wesbruce

A 30 km planet is 11300 square kilometres. Two kilometres deep. 22000 cubic km! That a lot of space to hide mineral ores. I suspect the larger organisations will leave the Novark zone early for their own bases well before the resources in the novark zone are stripped. If ore resources are place-able they may never run out. The ark zone is 20 r by 2 deep. ~2513 cubic km!

You can skip g forces as a physics thing while still having it as part of the skill tree. Pilot skills can include; g force control, safe turn, g related crew communication, g trapping (effects a opposing ship in combat.). Players would Suffer a standing negative "in turn g effect" to all skill while standing or walking but they too can have g force skills: g anticipation, g agility that also counters it. Engineering skill can include: gravity stabilisation while working at the gravity generator that all big ships and stations have. You could also have gravity guns that impose the g force related negative skill penalty on the target. Or just toss them about randomly.

That is all ready in the game, look at the video with the landing pad, the bumps are 2D but look 3D. Any bump or spectacular effect would be at the texture level and would, as with everything, be subject to the size of the possible memory base client side as well as server archive side. An infinite amount of player made texture variations means someone somewhere must store for quick download all the texture files including the bump maps and such archiving costs money and requires maintenance. Remember they can't even start planning that stuff until they have the lighting engine fully crafted and lighting engines are a huge pain. They are the major lag source in every voxel game because every new shape or voxel deletion forces a recalculation for the whole chunk, and sometimes the whole world. This is why their using grey and dark grey construct voxels at this stage. It's easy on the placeholder lighting engine.

Going below 25 cm requires some special code that three other companies already own the rights to and in all three cases it requires a lot more data to save the results. Patents matter. NQ is not Landmark/ Planet Explorers: voxel farm, Always geekie's Vox or Voxelnauts. Reinventing the wheel is hard and patent battles is harder. We can make lots of basic chairs etc as as normal meshes and pitch them to NQ but memory limits matter. We could do voxel sit elements that hide in the top of some voxel's but 25 cm smoothed to perhaps 5 cm in some cases would be the limit. And a voxel chair is immovable. mmm I can think of a fix for that last problem.

This will be essential if the players are writing the quests as contracts but there will be limits. Some level of moderation and security would be needed. I would expect the first implementation with be contracts with relatively large instructional fields & mission completion fields, editable heading and URL vetting on the all text: Spammers, porn, illegal copy right breaches, virus hacks, obscene demands, dud obsolete stuff. It would need net nanny and a spam detector on the URL's at the very least. A low pass virus scan may be needed. All this would be on posting or creation for distribution or sale. Anything sold, offered for sale or posted to the contract board would be server side not client side even though the execution of it is fully client side. So if you are off line the stuff still works. Note: If you have a star fighter and you go off line it would despawn (all ready stated). Bigger ships would need some greater persistence but when you allocate allowances to your crew and org the game would set up that persistence. This will be the greatest challenge in alpha. Lost and dead ships because all the crew just crashed at once. Smaller ships would have more persistence if landed. I could imagine a special landing pad that saves your ship completely but despawn's it in the process. Several games have this. I'm not a dev. (I probably should fix that but my resume is so bad even I would not accept it. Can't even find by own referee's! Where have the years gone? )

Arguably if you make all items heritable on permanent departure of the game, which appears to be NQ's intention, if you log off with the org named as the beneficiary of your departure would get your scrips sent to them. So even though it is your script and private there is a backup accessible server-side at the org level. So if you can do that for permanent drop out of the game could you also do that for short term game absences. It may mean that the org's will need to maintain virtual server farms to hold, buffer, their members scrips. If you give someone the right to fly your ship then logically that would involve transferring copies, under the hood, of all of the scripts but in a locked form. Like second life scripts there would be a range of allowances. Locked, editable, single value adjustment, no resale, open do as you please, teaching scripts with a heap of annotation.

Welcome to the fun.

Welcome. I am not sure you should trust the orgs here they all sound like someone made the mistake of loading up the cryo-prison and the insane asylum by mistake. lol. I hope you enjoy the game when it launches. If it does not work blame all us alpha testers for missing something. Note: I spent several hours trying to get x,y,z coordinates on a hole in the world in Planet Entropia.

