wesbruce

Today logging is done with big machines like this. I could see that being an arm on a hover speeder. Add a tree seeder to another and some nano-fertility sprayer to Increase growth to not quite minecraft speeds and you have forestry and farming. I have another idea below. I can also see a way to make farming biodomes secure and fast but lootable for seeds at least. A process called gleaning; yields seed or transplants while giving the crop a bonus that benefits the owning player. The raider is just doing a little weeding. Another option is a bio-harvesting attachment on a speeder/ ground craft produces green matter. The nanofab has three modes carbohydrate extraction, protein enhancement, polymer production on greenhouse. Green house planters and hydroponic shelves produces bio-pharmaceuticals, flavor enhancers, scented flowers, & Heme-root. Add some algae and yeast vats for the ships and dead worlds. Combine all 10 outputs to make a small range of food items with variable colour. Give the player cook a naming field and with a small range of food files you get a large range of foods. It's been discovered that Heme makes things taste like meat. Combine any three resulting meals to make you space pirate feed and use an autogalley for them. Boring food for the PvP crew fun food for the survivalist and arkzone party set.

Remember the game need not dumb down to attract newbies if it's designed well and we have multiple planets and systems. A few orgs will set up classic game play on some and others could be set up for that new world start from scratch and pull in new player with a space bus. The game has only one starting Arkship but many more left earth so even new untouched starting worlds are a possibility if Arkzone crowding becomes an intractable game play problem some time down the line. As for rewards for established players; my game within a game idea may be useful. Allow established players to acquire artefacts and integrate them into a virtual reality build. Challenge maps, puzzle maps, lost ships and lore story ruins, or just loot filled deathtraps. Have an algorithm pop these out into the world with even the creator not knowing where. Now you hunt your creation or leave it for others to find. When found the hunter has an ability to communicate his find back to you the creator and thank you for it / or politely cruise your fiendish traps. Thus people with some depth in the game end up part dev, part lore creator and part dungeon keeper. Lore lords as well as war lords. Story tellers as well as merchant princes and Ancient Alien adversary as well as master craftsmen.

I'm sure some of us could cook up a deep but not complex food mechanic that wont burden other players. All you need is an auto galley for the non foodie players, space pirates, and various farm units for the rest of us. We could even have a planter Element that goes on a voxel build with green voxels that grow. Have the voxel mages come up with 2000 crop shapes but it's really just one element replacing a set of voxels with another set of voxels over time in a fixed space. Fuzzy green, brown and wheat coloured voxels. Fruit of all colours and various shapes. At 25 cm a voxel pumpkins are easy, apples need to be smoothed a little more and wheat is just dirt with a decoration Corn just needs to be a fuzzy voxel with fuzz that goes sideways. If the voxels can have normal maps then we could do even better. Throw in a few bush, stem and leaf meshes, already seen in the demo and we're almost done. Add another plate and table Element and the recipes arrange voxels on it and you have a banquette. Almost all art but a notch up from 23rd century space pirate algae hardtack. Of cause the hardtack makes lembas bread look like a light snack. Add a few non combat bonuses; social standing, awareness and creative intelligence that buff various skills. Have good food push them up and that does more than just keep you alive.

