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Territories in space? Process of building a Orbital Station.


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I know we just got some details on How territories will work on planets, but will there be any territories in space. If not then what is the process of building an orbital station? or star base?

 

If it there are territories in space then I'm assuming there would be some sort of second layer of hexagons  around the planet a certain space away and you would put down a floating territory claim device on it and then you would be able to start building. 

 

If there are NOT territories in space then how will this work? We can just start building anywhere in 3D Space? or does it have to be on a certain plane? and if the orbital station has an up and down how will we walk on it if we build it upside down if there is no gravity? Will my orbital station rotate around the planet? How does that all work?

 

Thanks in advance.

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I know we just got some details on How territories will work on planets, but will there be any territories in space. If not then what is the process of building an orbital station? or star base?

 

If it there are territories in space then I'm assuming there would be some sort of second layer of hexagons  around the planet a certain space away and you would put down a floating territory claim device on it and then you would be able to start building. 

 

If there are NOT territories in space then how will this work? We can just start building anywhere in 3D Space? or does it have to be on a certain plane? and if the orbital station has an up and down how will we walk on it if we build it upside down if there is no gravity? Will my orbital station rotate around the planet? How does that all work?

 

Thanks in advance.

25:00 in he will explain this. :edit My mistake I thought he explained it there.
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You guys do understand you can just get a ship up there, deploy a Core Unit and start building, right? The Core Unit acts as a "territory claim" of sorts : Nobody can edit your construct, within a certain grid.

You might say "but Core Units have limits". Yeah, but nobody said you can't chaim Core Units throughout a construct to expand it in size.

Territories on planets are mostly for mining the resources on them safely, not for the "claim" of them. And of course, for them protection bubbles. 

Also, you guys do understand why the devs went for hexagonal tiles on a SPHERIC PLANET, right? Having hexagon tiles in space, makes absolutely zero sense. It's space, you could deploy a claim in a cubic grid - oh look, that's exactly how Core Units deploy their grids that nobody can edit voxels within but you. Why cubic claim around Core Units? Spoilers, it's because the Core Units are cubes themselves.

Cheers.


P.S. : Feel free to look up the Kickstarter video on how building works with Core Units.

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As an addendum to what Twerk said: 

 

They have stated they have no current plans for territory mechanics in space but may develop such things in the future. JC did say that if they created space territory mechanics they would be very different from planetary territory mechanics. 

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So if i used a core unit I could basically have a floating city in the Sky (not space)?

a core unit just gives ownership of a construct i think. A Territory Unit gives ownership of an area so you could have the city anywhere but you wouldn't really own the area around the city itself just the actual construct

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a core unit just gives ownership of a construct i think. A Territory Unit gives ownership of an area so you could have the city anywhere but you wouldn't really own the area around the city itself just the actual construct

watch the KS video. Core units deploy a grid.

 

 

 

So if i used a core unit I could basically have a floating city in the Sky (not space)?

 

Pretty much. That's what a Death Star is on the inside after all.

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(41:30) Will there be territory in space, perhaps borders, beacons, notified of someone crossing?

 

We are sort of the stage of the feature that is something we discuss at coffee but we don’t have any defined plan at the moment. The way it could be implemented in my view is it should be you have territories on the planets.  After a certain amount of territories acquired by a certain organizations, could be an alliance or organizations… at some point if you cover a certain percentage of the planet, than this planet overall becomes an administrative territory or the {?} property of this organization, while of course all of the other territories secured on it remain under control.  So there is a several level system.  So it will be like this planet globally to organization X or Y and then a certain space around the planet will also be considered managed by this organization, and then you can have several planets that are owned by this organization and then you have  {?} that this system belongs to this organization.  This kind of idea is sort of not micromanage of space areas where it gets complicated to visualize… this system is very difficult to set up so we are far from… everything I said might change completely, maybe I did not know something very problematic, the way this also threshold should be handled is a mechanism  {?} that for example if it’s at 70% you need 70% to get it, but if you go below 70% you don’t lose it immediately, but if you go below 60% you don’t lose it immediately  {?} so you don’t have a constant switch of owners for example of a planet.  And we need to precise more how things are happening, for people on this planet that are nothing to do with the organization x that happens to be on a planet that is globally controlled by x.  How would we handle that politically, these are the questions that  {?}.  I don’t think it would be a good idea to have micromanage volumes in space that people would have to claim and things like that.  I think that the core system will be the territory on the planets or territory units, and from there we will try to expand to make sense of ownership of space in general, and we can  {?} larger scale, in larger scale.  These are discussions, there is nothing said, of course we will have to handle that in the long run.  That’s another way to answer that, I think we will need to have some kind of galactic scale power map.

