wesbruce

The best compromise probe design I can think up given the debates is as follows. The probe micro gate is a big heavy element that can be built into a suitable ship design. Any Ship will do but it also needs a special deep space shield. This make it not attack-able or loot able as it leaves the system. It can be armed. It can't use a gate with this micro-gate installed. A gate can't go though a gate. It needs big rockets, power, etc: already available. The probe's micro gate is linked to one on a station that remains in system and needs a little maintenance. You use that to fuel the probe and cycle the crew. These can be re targeted to a new probe, sold or re purposed when the time comes. The micro gate is operational with a limit of 300 kg: ie player and some stuff, fuel canister or personal storage canister. So you can crew your ship and supply. Any added fuel, power or on board maintenance shaves some time off the journey time but not enough to make it trivial. You crew the ship as a day job. An org rotates people though that job. The gate is two way so you can go back to the departure station but it requires more power. Isolationists can simply not go home on their day off. A single player can travel relatively fast if they work hard. A gate can be sent to a non stellar target. You can send, build and deploy more than one probe and stargate into a system but only one can be activated at once per star link. On arrival in the target system you have the option of: Using the gate as a one man portal and build in the system using only it's resources. (somewhat anti-social) Salvaging most materials to build a slightly larger gate. Fighter sized ships and small miners can come though to pioneer the system. Or building a big miner and then a medium sized gate. Or A more mature system or org can build a major gate that allows any sized ship. Be ready to defend it. Strategic considerations. Still takes time and effort to do. Still encourages most to concentrate and cooperate. Almost griefer proof. You can build and deploy more than one stargate in a system but only one can be activated at once per star link (maybe per size class). Back up gates are possible. Hide it well. Battle damage degrades a big gate to a smaller one but does not destroy it instantly. You can turn them on and off: Cycling them confuses ambushers and disrupts blockades as they need to find more than one target. Allows counter ambushes. Fleets coming though a gate can be broken up if you cycle the gate at the strategic time. They end up at two or more locations in system. They have to re group. It's a semi-free roam option. Fleets can go around a bottleneck if they are very organised. You can sneak spy's into a system but it's a little harder to slip in a fleet of dreadnoughts. Not impossible. Neutral cut off systems can bypass a battle zone if they have planned for it or teamed up to crew and supply that fast probe ship. The result is a slow growing net or web but a fluid self healing one.

I suspect the seed is a tiny stargate that handles only data and a few hundred kilograms. IE only the tiniest ships can jump to it and maybe a few fuel cans. How small and light can you make your minimalist ship? Is it called the flying coffin! All of the ships that JC Bailie has shown off may be too big for the probe! That is my preferred option. Once though the probe your starting of with just the stuff you can carry and something only on notch up from a jet pack and reentry shielding. Geronimo. Of cause it could handle more that one coffin so your mates can come and if it's not secured at the sending side everyone and his dog may be coming though with all sorts of funny shaped coffins. Someone is going to try for the group orbital paratroop world record. Meanwhile Bob parked his probe near an asteroid in another system and is building the space bug, while thinking planets are for noobs.

There is another question. Will the stargates have ship size limits? This could be useful because it allows the big boys to fight it out in the big systems while smaller newbie players and small corps can play away in the pioneer without fear of a griefercorp dreadnought showing up to steal their whole hard won system. It adds layers of progression to the star system as you grow the gate capacity.