With no npc's and players spread thin over may worlds weather hazards would be essential. It can be done already in minecraft there is an absolutely terrifying weather mod out there on the forge mod pack list. If it can be done there it can be done anywhere. Some other hazards possible. I do scary lists. Dust devil. Small local 1 metre at the base 4 metres top 10 metres high. Cleans solar cells on mars. No damage but moves player a meter or two randomly. Don't dance with one at the edge of a cliff. These may move in swarms all moving randomly but in the same direction. Abrasive dust devil. The same as above but does do some damage to a player within 2 metres. Keeps you on your toes. Charged dust devil. The same as 1 with a light show and a Zap. A lot of damage 2 - 4 metres range and directional lightening attack. Becomes a normal dust devil after discharging. Toxic pool. Don't step in it corrodes suit, damage, easy to avoid but may be concentrated around rich resource nodes creating a maze challenge. Thin ice. Walk on it and you fall though into chilled water. You take damage unless your suit is optimised or upgraded for it. It is not deep so you can scramble out. Cold worlds with liquid water only. I have fallen in one myself it ruined our snow holiday. Ice Crevice. Thin ice hides a deep hole. Drop 3 - 4 metres. Cold conditions. Scramble out. Tread carefully. Volcanic Crevice. Brittle lava and ash over a hole. As per 6 but hot. Generally fatal in the real world! Should be survivable in game. Vegetated Crevice. Just a hole with plants over it. Drop 4 - 8 metre. Survivable landing. Scramble out. Adds risk to Worlds with life on it. Could lead to interesting cave system. Dead air cave. Toxic air voxels in a cave, suit up. Creeping dune. Slow moving ridge of sand moving towards your base. Various sizes. Width 6 times it's height. length 2 times its height. Moves in the direction of its length. Resource sand. If you can do voxel ships you can do dunes and waves, sparingly. Toxic dune. As per 10 but does damage to suit as you walk on it or try to mine it out. Useful chemicals. Geyser. Intermittent, dangerous, even seen on ice moons. A useful resource. Hot damaging if you're too close. They can be hidden under a layer of chemical deposits and dust. Natural mine. Wave. If you can do a lump of copper you can do a volumetric wave. 8 x 2 x 1 with long axis being the width. Flat on the bottom and tapered at the ends. Move on water and ice. Should be no harder than vegetation on flat terrain but moving. Moves player in the water, could knock pull a player into the water if on shore. It could be hit by very low flying vehicles and ships doing damage. Don't over do them but adds interest to a big empty ocean. Flash flood. As a 13 above but in a river and dry river. Much longer than wide. Clips into landscape. Should be rare. Don't camp or land on the river bed. Dust cloud. Replace air voxels with a coloured air voxel and change sky light settings. Choking damage to unsuited players. Abrasive cloud. As per 15 but with more damage and can damage suits and small ships. Toxic cloud. As per 15 but with more damage and can damage suits. Interesting chemicals. Acid cloud. Venus has these. As per 17 but big and high above the planets surface. Can damage ship's if not properly designed. A resource; mix it with CO2 in the right chemistry set and you get water, sulphur, or plastics. Make a balloon city. Nebular cloud in space. Replace vacuum voxels with a coloured vacuum voxel and change sky light settings, hide the stars. Big enough to hide a ship or a fleet and force you to play cat and mouse in the dark. Forces short range combat by disabling long range targeting. Unstable cloud. As 19 but forces you to use a lot of power just surviving in it. Some ship damage if you run out of power. Just firing some weapons may be dangerous. The idea is not to kill the player out right but keep him or her reminded that aliens and other players are not the only thing the big bad world has to offer. No nasty alien ships or fauna needed.

Voip is very good for helping out new players fast and easily. Given that there are no NPC's for that function and typed chat is real slow and impossible in a crisis a voip tool would be very helpful. It also make GM operations fast and easy. I'm biased I have dyslexia and ant see the font in some chats so text chat boxes are barely useful. Integrated VOIP applications are also getting cheaper. In one PS 2 game I ended up teaching a guy from south east Asia English mid battle without dropping a shot. I had never heard of his native language.

In planetside 2 most use the in game VOIP because it emulates a command structure and allows people to form fluid big groups fast. Generally the only ones using external application are engaging in spycraft with one player planted on the other faction. Some are very good spy's.

Big balloon craft could be used on Venus, Geoffrey A. Landis a Sf writer who also works at NASA has covered in a scientific paper. A balloon vehicle is a lot of lightweight voxels and a big slow easy target. It could be done but is it something you would want in Alpha? The soviets used balloon probes in Venus successfully decades ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus It is an option if you have that lethal surface, live in the sky world type. Mine with drones. Remember we are setting this in 2317 or so maybe even wheels are obsolete let alone balloons.

Seeds from orbit, isn't that what the aliens normally do in the B grade movies? Every thing is OP if you can do it from orbit. However orbital defence platforms would be the general answer to anything from orbit. I'm talking long term and a specific set of biome rules/ type that makes terraforming on it possible.

Funny how this contradicts some of the terraforming thread comments. lol. If you can bombard a living would into a lifeless ruin then, in theory, you could create a terraformable fallow world or biome. One with equivalent 'damage' or the mars look but could be bombarded with seeds and technology to grow a green world. I.e. A biome with plants and grass allowed but not there at the start.

It looks good but I have a question will a very fast moving player get a sub-server or what ever it is called? Jumping speedy from subserver to sub-server rapidly could cause mayhem. Speedy would still see the rest as the camera player in the video does.