It is not a hard problem to solve. Just add a new player terminal in world that calls a player vehicle to do a simple delivery mission. Your not paid by the terminal if the noob dies in the first few seconds of the drop off. This will give you a dozen player made new player zones while giving the new player the same wilderness start. Also the cryopods in the ark are move-able, it's done in the back story, A contract to ship 6 to somewhere would not break game lore or play so an option to spawn at the ark or spawn at a 'backup' wilderness site may be added to the game to be activated if the Noveark zone becomes a problem. The ark is a really big case of putting all your eggs in the one basket. Hence the term backup. The server architecture prevents crowding lag but not psychological crowding or being over whelmed. Many heavily built minecraft servers have all kinds if mechanism to get new players to the wilderness fast. They are generically called noob cannons or noob gates. So does Active Worlds the first sandbox, Second Life, Planet Entropia, even some fantasy games.

It must be done. It should be easy. The perfect mobile planetary mining base. Just watch your step.

I think the key point is that with the right tools and player organisation the players could do all that and more in game. If you have hidden org functionality then your able to zip off to planet garrzoop, switch suits and be the alien. I think that is JC's aim. PvP but not just a brawl, the players driving key parts of the story and content. I can see several aliens that could be done that way.

Only the 2 smallest engines look like that. The bigger engines look like they are designed to be covered and are in the bigger ships. I think they wanted the 2 starting engines to be intuitive. So people know which way to face them.

The kickstarter video shows an open cockpit or seat though it has a high back and roll bar. Perfect for grav forklifts, hovertrucks and tank crews.

There are good reasons why free currency trading is restricted in games. It created a near perfect money laundering technology for terrorists and criminals. Some have even been busted in Second Life. So avoiding a player withdrawal of trade-able currency is now normal. Novaquark is following that line. There is more to Bitcoin than bitcoin the currency; the blockchain technology as many useful game functions including server-less peer to peer account archiving, anti-hacking measures that enable client side archiving, automatic player adjudication of transaction disputes. etc.

Yep that was my post. There could be more humans out there than the ark ship and more spreading out from other ark ships that have had time to become the aliens.

I have an unpublished work in progress with 17 jump drive variants: bomb drive, Satchel drive, John DeChancie's red shift free way, etc. Novaquark is using three from that list by complete accident and has talked about a fourth. It also has three variants of hyper space, 4 wormhole options and several STL ship variants. Novaquark choices are for good reasons. You should like the result. If you don't there is ten more space games out there with ten more on the way and the technology for all of them will be ex patent in 7 to 10 years.

Resorting to some basic tecnobabble. Yes you need both warp drive and a star gate. The warp drive is fast, Mars in minutes, but getting to a point 16 light years away would still take months or years. Note, this is true in star trek Earth to Vulcan is 30 to 60 days for the any of the Star fleet ships. The fastest ship in TNG only halves the time Enterprise NC 01 takes. Hence the poker games and holodeck. Thus the stargate is faster. (Even voyager uses them.) It would also be much more accurate. Space is big, star systems are small targets. Missing could really ruin your life and the life of 10 generation of your descendants. You do not want to jump to a dead star that lacks the resources to build what's needed to jump out or survive. It also grants NQ the time to develop interesting star systems to find and drop a few non procedural odds and ends there to be found. In terms of lore there is no reason why some other race or population of earth refugees could not be sending out probes and when a good system is found, pack up everything into the cargo bay on a huge passenger liner. Do up their seat belts and jump to the new system with nothing left but empty mines, stone shells of buildings, some weed, and a forgotten box of junk or two. No stargate needed because they are culturally nomads.

Second Life does have some things to teach. I have cited it a few times. I was an early player and had 7000 primes at one point. Every kind of space station and some sea steading stuff and a mix of other experiments. We tried so hard to do a convincing space station in SL but failed. Somme of the open source versions now available are able to do amazing things. But you are still locked to a 2 d plane. Build your own game on open sim. http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page I do think sculpties would be a huge thing to add in DU. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_prim You could do that in DU but it may still have a current patent. Second life also has a bunch of problems. Don't do an ingame stock market if your game is based in the USA; the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) shut it down. I lost a pile of pretend money. Don't allow porn skins etc if your not willing to feed 80% of your profit to the legal department every year. Above all don't tie the size of your memory allocation to a fixed space on the ground that's too damn small! By the way Jeronimo, Second life is not the first or oldest game of that type. Active Worlds dates from 1997 and that's six years before SL and 'There' which is as old as SL. Active worlds solved the land problem by licencing the meshes them selves. https://www.activeworlds.com/web/index.php