I think you have misunderstood the Stargate Probe mechanic. It's a robot with a tiny stargate that flys to the system. The Weeks or month depend on server allocation and how ready the dev's are with Easter eggs etc. It buys them time to build the system properly. Procedualism makes that fast and easy as No Mans Sky, Vladimir Romanyuk's Space Engine and Space Engineers, etc indicate but if you want story and lore you need to buy a tiny bit of time. (Someone should tell Sean Murrey.) No one spends time riding that probe ship. On arrival a tiny ship is sent though the tiny gate with you, your nanofab gadgets and just enough stuff to build a bigger ship. Mine, build bigger stargate bring in bigger ships. Now you have a new system, trade and all that fun. The only question is that once built can it be cut off? This is promised by the dev's and is a key uniting plot tool, but it could really be inconvenient for those not in the fight if its a tree not a network. Does the stargate link to the nearest neighbour? Does it skip a dead link if close? Can it link to the system that launched the probe only or any gate in range on the network? Can a branch of gates be cut off the trunk without the twigs at the end somehow quickly reconnecting to the trunk, Atioth? I suspect we will see a few fanatical PvE players get to a new system build a Resurrection node and then blow up the probe or never build the gate. If a gate is destroyed by war can those dependant on it go around the barrier in a reasonable time? Have you created zones? Can a distant corp on the edge of the network stockpile something in the Alioth system allowing a gates quick creation without sending a slow probe? I presume the main stargate at Alioth once built will be effectively indestructible. Will Banking system synchronise even though the gate is a shattered ruin. Perhaps the interstellar financial system uses pinholes sized gates to maintain communications. A 1 atom at a time signal system. Cargo would be cut but not communication and some brokering.

Hi I'm Wesley Bruce, wesbruce in may games. That heading was not quite serious, Much. I am a geographer and would be game designer but not a programmer. I don't even have a computer that can run the game though I am planning to buy a new PC. Dyslexia makes reading code hard hence my interest in non code based solutions: Second Life, Voxels, Blenders little boxes, minecraft. Played many MMO's. I have abandoned avatars everywhere. I know Geography, some astronomy and planetology, human ecology, some economics and chemistry. Degree Australian National University. I've out lived my membership in the National Space Society twice! (A Sad story and a funny story there.) I know all the old L5 society stuff. Also I have blog posts on para-terraforming, sea steading, space stuff. Two NASA submission, not winning but considered useful. I have some skill in blender, wings 3D, sculptris, etc. Enough to be useful in a team but not on my own. I've studied game design informally including game economics, quest/ tutorial design, map pitfalls, voxel theory, minecraft modding. I checked out the jobs on offer at NQ and know I could help but I'm not that good. Total lack of formal qualifications matters! And I know my limitations. I'm also in Australia. A long way from Paris which may be an issue. I have Skype. PM me for it if you need it. My current job is as a carer, disability support but that is diminishing as the guy I look after gets better at doing things. He has Cerebral Palsy and more university qualifications than me. I'm a crazy ideas man with an idea of what JC baillie is wanting to do, how it's working and some of the things needed. I can also see the pit falls ahead; that may make me useful. I'm a bit of a lore master with many ideas. I hope to see you in-game some day.

If you're worried about your ship building skills we should have a dozen player made stock designs before the end of the Alpha testing phase. And we will need to test the sales tools for those designs so I guess you just volunteered. lol. PS I'm not a dev or alpha tester, I need to update my computer before that sort of shenanigans.

OK the basics are voxel ships that are fully editable by the owner with so far mat black grey and metallic, but not shiny, white. JC attached copper to those ships in the demo. Attach the elements to the voxel matrix to define flight, propulsion, sensors, crew seating or cockpit. I suspect the cockpit does no define flight direction. On finalisation everything is defined as the one thing for movement purposes. The resulting ship has a big bounding box as indicated by the collision in the game-play video. Yet that does not effect players. They are dealing with a smaller bounding box of the elements. The voxel engine supports fixed direction gravity, on the station and spherical, to the centre gravity on planets. [it would be very interesting if it could do radial, out from an element defined axis. That would give us a semblance of centrifugal artificial gravity: Stanford Torus, O'Neill Cylinders, etc, every National Space Society member would buy the game and that is most of NASA and almost every astronaut. It would not actually be rotating but an animated texture on the out side would appear to fix that. ] Ship flight is as a unit so there is no tracking of loose bits like in space engineers. That's their main source of lag. Battle damage DU will probably not blow stacks of stuff off to create tons of lag. Combat is tab targeting, logically the player and the elements or the bounding box not the voxels them selves. No bullet physics to mess about with. Cutting a ship in half may be possible with "weapon mining" of the voxels, assuming you are left with only two bits for the game to track (and a rage quitting newbie or two). Calculating the new bounding box will be fun particularly if the rear gunner surprises you by having a backup control seat handy. You just turned one angry ship into two! The server demo shows that the large number of players or stuff in a fixed space problem has been solved by JC baillie by decoupling the servers from specific in-game locations and tying it to population density and by making the update rates inversely dependant on distance. A sniper sight may over ride this for seamless long distance engagements. Size affects this distance update effect. Arkzone crowding can be solved with a few player built newbie busses dropping people off out side town and an in game emulation of Uber. So from what's shown it does look like you can build the ship of your dreams and fight each other with it, with minimum lag issues. Cloud computing for the win!