Over urbanisation is really the problem of abandoned structures in the safe zones. It could be solved with several tricks. A "noob bus" pick up from the ark and drop off a 3 to six wilderness locations with a regular location change. People build, harvest resources and then return by building a vehicle or catching the next "bus". This disburses harvesting and build much further than running distance and reduces early crowding. Means small bases in the urban zone. Lootable secure chests. Storage is secure but one set of skills or tools allow you to see the contents but not loot or damage it. The other set of skills or tools allows you to take an item or two from the chest but the item is generated not lost from the inventory and your locked out from looting the inventory or seeing what's in it for a while. Your mining other peoples chest but not their contents. Difficultly is based on the market value of the items. This makes early game play beyond the safe zone viable while making raiding, viable and fruitful yet harmless. Ruination. Abandoned buildings are templated (removed) and then modified a little and plonked down on new worlds as ruins to be found by other players. A little lore can cover why. A few rubble, dust, dune or overgrowth voxels would be needed. Abandoned storage becomes loot chests in this case with exotic or 'ruined' loot. Beautification program. A quest like game play to demolish abandoned safe zone building with some looting of resources but a template is archived, off line and compressed, in case the owner comes back. They can spawn this template somewhere else at reduced resource cost. A few extra fast build and demolition protected zones for machinima makers with loss less demolition tools. So city can be built used for challenge map, build off game play or movie making at low cost and then is gone just as fast.

It might be really nice to code a crowd funding option into the organisation structures so we can have in game crowd funding of big organisation projects. An option to draw on non members via the market system for big projects could also be a useful tool for colony infrastructure and recruitment. Takes some workload off the GM's too. I would count as part of the player run government system. Once funded there is a lot of hiring: player generated quests.

Looks like a good plan CaptainTwerkmotor. I'm left with a lot of ideas for space combat options. Fire on breach = extra damage if the targets have taken X damage already.

If you know minecraft you know that the water fits the above description, if you get far enough away it stops flowing. Most don't know that. In DU the distance would just be much shorter. Technically there are Four water levels/ types possible: Static opaque water ; old technology, (Everquest, Cube 2,) cheap on server. muddy or foamy water, very useful. Often forgotten. Can do rapids and water falls. Static translucent water; available in engine as indicated above, In many games. No lag. Short limited dynamic flows: Described above by yamamushi. No harder than growing trees or mining terrain: doable but should be very limited, (minecraft, Terraria.) Full persistent flowing translucent water with volumetric flow changes: server crashing lag machines. But some minecraft mods do this using chunk loaders which are cloud servers running only the chunk. Tricky, not necessary. All have Animated texture but freeze if the player is any distance. As for falling hanging blocks. It's the same problem as the ugly spawn problem. Add a mesh clean up tool in the mining tools. It should be no harder than mining out the whole hanging hill top and spawning in a pile of rubble below. But it is not a job for DU, it is a job for voxel farm, etc. They may get to it soon. One mine craft mod has a tool that does this. Aim it at a voxel it mines the top voxel it can find of that type. No falling blocks needed. This no cave-in except where you specifically do them as a mining act. Ie it is not a block property that the server tracks, or physics but an active and local targeted mine and place scripted into a clean up tool. Smooth down. Technically if you have explosions that effect the terrain you have the same lag problem. Erosion is just a slow explosion.

Mars has all the materials to make fertiliser for the biodomes. And Bob Zubrin's mars hab design stores all the astronaut droppings as freeze dried shielding for use as fertiliser on mars. See his "case for mars." book. We need not go into that level of detail though someone has all ready suggested it on another thread. I'm A National Space Society member and former Mars Society member. Curiosity rover has spotted several useful chemicals that if you put it through a mill gives you useful fertiled regolith, add seeds and some bacteria and you have soil. A minigreen house is planned on a near future mission. CaptainTwerkmotor is correct biodomes and roofed valleys is not full terraforming. I've actually outlived my NSA life membership twice.

Don't worry I'm sure we can come up with an automatic Tamagotchi feeder for some and a farm biodome for the others. It's just another crafting recipe in the 3d printer thing. Just look at all the food in Second Life, it does nothing. In Eve online it's just trade goods and decoration. I even have a design for food for one game that gives you the ability to spend your skill points in an imaginative way. Beats the boring skill menu. If only I could do code!

Is it Voxel Farm under the hood or something else? If so all the tools are there. I even talked about flowing water and erosion on that blog. It can be done but you need drain blocks and drainage rules. The one thing minecraft missed or fudged.

Key words guys! We need stuff that is light on the servers so combat does not mess up all the other cool stuff. The big question is how you do light on the servers with a 60 ship battle with ten turrets each? mmm That's a whole other topic/ can of worms.

