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wesbruce

Alpha Team Vanguard
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Posts posted by wesbruce

  1. 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. 

  2. Thats nuts, trading stocks for an in game organisation is the same as a real life one in the eyes of the law? What's next? Am I going to have to declare my income from space piracy on my tax returns to the UK goverment?

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

  3. Would a stock market analogue work in a game like this? In the real world, it always seemed to me like stocks are only worth anything to someone because everyone else wants them. That's how it always seemed to me anyway, I've never been big into the stock market.

     

    However, in the game, what with organizations and how big a role it seems they'll play along with player-driven content, I feel like a stock market system, albeit on a small scale, could be something that would work in Dual Universe.

     

    I could also see it NOT working of course, like someone who owns tons of stock just stops playing. Or, no one is ever really interested in it and it becomes a mechanic no one pays attention to.

     

    I feel like it could go either way but I'm rather unfamiliar with the real stock market. Does anyone else have thoughts on this?

    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. 

  4. 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.

     

    1. We could in theory test for every floating voxel at high LOD to clear some extremely large floaters. 
    2. 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. 
    3. 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. 
    4. 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.
    5. 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.
    6. 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.  
    7. 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. 
    8. 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. 
    9. We could do the above tests 5 & 6 and spawn vegetation or rock piles to hide small floaters. 
    10. 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.

  5. Hi,

     

    Watched last video yesterday, but didn't have time to leave message/feedback.

     

    Since we all know that all players will start on same planet and same place, this starting planet looks very small. This opinion is based on "Space Engineers" experience, where players start on same planet (ofc it depend of server). And it is very big risk to build base even for few days (played on planets with similar size). But the biggest difference, there are 10-20 players on SE servers, but you want allow hundreeds or thousands of players start close to each other.

    Players will not be in safe at all, many of them will try to kill, steal or even troll (especially with 1 month trial). Bases of players will be everywhere, because size of the planet is small. Ofc there could be some Teritory Defence Units or any other defences.

    Then we get another problem - resources. This is long term problem. Since everyone start at the same point, closest resources will gone very fast. Regrowing on maintenances? But what will happens with bases under the ground?

     

    In my opinion, starting planet size need to be much bigger. Yes it won't solve everything, but it will reduce size of the problems.

     

    And yes, I'm speaking about starting planet only. Any other planet could be as standard size on video, because population on them would be smaller.

     

     

    Thanks,

    Archonious

    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! 

  6. 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. 

  7. I would like to introduce an idea about using the paint tool to create some bump maps textures for our builds:

     

    The concept is using the paint tool and having the possibility to switch to texture or bump mod.

    Normal maps would be too complex to paint by ourselves, so preferably using bump maps system, painting in shades of greys over our texture painted model. An Invisible painted information layer to anyone's eyes on a finished build but renderable by client side lights information calculation.

     

    This might greatly improve the appearance of any constructions

    And why not doing the same for a reflection map painting mod

    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. 

  8. In the kickstart promotion video, at 0.50min, JC mentioning that "you can build anything you want, space ships, cities, orbital stations, there is no limit in size"

     

    Jc mentioning here the infinity big, from voxels of 25cm

     

    What about the infinity small? or at least smaller than 25cm?

     

     

    NQ is missing something in the building part, 25cm voxels will not allow to build a chair, a table, a lamp, a frame, or any decoration objects, to put in (and in fact the only things you can build) empty space ships, empty cities, and empty orbital stations

     

    Its like, think big, look at it from far, and forget about details

     

     

    The content of DU is pretty well thought in global, at the scale of civilisations organisations, but what about in details, at the scale of one player?

     

    What will one player see ingame?

    Very detailed textured mesh based elements stuck on very contrasting flat voxel builds?

     

     

    NQ shouldnt forget who will pay and play, who they are targeting when they talk to builders and coders, to lot of people who spend their days on 3d modeling softwares pushing the latest technologies, day by day, making scenes more and more realistic that you cant make anymore the difference.

     

    I m talking about gamers who are also architects, interior designers, industrial designers, graphic designers, CG artists, animators, developpers, coders etc...

     

    Is DU going to be the game for gamers who grew up with 1m3 blocks in minecraft, who got maturity now to play with 0.25m3 voxels?

     

    NO right?!

    DU isnt based on java and still have a bit more than 2 years of development

     

     

    And i think the community should keep in mind to push further and further the possibilties of the building tool of DU to make it the greatest sandbox of all times

    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. 

  9. Hello everyone. Will it be possible to store data - for example text files - in game? It would be great if you could connect a large number of DPUs to a single "server" DPU and make them download something from (or upload something to) that server.

    I've been discussing this issue with user Ignorer. He suggested implementing Data Block (basically a data drive) and I think it might be a really good solution.

    What do you think about it?

     

    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? )

  10. 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. 

  11. whats with the '

    Incompatibility with European key board unicode and American html that the site uses. Some text editors in word processors do apostrophes differently based on language settings. Blame planet microsoft. There is a European and American system and if the word processor is set to one and the browser is set to the other the  appears. 

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specials_(Unicode_block)#Replacement_character

     

    NQ-Nyzaltar can fix it manually but that's no fun. Setting all the computers to the same font would be a pest because this is occurring because the french ' is not the same unicode as the English ' used on this site. In french the ' has extra functions; they need those functions.  It's a European key board setting problem. It might be fixable by using a word processor setting or using open office text writer instead of the microsoft version. 

