to limit the flow of data to millions of users. One question was answered it's not marching cubes but a improvement on marching cubes or tetrahedrons. Need to search up all the newer voxel signographs. The industrial craft 2 indicates the tech tree's roots so it does look like the disposal unit will be a macerator or recycler analogue. A way to get rid of all the rock. A modded minecraft tech tree with shields, etc would be cool but it's a lot of work and testing. Direwolf20 would love it.

Yep if JC's server architecture works every MMO game company will want it and so pushing their people to fund the experiment will be a major thing. If it works every game will be using it. The metaverse quadruples in size over night. If Dual Universe makes JC Baillie as rich as Markus 'Notch' Persson they can expect a low asking price for his technology.

Nice idea but I think power will matter. The more power the more you keep. No power the Resurrection Node is off. Res some where else. Base power = lose stuff but your home. Lots of power = keep all your stuff. Clearly the Resurrection Node is designed to drive your quest for energy early. Still not sure how they are going to Stop people slipping into your base via you Resurrection node, looting stiff and digging out. They have three game designers listed now so that's progress. They may be on it. A lot of resurrection nodes will be in trap rooms or have a one way exit system if not. "Jump off this cliff, it'll be fine!" They could use a colour or number indexing system; each RN has a value you res at the one matching your preset the value.

Yep that sounds like JC's plan but it means to do even a small battle you may need a hundred full sets of guns and gear in a armoured warehouse on the actual battle field. I think by mid alpha a semi-locked grave will be clearly needed. The prevalence of that in minecraft is telling. Death chest was one of the very first minecraft mods. Loosing everything is a recipe for hundreds rage quitting.

True Jeronimo but it had to be noted that people will try and do this and it costs money and time to undo. It was mainly a warning to the dev's, and you would be amazed how many attachment points can be abused.

You think you have nerves, the alpha is jan/ feb next year, only 4-5 months away. 4 months goes in no time at all in the world of game crafting.

Landmark is not a game its a permanent development test server. That was always the stated aim and still is. It has game play and building but it is never meant to be out of alpha. That's what all of us that signed up early signed up to. Not sure I like the style that's developed, too gun like, and Everquest Next may take some time but It is what it said it world be.

A choice at the game start screen would work. However JC is looking to create a game where people are forced to work together and and hard mode setting or difference in start mode would work against that. My suggestions are all about people coming late to the game.

It occurs to me that just doing a remake of a minecraft mod pack at smaller voxel size would not be good enough. (love all three mods though) That's why I had levers, wedges, pick-hoe etc. I.e. even a minecraft veteran faces a little learning curve if some low technology is enabled. It needs to new, temporary, low technology and only ever as a player choice competing with the nanoformers speed and power so you have genuine bragging rights. That is the challenge. The nanoformer uses power to mine and harvest. In building mode I would assume it needs no power. If its out of power you take damage. That's already been talked about. It a driver to technology development and a hint that a lower technology, power saver game mode, may be an option. But NQ probably would want to keep low technology to a minimum. It's extra work. I have an idea: I'm putting together models of some lower technology elements these are not meant to be usable but when you make a foundry from scratch the nanoformer first makes the low technology stuff then uses them to make the high technology Foundry which then replaces the low tech stuff instantly. One mesh with charcoal kiln, bloomery, and a pile of resources: stone, dirt, fuel and ore. It is only meant to be visible for a few seconds. It beats scaffolding. At the moment I'm stuck for a good copper (Malachite) ore Texture. Most out there would look rubbish on a 25 cm voxel and a 4 m tunnel wall. Making the ores look convincing will be a challenge. I need to do a little research on texture tools in gimp and blender. I'm not a dev so I don't know if they have someone on that problem yet. There is also the question, If you have a nanoformer why do you need a foundry or 3d printer? Some technobabble is needed. My best suggestion is that the nanoformer can move things but can't make phase changes; Smelting, melting, setting glues and plastic are all phase changes. Hence the need for four base machines: foundry, 3D printer, assembler and the disposal unit {only in the art but that is clearly a grinder }. The next game design question, If you have all this high technology do you need all the ores? Copper Malachite, tin Cassiterite, Lead Galena, the three iron ores - Native Iron (asteroids), Hematite, and Magnetite? The precious ores make sense, gold, silver = electronics. Then you have rare earths. Rare earths are not found in ordinary dirt. Some ores like lithium are not even generally found underground much. They are dry mountain ores and salts. How detailed and scientifically accurate do you want to be? The real hard mode is for the game designer. As for easy mode players having an advantage over hard mode players that is the point.