If there is more than one Arkship then this is the one that drew the short straw and scored the most distant know terrestrial world. Some one else scored Proxima centari b. This assumes that the swathe the neutron star cuts is not 30 to 80 light years across. I think the assumption is not just radiation or planetary collision. The doom star is moving at high relativistic speeds giving it a mass great enough to tear planets from their mother sun and scatter them into the deep dark space to freeze. While also sucking some planets and stars in to it's mass. A giant cue ball 10000 times the mass of the sun sending stars scattering like billiards on a table. A gravitational sling shot disruptions measured in terms of 10's of light years if not hundreds. That would make an awesome animation. There are some stars out there that have been clocked at 0.3 to 0.8 c! There are some that seem to be moving at 20c !?! If that's not an error burn your physics books.

A 70 km radius planet has 61000 square km to mine. A solar system will be bigger. Sensor ranges will not be infinite unless its a really big ship. You should be able to go out and mine if your sneaky. Don't pick the closest, easiest, most obvious place to mine. Ship stealth should be a major part of PvE game play. Be the asteroids not a big target near it. In the videos the main dev seems to have a focus on teaming up but talked about solo play. Hiding in a hole or having a fast sneaky ship with rear firing turrets. Let the pirates fly into a hailstorm of exploding rounds while chasing you. Solo is not his first option but it is a option. In some eve systems I spot mine, don't loiter long enough for them to track you down. Grab and run. Fast mining will matter in DU space.

Gameplay effects. Essentially not much work. The game makes available artefacts, technology blueprints and special voxel materials that can be integrated into a virtual reality build. In this case it's a lore build not a ship or saved structure for sale. The player takes on the persona of an ancient working in the distant past [or a secret child of the ship in the present] building something as a preparation for the coming sleepers. Once finished it is checked by the dev's or a player jury, to eliminate illegal and pornographic content or completely incompatible lore. We can be a little flexible on incompatible lore if some of the builders are playing god; trying to manipulate the sleepers to worshiping them or fighting their enemies. Then it is randomly deployed into the world to be found. On finding and reporting, it become news. I.E. the discovery is reported on an in game media system. The creating player can seek it out if he or she wants but the idea is to create player lore to compliment the dev's work to be found by others. The key themes are that someone from Earth got out of cryogenics earlier, or used another technology. They have sought out your target worlds, got there many centuries before and made a few things to help you. However a lot can happen in the thousands of years you slept and the ancient relatives have either: Finished and moved on, lost track of why they are doing what they're doing, have gone extinct locally perhaps in war, Leaving AI in ruins, swamp, etc, have hidden among you not wanting to reveal their presence for some deep and complex reason, become high technology barbarians dominated by myth and superstition, Built hidden cryogenic facilities and are sleeping somewhere to be found, (The catch is the last 2 would require NPC's or player alts) Perhaps direct and explicit contact with another Arkship somewhere went badly wrong. So their interactions are more mysterious. Perhaps they have changed so much that your are as much a mystery to them as they are to you. The children of the ship idea is a little different since they are essentially faking all the artefacts and structures to hide their presence. And the contact gone wrong occurred on the ship when they pulled someone from cryo for some reason. Some may be trying to get the sleepers to worship them or serve them by deception. If it's a player built world why not player built mystery's and ruins. After all we have all that stone. We're never going to make a spaceship or skyscraper from it.