There is a few ways to do ancient ruins without aliens. Spoiler warning and definitely not official. Assume that the first prototype ark ship attempted some kind of blind FTL jump. No target gate, No STL. It went horribly wrong but some survived, built even managed to get to other systems using the unsafe drive but eventually they died out. Their genetics was damaged badly in each jump. The result it ruins, unsafe ancient derelicts, that are hundreds if not thousands of years old because you took the slower but safe STL solution. Some ruins may even contain barely human NPC's. A second idea is that the defective ship jumped back in time tens of millions of years and Built normally but eventually they fell to a civil war that destroyed everything including their stargates. Only their tech, their stone and a few genetic clues in the plants and animals remain. Their language was a mix and a mess when they left and has gone haywire since. These two could allow a lower technology gameplay as individual players use some kind of found memory tech switch to an alternate thousands of years ago and build what will be ruins (creative mode). These special ruins materials and stuff then decay. So all but the first ruins is player built with each alternate seeing how much he can entice the other players with a story, gift them a smattering of higher technology bits or troll low tech puzzles and traps. This can work with real extinct alien memory technology. The third is a secret society (alpha player guild) with a few secret technology tools that allow them to go out and build fake ruins to manipulate the others into adopting their political goals. I.E. the structures are built propaganda. In the third case someone is handing out a slightly suspicious mission to drop off a robotic gadget and a lot of stone somewhere which unbeknown to them builds an ancient looking ruin as part of a plot. A random secret society member 'controls' the robot and builds. Funny how the ruins are found near these drop offs and never before! In all three cases the player building the runs is 'teleported' there and not told where. IE the star, planet, etc data is turned off. Your ruin may not be found for months real time and because they are player built templates the GM can move them to newly spawned worlds. A game within a game.

I'm a tad biased. This is one of my sites: http://vacoyecology.com/valleyhouse.html OK it's just a really big modular biodome but that's my point. My player icon is an asteroid with Four biodomes and two yellow rail based tracked centrifuges and a few other bits and pieces.

There is another solution to the mined out spawn zone problem. Simply add restoration tools to the tool range and mine restoration to the "quest" list. Make money fixing spawn. People go out with tools they have crafted and a small amount of resources and smooth, fill, repair the Terrain. Mine restoration and forest replanting are a real thing in the real would. Whether it resets ores or simply resets the terrain to seed without ores will be a question. If this is a player built world and a player mined world, why not a player repaired world? Also helps with that hidden base. You don't want the mining giving the game a way. In minecraft anarchy servers I'm the guy that goes back with dirt and saplings and replants spawn. It really confuses people.

Why bring a knife to a raygun fight? Frank Herbert had a nice solution in Dune: force fields that blocked ranged weapons but not melee attacks. It would be simple to do today in a game and would give players reasons to keep a melee weapon handy or add a bayonet to the laser rifle or what ever. There is more to melee than just a knife item in the hand though. You need animations, hit boxes that don't glitch out if your too close. One solution developed in Second Life years a go was really slow bullets that lasted only a few fractions of a second so got only a metre or so from the weapon before disappearing.

There is another variable. Planetside 2 is a good test of a game but there is a catch. Most Australians play planetside 2 on an Australian server near the airport in Sydney. If an Aussie tries to play on a US or EU server it's unworkable. There are no Australian servers for landmark so I have trouble with it. The same is true for quite a few other games, World of tanks, several MMO need to segregate Asia from the others because of bad links: Hawaii, California, several places in the middle east (the data is going though real world war zones in a few cases). If your not on a server in Australia, Singapore, Japan, Korea or Russia (Siberia) you get lagged to death. The optic fibres are fast but they're plugged into old telecommunications infrastructure in some places. This will be a problem for a single shard universe design. I'm not sure folks in the US and Europe know how bad that problem is. I'm not allowed to blame the undersea optic fibre cables my brother made them. In Sydney they go though a facility that is 100 years old. The optic fibre technology is new but the power system and control wiring is decades old. It's a problem the devs need to know about.

If I understand procedural landscapes the seed uses it's values to get locations to put plants, rocks, etc. The biome defines which look up table to use. Having some thing that switches the designated look up table and throws in a force filed dome or valley roof would work. You get trees where there would other wise be rocks. It would be too much work for launch but it would be possible to do later particularly if we plan for it. One look up table has a 4 metre rock the other has a 4 metre tree designated to the same value. Player gets line of sight, the Terraformer unit tells the GPU that it's using table 2 not table 1. Green patch on a dead planet results. Clearly not early game though because only a fool would land the ark ship on a dead planet.

Wow lots of ideas. One thing to try it to make food, air, water automatic in the cockpits and control units but set them to kick on activating survival mode 100 m from the ship. This gives you base bonuses to your human avatar that is only useful out of the ship. Running, jumping fall distance, etc. Hazard endurance, research, prospecting, exploration result bonuses. If you're a player that lives on your ship you never see the stats and they never go below 20 but if you're the castaway, explorer, survivor type you can eat, drink, etc and push the stats up to 100/ 200 or so. You can find and do stuff that the ship player can't find and probably does not want to look for. Social bonuses would also be linked to the base stats so they matter in a starport bar. Better the bar and it's food the better those stats. Run out of food, etc you don't die but finding alien plant life, surface ores and hunting things with ray guns are locked in at the base level 20 with no bonus loots.