Easy mode; As described already. Hardish mode; someone has moved your cryopod out of the safe zone to the other side of the planet. Dig and hide. But the nanoformer works. Hard mode; As per hardish mode but the nanoformer is on the fritz you take damage every time you use it but you can make a healing booster that fixes it if your close, you can pick stuff up by making a lever and cut stone with a hammer and wedge, Strip branches form trees with a pruning hook. Dig dirt with primitive pick-hoe. make a 3D printer and fix the nanoformer with a repair kit from it. Extreme mode: defective cryopod, you emerge a zombie. You can walk, jump, turn, melee and make a nanoformer attack but nothing else works until you harvest a vital resource to fix your brain and nanoformer. And everyone is hunting you because you have a useful resources drop. How long can you last as a space zombie. [i keep writing about space zombies and awaiting someone saying "Noooooo no zombies!" But All I hear is a worrying silence. Scary. ] Hard and Extreme mode would both be sweet griefer penalties.

I would suspect that most of the alpha and beta wipes will effect some of our saved builds and leave others intact but they will not work in the newer version. I have some early stuff in landmark that I would never want to see the light of day ever again. Hangs head in shame. I have some ships in space engineers that wont work at all because of up dates. I think some of the best alpha and beta build will show up as ruins. I've suggested that. Replace the elements and core unit with stone or loot chests drop them on a new planet to be found. We could even have a few themed build competitions. The great sky whale build off.

For combat we will need some kind of temporary battle respawn. A deploy-able stretcher/ Resurrection unit with a limited range. Medical skills may give higher level of retained items, lower debuffs and longer range. This makes your medics vital in the battle because they create and deploy the things. Other wise battles will be locked in around the main spawns like planetside 2 with out sunderers or planet entropia.

How would the game know your a griefer and not a very good security guard or organisation warrior or bounty hunter? It will need a reputation system of some complex kind.

See the weather thread there is a dozen more there including some from me. I tend to go more into depth as to how the may work.

Its all hinted in the back story. Player has memory loss = create character, Play looks like death warmed up = edit character appearance, Player has this glowing thing on his hand = VR training, Player leaves ship at launch = spawn is some distance from ark and the alpha and beta builds will be wiped (but may appear as ruins to be found later. ) Late player enters game = Choice of city or wilderness start. In the latter case someone has moved his cryopod to somewhere JC sanctions probably nearer the edge of the safe zone. The cryopods in the back story are portable!!! Hard mode. Late player leaves the ark proper = a bambie org or player picks him up in a speeder and whisks him off into the wilderness for a hard zero resources and zero protection start, NQ NPC vendor pays the taxi/ noob bus driver, There will be player made tutorials in world very quickly. The VR system would include ongoing tutorials. Designing the start of this game is the easy bit.

If you leave the game permanently everything you made goes to your designated organisation or player heir. So that is not the problem. The real problem will be the size of the giant save files that is generated over time. I discuss that above.

There is another layer to this I had over 7000+ prims on one sim in Second Life, mostly space stations, etc, The sim was eventually closed down and the prims sent to me but SL could not handle the number so most were lost and the rest corrupted. I can't rebuild it all from scratch. This is not an easy problem to solve but a way to zip and transfer out of the game all your assets to an external or client side storage would help. If you don't want the material edited or trawled for other games then you could encrypt the zip so it can only be opened in world. We have no shortage of private off line storage options but NQ will have a limit on its access to on and off line storage. It all costs money; hence the monthly cost. For the game to work we will need all the builds and world changes to be saved somewhere. That will build up enormously fast. If the game has to save every world change we make, every hole we dig and tree we fell it would out grow every minecraft world save in a matter of years. This is why some form of World heal is needed because a reversion to seed eliminates 90 % of that giant save file. Builds underground need to be saved in some special way. The building core units help enormously, they may not fly but they may be moved by GM in the event of some world change. This is why there is all the debate about world heals. A world heal is required to reduce data volume but we do not want peoples builds wiped, trapped underground (I can see a solution for that. ) and we don't want all the ore to reappear magically every other day. A purely local world heal or even biome change could be done as a major geological event: volcano, earthquake, meteor strike. but you want all player builds saved and re set. And you don't want lave flowing though your yard with out your permission. Yes some would give it.