I doubt that any bullet based system emulates every single bullet in any game. Most I know of switches to a bullet box of x100 assumed bullets with a pre rendered cloud of dots or parallel stripes. The box is its self a huge bullet 10 meters long representing bullets all more or less on the same path. It still is an entity that must be tracked and handed off to each server and player node. When FPS games talk of optimisation this is what they are doing, bundling bullets either until they hit or until they get very close then it unbundles them and shot guns the target. With tab targeting it's just a short sprite fountain and an out going vector at the firer with some sprites making it all the way at very short range. At longer damage the targeted player takes damage, may see incoming sprites vectoring to him (slow rounds) and may see bullet fall on the opposite wall. Both are local. Someone crossing their fire arc may also see bullets flying past because the game knows the vectors and can compute if your in the cross fire. Likewise if something solid gets in the way the bullets are stopped, that object gets the hit sprites. The tab lock may or may not be lost, with or without a delay. It is even possible for the game to switch to another target, based on skill or luck because that target ran in fount of or behind your target. I.E. friendly fire or an accidental hidden target kill temporary target switching [nearest neighbour]. In short in tab targeting you need to pass information to only 2 players/ servers in most cases. In some cases it may be four or five. It's never more than ten or all 1000.

You can emulate a PvP shooter in a tab targeting system but you can't emulate a tab targeting system in a FPS with bullet mechanics. To emulate fps simply have a narrow arc of selection and anything is tab targeted automatically but if you mouse off that target you lose tab targeting on that target. Both tab targeting and FPS can have area effect attacks so that does not matter. Homing attacks require some longer lock persistence to work but that's do able in both systems. Tab targeting with a narrow cone can do friendly fire too but it's more code. Bullet drop is easy too by having a "reticule height above target" requirement at the time of firing. The same with leading the target. It already knows the range in both systems. Knowing this I have difficulty understanding why people even bother complaining about the tab targeting choice. All game systems, including all bullet based systems, have a dice roll somewhere in the mix to hit or damage. The gods of RNG are not fools. You can shoot the turret or the drive that is just a matter of how many selection boxes a ship gets or whether it has a roll to damage subsystem table with roll biases at each end for what your targeting computer is set to. You can even shoot the gun out of a players hand in a RPG style tab targeting system. Lets see you do that in bullet based code? (It is not impossible.) Here is a game with Tab targeting being switched to a FPS targeting in settings. (It needs a little more graphics optimisation, Changed cross hairs, etc. ) Hopefully DU will add a FPS emulation setting and the debate will end. Then we will see if my tactics and skills beats your twitch.

You're all doomed! I just figured out how to do player zombies in this game without breaking the lore. If early or later game play gets a bit uninteresting and grindy this may spice things up. Hint defective resurrection nodes. No you won't be a super zombie ... at first. A low tech variant spawns you without a suit, nanopack and nanoformer but there is a build path to making them. Again late late gameplay if interest wains. I await the dev's comments eagerly. Let the flames begin.

I am already working on an armed mining grav speeder that can roll out in convoy beyond the safe zone on a planet. Grav tanks for the win. Once in space I challenge you to chase me. Most of my guns will face backwards on my Scorpion Blockade Runner. Step into my blazing wake. Pleeeease.

Oh great, look what you've done to me now! I've ended up watching a hello kitty online game play video. SO much pink my eyes, my eyes. Actually it looks good for a game designed for 5 year olds. Works well too.

I can't understand why people can't cook up there own SF worlds and have to use star wars, star trek, etc, etc. I have created my own sf worlds several times over. I have 4 up my sleeve and since none fit this universe I'm working on my fifth. It is easy. Define the theme. define the protagonists. This tells you how much of the world you need to flesh out. define the world origin. What is the key technology and is some key technology disallowed. (DU has no wheels; they are obsolete. Wheels on 25 cm voxels are that hard!) Is there magic or something that works like it; Psi, the force, Q continuum, ... wild nanites, teeny tiny aliens that are really humans in ships that got really messed up when a stardrive went wrong, pocket universes on your belt. What is the goal that your story is aiming for. If it is a game guild or company or organisation in this game what are you going to use to attract players, keep them, involve them, and give them in return for their member ship. Most importantly. Have you found and read the existing game lore here so your lore does not look completely ridiculous. More than one org seems to be making that mistake. ​It is not hard.

