wesbruce

Hello,
I would like to streass a point about hardness. there are two kinds of hardnesses: hardness on factors you cannot interact with, hardness on factors you can interact with.
The first would be rarity of a material, that has many usefull uses. This makes the game frustrating as you cannot interfere in it, this is the bad kind of difficult.
The second would be the complexity of the production chain and its optimisation. this makes the game frustrating in itself, but if the production chain is very simple to make, but very complex to make an efficient one, then it is fun because you have a sense of interaction and progression.
 
these are nuances that discern a good from a bad game.

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

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

NQ has said there will be a wipe from alpha to closed beta. I think closed beta to open beta will be a wipe. not sure if they doing one from open beta to live game but I would think yes.
 
and silverranger is right, the alpha in regards to lore is taking place while "we" are on the arkship in deep sleep through a VR

I got an idea.
What if a person attempts to colonize a planet, but for some reason deletes his account.
If nobody else visited the planet, it becomes a "Failed" world, where his creations are copied and pasted throughout the planet, with slights randomly generated lore, and stuff misplaced.
Simple things make a game great.

The first thread I ever made on this forum was about how to tackle the stock market and economy issue in a secure and unforgeable manner.
 
I'll just leave a link to this forum thread here:
 
https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/603-cryptographically-secure-market-features-using-open-transactions/
 
Granted, most people did not understand what I was talking about in that thread at all, and many people were angry at me accusing me of arguing for a RMT system in DU and completely taking the point of my post way off topic. 

Voxels will have physics upon placement right now but ghost images could be considered. I don't think travelling will take months, just making instant travel jump gates will as you will have to tractor them apart (quantum link).
 
Floating voxels will exist, but they may be solutions for the terrain, but not for the ships. We will call that quantum struting when a flating part exists on a ship. But: it is possible to detect if a ship is cut in half thanks to baking (they talked about procedural mesh baking) so i expect them to be able to sample that baked mesh for separation. (There is probably a mathematical way to achieva that).
 
For the terrain we could just detect if the below neibors exist or not and if not detatch the block of dirt and let it fall and rejoin the ground underneath. See the terrafirmacraft mining system for more detail. It is not feasible for ships as the materials are too strong to be able to use that technique effectively even tho it may be adapted.

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. 

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. 

This is not how you make friends here. This is how you get put on hit lists ingame. 

Depends how they handle inventories. If you can "delete" items then yeah eventual planets would be whittled away to nothing. If you have to deposit back into the world to clear it from you inventory then people would fill in holes just to get rid of junk or turn it into structures.

Other people have thought of this ...... damn

Why not put the entire city on a bunch of hovercraft units

What do y'all think about the possibility of a traveling city. i envision a city where each house is vertical and pillar-like. a city of floating gems almost. what are your thoughts?

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. 

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. 

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. 

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

To be able to simulate orbital physics correctly, you would not only need frames of reference but different voxel octtrees: one per structure. 
 
The system is simple:
the universe has a plane of reference containing solar system planes of references, those are static.
Solar systems store the combined center of mass of all bodies in the system, and create the orbit ellipsoids around it. the center of mass moves with the planets and thus simulate the N body system in some ways (the orbits have to be slightly changed every update but that is quite cheap as it is a change in position of the body, but not changing the energy.
 
same goes for planets and rings/moons/asteroids etc scaling down. when it comes to planets frames of references in atmospheres, those are relatively static, (unless there is a superstructure but that will not happen in the next 2 years) and thus can live directly in a child/parent reference relationship.

Servers HAVE to calculate physics, and physics are cheap if well done (using octtrees etc...). The problem is to share the data between players as it is quite cpu-time intensive. By deferring the physics on clients you would need to verify and crosscompare the results of ALL clients in an area and determine if someone is cheating, and then update in case there are precision errors etc... which is more expensive than actually calculating the physics on the server. It's just a matter of adding vectors and doing simple integration. Collision tho, is the real problem, and that can only be done server side if those can damage cubes, since the quantity of data to collect and analyze would be ludicrous.
 
Not talking about hackers or community modding to counteract this measure and exploit that democratic system.
 
Hope it helps you understand why it can only be done on servers if you wanna be able to let people with a small upload speed play correctly.

You definatly put a lot of thought into it. I personally would love even realistic gravity, and maybe in 10 years we can get that. But I can tell you for now that is a lot of added calculations to tax the servers.
Sure its not many per player, but for thousands of players and millions of obkects it's a lot. And the devs seem to be taking large steps to reduce that for now. But once Carbon nanotube or Quantum computers hit the market its all good.

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 

Interesting you compare with SL, i never remember to take that game in count, since is boring wait the wall paint to dry,
 
but for sure has some nice sandbox and script content.
 
at my readings on dev blog and posts i hope DU came way better than SL btw, specially the scripting part.
 
I also home they make a lot of machines to industrialize our facility's like we do in Minecraft

Let me phrase it this way:
If it were that trivial to do dont you think EVE would have to do the Time dilation thing in large battles?
 
Network latency may doesnt matter for the actual calculations, but it matters massively for the player input.
If that Japanese guy who is fighting in his fighter against me euro guy is always exactly where i expect him with that /at least/ 1/8 of a second time delay hes not using his controls
 
Try playing any fast fps with a ping of 125+, lets see how fun it is.
Same problems apply for any online game.
and unless we find a way around the no communication theorem its not going to be solved by ignoring it and saying the physics are easy to compute locally.