OK this will be where I have the most fun. I have already proposed several overlapping compatible bits of lore. Here I list and integrate them. This has several assumptions: they could not just go to mars or alpha centuri or tau ceti because the neutron star is huge and is cutting a swathe though space 40 to 100 light years across. Secondly the Arkship in the games back story is not going to the nearest target safe system others scored that one. Thirdly some of the starting game play technology: Safe star gates, probes, some force fields technology, Is unknown to the people coming off the Arkship; some of it may have not been invented when the left Sol. Hence the need for training and discovery. Someone tried to leave early, jumping the gun with prototype FTL technology. It went wrong but they survived, damaged genetically but survived long enough, before dying out, to leave artefacts, technology, some enigmatic AI or strange uploaded version of themselves. Something with a memory of man and a desire to help but little understanding of the Arkship's occupants. They have 9000 years head start but this means they have 9000 years to fall into ruin and your as hard to understand as a Neanderthal. Many stayed and worked on projects to help the travellers. Doing vital research that could not be done on a ship and was not finished before departure. Some of their results were beamed to the arkships so they have technology that was not known when the pioneers went into cryo. These are long dead hero's who stayed and died so others would succeed. Some of the solutions could not be sent to the cryoships in time, they were out of range, so they sent smaller faster relays to deliver the new solutions. The result is basically the same as 1 and 4 but with more AI in play. One of the ships sent to the closest safe system to Sol arived hundreds of years ago and survived long enough to buy time, a few hundred years before the neutron star caught them. They have FTL, gates and much better technology. They either used option 2 and 3 themselves before building a new faster arkship and heading off or They set out again by probes and gates to catch the Arkships. Because of the quirks of relativity they can not contact the Arkships directly or match velocity, but they can place things on various worlds to help and welcome them. Their chain of stargates have been destroyed behind them lest strange effects from the neutron star can propagate though them. 9000 years has distorted their mission a little or on some worlds shattered it in war and disaster. They are now space nomads leaving advanced tributes to their sleeping gods. Not everyone slept on the Ark ships some continued working, living, dying, on the ship, but their children survived. Hence all the corridors. Some are helpful AI some are still human. When the ship landed they slipped away or slipped into the embarking crowds. They have the same technology etc but have a few new technologies developed in transit. However these children of the ship see the earth as a distant legend. There is also a language gap for them, they have no word for tree. They are secretive, seeing the sleepers as alien and fragile. They have been warned not to reveal themselves for that may destroy the sleepers moral and sense of destiny. In this context the children are just Dev's and hand picked players not NPC's but are never really seen. They conspire to help. Some may plot to hinder. This in SF parlance is the FTL greets STL conundrum. It is as old as the Traveller RPG way back in the 1970's but no one has developed it fully. The universe of SF has enough ancient aliens and extra terrestrial gods. Lets make the humanity both sides of the first contact equation. 9000 is a long time. And yes I know it's not technically an STL ship just a slow FTL one.

Read Alain Damasio pdf book http://www.dualthegame.com/backstory it is brilliant. Now that's one heck of a way to land a spaceship. Nailed the landing but the seat belts work better on star trek. lol. The back story has some technological incongruities, I think that's intentional.

I see typos.

9,854 years is a long time. Assuming 80% the speed of light, fast STL it's 7883 light years. At 10% the speed of light however it's only 985 ly or so. Almost next door. If above the speed of light its a long way indeed. That was a heck of a big mean neutron star their running from if they have to run even 900 ly to get clear.