 

(Interviewer) Yea, we’re not going to be getting into space immediately anyways so

 

That’s exactly it, to make it clear, the vision we have for release is that people will start to first build the first… {unintelligible} and then from there, they will start to unlock technologies to go at a faster than light so warping to other planets so they will start to explore the solar system and only when we release the expansion that gets the stargate than we start to explore more and more solar system if you want and then the galaxy will be discovered probably. So this is going to be a long process and we want it that way, {?} the exploration is meaningful and an achievement and difficult and incredible success achievement and feeling to unlock a stargate to a new system to say we have been to where nobody has gone yet.  This kind of idea… this is very different from what other games do where you have immediate access to everything.  That is fine for a single player game I suppose but when you plan on making a game like Dual universe that is meant to last for many years if everything goes as we hope, I think it’s very important that you have this sense of progression and achievement and phased conquest basically. So yea, stargates and politics of control of the galaxy, these are things that will come later because of that. And also because we cannot implement everything in the first  {?} this is also way for us to control and stage the development of the game.

 

http://dualuniverse.gamepedia.com/Archive:DU_Explorers_Interview_(Sep_17,_2016)#Extra-Terrestrial_Territory

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The idea that if you control the planet, you control the surrounding space, is quite appealing. If you control a most of the planets you control the star system. Control the star systems and you control the galaxy. Control the galaxies and you control the universe.

 

Control the planet, control the universe.

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Depending on the actual game mechanic details it might make sense to have some kind of space/territory claim unit which is intended to block others from building right in-front of your space station - potentially building you in...

 

But, on the other hand, if aspects like this are considered in the mechanics design from the start these "griefing" issues can be avoided. E.g. if there are self defense mechanisms you can deploy around your starbase/add to your base which allow your base to shoot any building blocks/core units and attached constructs automatically and, if building in space takes some time and cannot happen instantly this can be solved that way. As it would be rather hard to build in the range of enough guns without getting everything destroyed immediately.

 

Disclaimer: this is just _one_ rough idea on how to tackle "claims" of space without introducing artificial claim units / building blockers.

 

 

See you all in space,

Bobbylord

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Depending on the actual game mechanic details it might make sense to have some kind of space/territory claim unit which is intended to block others from building right in-front of your space station - potentially building you in...

 

But, on the other hand, if aspects like this are considered in the mechanics design from the start these "griefing" issues can be avoided. E.g. if there are self defense mechanisms you can deploy around your starbase/add to your base which allow your base to shoot any building blocks/core units and attached constructs automatically and, if building in space takes some time and cannot happen instantly this can be solved that way. As it would be rather hard to build in the range of enough guns without getting everything destroyed immediately.

 

Disclaimer: this is just _one_ rough idea on how to tackle "claims" of space without introducing artificial claim units / building blockers.

 

 

See you all in space,

Bobbylord

The mechanism is solid though.

 

 

You deploy a Core Unit (the blue boxes). Accord to a video on youtube on their channel, they say that a 1 cubic meter Core Unit, can deploy a 72 meter grid - that's in all directions, hence a radius. The biggest one of these Core Units, is 4 m3 in size, so, let's say they deploy a 288 meters radius of a grid - make it 300.

 

That means, if you put such a giant Core Unit, under a landing pad on  station, anyone who lands on the station, cannot build withiin said gird, BUT, you can't build within their "claimed grid" either.

 

But since your construct is built outside of another person's grid entirely, those two constructs can interact, i.e. shuttle landing on a space station.

 

 

And as I said, said 4 m3 Core Units, should technically be possible to be linked, i.e. at the 265 meter of their grid's radius in one direction, a a new Core Unit, to expand the construct is said direction.

 

However, the difference between Core Units and Territory Claim Units, will probably be that the latter can deploy a Protection Bubble, while the Core Unit constructs can just deploy a powerful shield around them - powerful being relevant to the ampage and wattage you can afford, i layman's terms, energy regeneration and energy capacity of the whole construct.

 

P.S. : The Devs have spoken of a minor "protection bubble" for a ship when a person's offline, but by the sound of it, it won't be something that can last 48 hours, but more like a first layer of defense. Don't be a derpy sheep, properly dock your ship. Any self-respecting space station will have anough defenses to deter any and all GTAs from happening. And let's face it, a battleship can't dock on a space station, but it's a battleship, it won't always have ZERO people on-board.

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The mechanism is solid though.