  12. I attended the 2000 Olympic's in Sydney without paying a cent. I was a carer thousands of tickets were given out to disabled people and their carers. (We were told "don't lose the clients, don't lose the clients." Then we lost a senior staff member!)

    If your willing to work for somethings you can earn them for free. In this game model you can download the game, buy the first DAC and earn more in game by being really useful to other players and sending some of your in game credits on DAC to cover the next month. 

     

    If you can't afford DAC then you probably can't afford the F2P super cool hat or even the P2W super gun. The history of the gaming metaverse is full of dead free to play games. All the games that have lasted the test of time have P2P or B2P. There are a dozen nearly empty open source games out there that were once F2P and went fan base and are now barely alive.

     

    And will everyone from the English speaking world here please check their spelling and grammar. It takes a few seconds to add a spell checker to your browser. There are a whole lot of holes in your arguments when your mixing up the two holes/ wholes. 

  13. 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. 

  14. From what NQ has said it seems resources are not going to regenerate, which is good for the economy long term. They have also said they want all players to spawn on the same planet, but this might change down the line, but at launch I expect there will only be one spawn point.

    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.  

  15. I'm imagining Sanctuary from Borderlands 2. A huge mining platform upon which rests a city. Don't see why it couldn't be done!

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

  16. I've already wrote one or two topics about Alien NPC, i know in early stages they probably not exists, but since this game is not only a sand box but an MMO to

    would be nice to have, later on game, some sort of Alien presence that could be randomly discovered like:

     

    Ruins: with unknown material that player must study to learn its properties and uses and lore

    like, with some advanced tier scan a player can find a Alien buried ruin or ship wrecked, where he could scrap and unknown metal, after some time (real time) and study he could get the right skill point to work with that metal and replicate it from known mats, after that will be an other learn process of experimentation to know if that metal is strong for engines, weapons, shilled or to mix and refine other tech man know. That would be interesting as MMO because only that character (and other few player chars that found and pass to the hole process) would be able to deal with that metal and they would become more individual and exclusive and their crafts more valuable (maybe) for the market.

     

    Ships: Not passive as ruins but working quiet as similar, very rare alien aggressive drone ships could be found on space, those will attack the player on sight, after a successfully fight and winning the parts could be achieve and maybe some new working technology found, but since is alien it can be used, recharged but not replicated so easily, maybe one guy like before example that know some about work with right alien mat could do the job.

     

    PVE: Once more, since its a MMO (sandbox) game it could have at some point some sort of PVE, (not telling that must be included at betas or launch)

    a lot of players like pve over pvp. PVE stimulate union and alliance, and friendship (while only pvp stimulate a lot of aggression between players )

    Many times in other games i have saw some peace agreement between enemies to take care of some real hard PVE challenge. 

    Those are very fun events with great coordination needs from leaders and tolerance from players that use to fight themselves on sight.

    (like Guardian of Galaxy movie where Nova troop and Pirates team up to stop the eminent destruction of the planet)

    as lore, lets suppose as examples before, after 100 random rare alien drone have been found and destroyed. a Huge alien mother ship random  spawns from the warp and start to move against a colonized planet, this is a thread to all brand new human colony and also for the survival of the specie.

    That would make all companies and other player that live on and from that sector (even as robber or pirate) to forget their differences for a while and team up to destroy that common enemy protect their way of life.

    (and maybe if the alien ship wins the fight it lands and populate the planet with aggressive insectoids or other alien life, after that the ship goes away despairing on the warp living no trace. the planet must be cleaned and re taken after things become normal again.)

    This type of game interactions are fun, strategy hard, and give player chances to make friends and know better each other.

     

     

    i think there is a lot of possibilities where Aliens can be included in the game without breaking the lore.

     

     

     

    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. 

  17. Was watching the video of a fighter ship being built and noticed the elements like the core, gas tanks and such can be covered with voxels making them internal to the ship.

     

    Could you also contain engine elements the same way? That way you could say make startrek warp nacelle out of voxels yet embedded inside would be the standard engine element. :)

    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. 

  18. If it has implications on gameplay there has to be limit, specifying it has to have a exhaust makes sense. I hope they create some "naked" versions that you can incase in as much or as little armor and make it look cool.

     

    I want a cockpit that is just a seat and a joystick so I can build whatever type of canopy I like or be totally open to space.

    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. 

  19. 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. 

  20. I asked in another thread if our Solar system survived the Nova. The general theory on that is that it didn't but the conspiracies are simmering away, there is a possibility planets survived but were swept off their orbits and scattered.

     

    Presumably if we had the technology to make the Arkships we would have had some experience at colonising planets alot closer to earth in order to experiment and develop the life-support/ propulsion tech the Arks would be using.

     

    So you potentially have a colony of humans either adrift on a displaced planet or stranded on an Alien world as their homeworld is gone. 

     

    After 10 thousand years, if this colony manages to survive it would have evolved and to us would probably appear to be Alien.  So I guess even if there aren't going to be any 'aliens' of a different species there could at least be a different type of humanoid.

     

    Ofc watch Einstein get involved now and mess up the whole time/space part of this theory <_<

    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. 

  21. 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. 

  22. So in the interview with captain shack one of the things JC and shack discussed was sending a drone for a stargate. JC said that once the drone is where you want it then you need to "jump" to it. so does this mean that we will get both a jump drive and an ftl drive?

     

    For those who have not seen this you can watch it here.

    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. 

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