OK this will be where I have the most fun. I have already proposed several overlapping compatible bits of lore. Here I list and integrate them. This has several assumptions: they could not just go to mars or alpha centuri or tau ceti because the neutron star is huge and is cutting a swathe though space 40 to 100 light years across. Secondly the Arkship in the games back story is not going to the nearest target safe system others scored that one. Thirdly not all the starting game play technology: Safe star gates, probes, some force fields technology, is known to the people coming off the Arkship; some of it may have not been invented when the left Sol. Hence the need for training and discovery. Someone tried to leave early, jumping the gun with prototype FTL technology. It went wrong but they survived, damaged genetically but survived long enough, before dying out, to leave artefacts, technology, some enigmatic AI or strange uploaded version of themselves. Something with a memory of man and a desire to help but little understanding of the Arkship's occupants. They have 9000 years head start but this means they have 9000 years to fall into ruin and your as hard to understand as a Neanderthal. Many stayed and worked on projects to help the travellers. Doing vital research that could not be done on a ship and was not finished before departure. Some of their results were beamed to the arkships so they have technology that was not known when the pioneers went into cryo. These are long dead hero's who stayed and died so others would succeed. Some of the solutions could not be sent to the cryoships in time, they were out of range, so they sent smaller faster relays to deliver the new solutions. The result is basically the same as 1 and 4 but with more AI in play. One of the ships sent to the closest safe system to Sol arrived hundreds of years ago and survived long enough to buy time, a few hundred years before the neutron star caught them. They have FTL, gates and much better technology. They either used option 2 and 3 themselves before building a new faster arkship and heading off or They set out again by probes and gates to catch the Arkships. Because of the quirks of relativity they can not contact the Arkships directly or match velocity, but they can place things on various worlds to help and welcome them. Their chain of stargates have been destroyed behind them lest strange effects from the neutron star can propagate though them. 9000 years has distorted their mission a little or on some worlds shattered it in war and disaster. They are now space nomads leaving advanced tributes to their sleeping gods. Not everyone slept on the Ark ships some continued working, living, dying, on the ship, but their children survived. Hence all the corridors. Some are helpful and part AI, some are still human. When the ship landed they slipped away or slipped into the embarking crowds. They have the same technology etc but have a few new technologies developed in transit. However these children of the ship see the earth as a distant legend. There is also a language gap for them, they have no word for tree. They are secretive, seeing the sleepers as alien and fragile. They have been warned not to reveal themselves for that may destroy the sleepers moral and sense of destiny. In this context the children are just Dev's and hand picked players not NPC's but never really seen. They conspire to help. Some may plot to hinder. This in SF parlance is the FTL greets STL conundrum. It is as old as the Traveller RPG way back in 1977 but no one has developed it fully. The universe of SF has enough ancient aliens and extra terrestrial gods. Lets make the humanity both sides of the first contact equation. 9000 is a long time.

Remember even the starting planet is a big place. A 70 km radius planet is 60000 square km area. Lots of room for a new player to get away from the hustle and bustle of the older players builds, corporations and wars. Assuming no one has a magic scanner that detects everyone on the ground automatically from high up its easy to mix new and veteran. This is made easier by a few player groups that choose to help the new players find untouched wilderness. Nova quark could help by adding a few "call buttons"; Items that allow players to hail vehicle with an integral pickup and delivery contract. Space Uber. Lock the transaction to pay 2 minutes after drop off in the passenger has not died. Thus Jim could call for a two seated vehicle to scoop him up and drop him somewhere: wilderness, city, mine. So if the driver is a greefer he does not get payed if he drops and then kills you for your stuff. Anyone that does that will get a bounty on his head and may find the next person he drops off was bait and has backup. Just make sure the call button does not spam single seated craft and irritate all the fighter jocks.

It is relatively simple code to create a locked freight container or haulage box and a cash on delivery with insurance contract. Alex puts goodies in a special box and creates a haulage contract automatically. Bill takes the box to destination and drops it off on a delivery stage; that may be a docking clamp, weighing machine, contents scanner. Bill gets paid. As far as the server is concerned the haulage container is just a number on a generic box which if delivered loads a goods look up list to the receiving players inventory or storage. Nothing to steal except a generic haulage box that yields random loot if opened and lands you on a bounty hunters list. While thanks to insurance another box is generated and sent with the same little number describing Alex's box of goods. No tears PvP with full economic PvE.

Alain Damasio's back story PDF has a lot of details, sneaky Easter eggs and a nice hat tip to minecraft. Gravitational compression, anti-gravity belt pouches holding tons of stuff (page 5). "Honey I shrunk the kids!" comes to mind. In other words that glowing glove makes Aladdin's lamp look like a wimp. All the pipes, storage etc are the low energy, high stability alternatives. And it looks like they are not alone out there. Could we see the Slower Than Light meets Faster Than Light welcoming committee scenario. Why use STL If you have FTL ? Why use Cryogenics, with a lousy AI nurse, if you have Resurrection Node - quantum duplication? Was someone back on earth working on a plan B that bore fruit while our hero's slept? It's my favoured option. Even the ancients are from earth; people who took even greater risks by leaving early or late or not at all. Not sleeping on the ship but waking, working, living and dying to ensure the survival of others. Or Uploading themselves late and beaming themselves to smaller faster probes. Perhaps staying doomed to develop FTL, etc, sending the data to their brothers Arkship hours before doomsday. 9854 years a sleep for our heroes is 9854 years of history for anyone else that did not choose that path. Fascinating.