Clearly orbital mechanics is a challenge. Making planets orbit the sun and rotate adds several vectors to the players, ships and everything that must be tracked and adjusted for. I can see two possible solutions, one easy one hard: Daily Update: Once a day at a predictable time everything is moved together, with a planetary bounding box being used; the box would be 1 or 2 planetary diameters and it would be moved 1 or 2 degrees around the sun. Note if the sun is orbiting the planets, the easy option, this is really a change of angles of all of the worlds to each other while either maintaining their distance from the sun or adjusting it slightly to emulate elliptical orbits. Any ship in the way is moved 1.5 planetary diameters to the side, sun ward. If it is still in the way it is moved another half planetary diameter in the direction of the orbit. If it is within 20 km of another orbiting object it is moved 20 km away from the planet. If it is not clear of objects now then you need a space traffic cop! From the players point of view the sun seems to teleport but only once per day. If timed to correspond with night on the major planetary safe zone/ city, where most would be, it would go unnoticed. It would be a normal thing so would break immersion much less than a minecraft modded multiplayer day night shift which is quite common and often unnoticed. This would only be a 2 degree orbit shift from the point of view of the player seeing it. Frames of reference: Another method would be to give every player and ship a frame of reference state with 5 to 8 frames of reference. You need this for boarding actions in ship to ship combat and docking anyway. At some point the person needs to be 'In the ship' as opposed to being in space or in another ship. Why not planets, atmospheres. The frame of reference call is a velocity, vector and orientation call. (The last thing will already be defined by a ship or stations gravity unit so may be ignored. If you want fancy space stations and ships where you can EVA on a belly of without falling off, the orientation call can be useful) The reference frames would be: star, planet orbital, planet equator or Planet by latitude, Ship, Inverted, station, space station centrifuge. All in the same frame of reference are given the same velocity and the same vector relative to the local down. The star would not have a velocity or vector. A non moving space station is in the stars reference. a station is in the planets orbital frame. Planet orbit is the velocity and tangential vector of the planet in orbit. It would effect all things in the planets gravity and stations within a few planetary diameters. In the case of planet equator or Planet by latitude it would be the velocity of planets local surface & atmosphere [even on vacuum worlds. ] The atmospheric stickiness. It would have a primary component in the direction of spin and tiny downward component and a hand off component from planetary orbit. Planet high latitude would grade off as you approach the pole but would be the same value for all in a given latitude. Ships taking off in the direction of spin end up transitioning to the stars frame of reference faster. However this transition will only occur is at an altitude of 1.1 planetary diameters of the core. Like wise a ship entering transitions fast if going in the opposite direction to spin. To avoid ship planet collision we could add a bounce angle, a real thing in space. If you approach a planet at the wrong angle you bounce off the atmosphere at a shallow angle. In the case of Ship the reference frame is defined by the gravity unit and directional unit. Any one in the ship is given the ships vector. This is already planned so you can run around in the ship. In the case of inverted, which can be set on a station, this frame of reference is set by a inversion hatch or door element. Gravity is flipped but the vector is unchanged. If you jump from space to a ship/stations belly and these gravity inversion elements are closer to you than the gravity generator then you transition to inverted. Pass though the inversion hatch or door element it flips inverted to ship or station frame. A rotating tunnel or monkey bar may help the transition (purely cosmetic). In the case of space station centrifuge this is a frame of reference generated by a special centrifugal gravity unit. (This is a long term thing not something I would expect in the game in alpha or beta or the first year.) This draws less power than a normal gravity unit and defines an axis. Down is relative to that axis and away from it. Gravity is proportional to radius in metres/ 1000. If the station has a static 1 RPM roll around the axis then the vector of the frame of reference is 16 m/s with a tiny down component. The floor stops you from flying off like a stone from a sling (until someone blows a hole under you). I've included this for completeness and future proofing. In short the frame of reference is a state with a velocity and vector that is pre-calculated for all in the same reference frame relative to that reference frames gravity direction and type. This is summed with the payers/ constructs active velocity and vector. All players, etc with the same frame of reference on a given server can skip the frame of reference calculations and treat it as zero relative to the ship/ planet. Collision with a moving planet causes you to bounce off the atmosphere. Only crewed ships can avoid this bounce. (if AFK you bounce. ) All movable objects may need the frame of reference component. Rocks and trees may need it (this may be a problem ). If it works for planetary rotation it should also work for planetary orbital mechanics. OK now is time for a dev to shoot me down with the reason why this wont work. Both look obvious so I may be missing something.