Careful what you wish for. lol. It has happened already.

Both planet Entropia and Second Life had stock markets at the some stage. Both were shut down by government lawsuits. Both faced multi-million dollar fines if they continued. No company has tried since. It happens to be illegal world wide. Government's do not differentiate between real and virtual markets because the both are electronic and can be just as real in terms of tax, fraud and latter may show up the real thing. The bitcoin markets are fighting hard but it's costing a lot of real time and money. Even voluntary lawyers cost money. It has also happened in other fields, i.e. hacking in games: http://www.sjgames.com/SS/ Governments sometimes can't tell fiction from reality.

The detached voxels on ships will be needed because the elements etc will fill the gaps. You don't want to waste mass by putting extra voxels inside the elements to bridge though them. You don't want clipping artefacts. In landscapes floating voxels and floating mountains are a consequence of wanting caves, without them all caving in randomly and becoming ditches. On world generation many cave generators produce either artefact: small and large floaters; Generally at the point where two or more cave propagation processes collide with each other or the surface mesh. It is less of a problem if you have mining as the only way to create a hanging voxel. In some games only some voxels can fall. The minecraft solution but you could add one that is stone not gravel or sand. (falling blocks actually comes from dwarf fortress) Hit that gravel and the gravel above above falls. There is a catch the JC mentioned in more than one interview. Every falling block in minecraft is three voxels: top falling, mid falling and landed. Mojang, I believe, is now optimising by creating one falling block with an inventory that can hold any other block and spawns it on landing. However it is still a lot of block up dates. Lag and desynching in multiplayer with lots of falling blocks is bad, and that's with 1 metre blocks. With 25 cm blocks it is worse because our mining tools will not be the same scale. They will be 2-3 m spheres not one voxel at a time. A single 2 metre deletion leaves ~200 voxels with air under them. If they fall that's 600 falling voxels! and then the one's above them fall, another 200 and so on. A recipe for massive lag even in single player game and this is a multiplayer game. There are some solutions but they are mostly not alpha or beta stuff. You just can' t test for every voxel in the world. We could not even test for every surface voxel [can see sky]. There are too many of them. We could in theory test for every floating voxel at high LOD to clear some extremely large floaters. We could make caves, and world gen tunnels propagate up into the sky far enough to kill most small floaters. Some floaters are a consequences of the cave algorithm ending at the surface. This would mean fewer over hangs at cave entrances. We could make the corner voxel in each chunk unmine-able without special tools and no drop. We could make caves also not able to remove this voxel in world gen. This would create a support grid to eliminate large floaters. We Should do a closed surface test only in the forward arc of the player out to 30 metres. This reduces the number we are working. It change could thus count as a player made change even though the player does not see it. However in some terrain that will add up fast. In the context of 5 we could do a migration test on rock and dirt. Any voxel that can see sky and has air under it turns to an unstable state voxel USV. This then infects any rock near it propagating, if it meets another USV it will Spawn a columb of voxels in all air voxels below. USV time out after 5 cycles. This may be a player proximity up date and count as a player change. This may wall off some caves. Or in the context of 5 we could do a per cent air in sphere volume on any voxel that can see sky and has air below it. And despawn the voxels if The percent air is two high. This would smooth some terrain a lot. That may kill canyons, ledges and edges. In mining we could replace the falling voxels with a sprite cloud and just delete some voxels above. Then create a rubble voxel on the floor. Add terrifying noise. This even worked in a mine in Second Life! All done with prims. We could do the above tests 5 & 6 and spawn vegetation or rock piles to hide small floaters. We could add a super cheap gravity gun that allows the players to delete any offending floaters at long range. In short the floating voxel bits and pieces are needed on ships. It's not needed in the worlds but they are hard to eliminate in world. It can be done only if you segment the job down to the local player movement/ changes level. But you can make it an 'unconscious' player process.

Aaaagh anti-pirate pirates. Someone's got to give grief to the griefers.