Varying the avatar even a little adds a lot of work. You have to have door heights for giants and button heights for dwarfs. Animations look all wrong beyond the 5 to 6 size range either way. Every mini race needs a tailored animation for each major action. Add ears and tails and you need to redesign all your helmets and space suits. Where do you put the tail when you jump onto a non customised cockpit, car seat or even restaurant chair. Then you get the whole tail clipping though walls in a fire fight giving your position away (Seen that; he could not figure out why he was getting owned in every battle. lol). It's a lot of extra work. If modding or external asset submission becomes a possibility then the dev's may be able let fans do all that. I've also seen a tails option abused to add pornographic content to a game. Clearly the avatar generation will be with you emerging from a cryopod looking like death warmed up. A walking corpse. The re-hydration and muscle restoration, etc is you avatar editing menu. Nice touch. I'm not a dev but I can see why it's hard work in alpha and beta. However if you can make hats and clothing you could make funny ears, tails, etc but It would be later game. We are not re doing Second Life. It does occur to me that if you can do a centre of balance off set value the size centre of value thing could be fixed in the physics engine. Again later game.

I keep seeing this on your posts but see better English before it than than most British here. lol. You're doing alright sir. If your really unsure throw same thing tough google translate and see if you get the same result. Edit. Had to fix a typo. lol.

Too many attachment points just means you will get a huge porn problem like Second Life had. Massive annual legal costs followed.

How did a make a duplicate and how do I get rid of it?

Hey I can remember when cows were new big thing in minecraft. A good example is the very basic minecraft food system. By about day three you have chests of food, full fields and you don't give a hoot who loots that field as long as they replant and your chests are safe. However if your a food fanatic you down load Pam's Harvest craft and Spice of life mod food becomes way more interesting. Spice of life makes food much harder, you can't eat the same thing three times and Pam's makes a huge variety of crops, trees and meals. We would not want farm simulator 2316 but if modding is possible we could get it. Not sure how modding could work on a single shard game. Though I could see one way using a set of default mod blocks, elements and materials, and a messaging system that up dates it client side if you have the mod installed. Not everyone would see the same thing though. If possible a big sign; "Warning modded system", would be needed.

I like the foundry and 3D printer but can we have a second incarnation of both and storage. These would be attached to a voxel build creating a bigger version with slightly faster operation. This would allow the building of foundries, factories and storage bays and silos that look impressively industrial and make great places for a fire fight. Most would be purely decorative. I noticed that the forge and other machines in landmark often got hidden in such bigger builds but were never really optimised for that function. It may need a forge input, the end of that mesh cropped off and made a little larger. Production bonus depending the number of solid voxels in the volume xyz1 to xyz 2 behind it. A few molten metal voxel types would be an optional extra. A printer Scaled up Shorted with the option to put more in a row as a special effect. I.e they all seem to run if 'connected' as above. A cargo input element that expands it's storage depending the number of solid voxels in the volume xyz1 to xyz 2 behind it. No need to change the fluid storage it looks industrial enough. Think minecraft's multiblocks in the mods but easier because the bulk of the 'multiblock' can be anything the artist desires.

I like the foundry and 3D printer but can we have a second incarnation of both and storage. These would be attached to a voxel build creating a bigger version with slightly faster operation. This would allow the building of foundries, factories and storage bays and silos that look impressively industrial and make great places for a fire fight. Most would be purely decorative. I noticed that the forge and other machines in landmark often got hidden in such bigger builds but were never really optimised for that function. It may need a forge input, the end of that mesh cropped off and made a little larger. Production bonus depending the number of solid voxels in the volume xyz1 to xyz 2 behind it. A few molten metal voxel types would be an optional extra. A printer Scaled up Shorted with the option to put more in a row as a special effect. I.e they all seem to run if 'connected' as above. A cargo input element that expands it's storage depending the number of solid voxels in the volume xyz1 to xyz 2 behind it. No need to change the fluid storage it looks industrial enough. Think minecraft's multiblocks in the mods but easier because the bulk of the 'multyblock' can be anything the artist desires.