 

 

You deploy a Core Unit (the blue boxes). Accord to a video on youtube on their channel, they say that a 1 cubic meter Core Unit, can deploy a 72 meter grid - that's in all directions, hence a radius. The biggest one of these Core Units, is 4 m3 in size, so, let's say they deploy a 288 meters radius of a grid - make it 300.

 

That means, if you put such a giant Core Unit, under a landing pad on  station, anyone who lands on the station, cannot build withiin said gird, BUT, you can't build within their "claimed grid" either.

 

But since your construct is built outside of another person's grid entirely, those two constructs can interact, i.e. shuttle landing on a space station.

 

 

And as I said, said 4 m3 Core Units, should technically be possible to be linked, i.e. at the 265 meter of their grid's radius in one direction, a a new Core Unit, to expand the construct is said direction.

 

However, the difference between Core Units and Territory Claim Units, will probably be that the latter can deploy a Protection Bubble, while the Core Unit constructs can just deploy a powerful shield around them - powerful being relevant to the ampage and wattage you can afford, i layman's terms, energy regeneration and energy capacity of the whole construct.

 

P.S. : The Devs have spoken of a minor "protection bubble" for a ship when a person's offline, but by the sound of it, it won't be something that can last 48 hours, but more like a first layer of defense. Don't be a derpy sheep, properly dock your ship. Any self-respecting space station will have anough defenses to deter any and all GTAs from happening. And let's face it, a battleship can't dock on a space station, but it's a battleship, it won't always have ZERO people on-board.

 

I completely agree with your outline of the mechanics above. That is more or less exactly what you can get out of the information published about the topic so far. Still, I think it would be awesome to have a less artificial way to solve this. Having artificially blocked areas other players cannot build in is easy to be implemented and allows for easy and quick balance changes, but having self defense options which make it about impossible or at least very very hard to build in a specific radius of another players construct, without consent, would feel a lot more natural.

 

If one organization feels that they want to try and build up a staging station next to the one of their enemies, why not let them try? If the defense of the station is too bad or they manage to take it out they will succeed. If not, they will just waste all the resources.

 

In addition though, to fight the griefing, a game mechanic which prevents players from attaching building blocks/modules/... directly to the structure of someone else should exist I guess. Expanding this protection to hundreds of meters or more is artificial.

 

This would of course be different if that could be solved with "shields" (like you outlined above as well). Such a shield would be an actual barrier preventing someone from building/entering and not just an invisible bubble/area which makes a sign pop-up which says: building in this area is blocked!

 

 

Greetings,

Bobbylord

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I completely agree with your outline of the mechanics above. That is more or less exactly what you can get out of the information published about the topic so far. Still, I think it would be awesome to have a less artificial way to solve this. Having artificially blocked areas other players cannot build in is easy to be implemented and allows for easy and quick balance changes, but having self defense options which make it about impossible or at least very very hard to build in a specific radius of another players construct, without consent, would feel a lot more natural.

 

If one organization feels that they want to try and build up a staging station next to the one of their enemies, why not let them try? If the defense of the station is too bad or they manage to take it out they will succeed. If not, they will just waste all the resources.

 

In addition though, to fight the griefing, a game mechanic which prevents players from attaching building blocks/modules/... directly to the structure of someone else should exist I guess. Expanding this protection to hundreds of meters or more is artificial.

 

This would of course be different if that could be solved with "shields" (like you outlined above as well). Such a shield would be an actual barrier preventing someone from building/entering and not just an invisible bubble/area which makes a sign pop-up which says: building in this area is blocked!

 

 

Greetings,

Bobbylord

Oh, look, I'm with you on the "less arbitrary rules", but you got to consider the average joe and people building within safezones. In Sfezones, the turret idea wouldn't work, since nothing can be destroyed, so the voxel grid owuld be the only guarantee of not being trolled - if people can build within a safezone without a territory claim unit at all that is.

 

Also, you got to bring in some realisic scenarios. Nooone is gonna build a staging station within a 30 minute warp of another station - and yeah, warp takes time in DU as the Devs explained it, it's not teleportation, you are meant to live the ship on the inside. You got to understand the logistics behind large scale warfare, nobody is gonna waste materials ( that also deplete ) on building a staging area within sublight intercept range, let alone near a station where missiles will rain all day.

 

Now, the distiction should be made, that 3D Objects like Elements (modules) in the game, should have skilsl associated with them for being deployed within another person's construct but not belonging to them, i.e. an engineer setting up a shield recharge device on the floor for his strike force to benefit off of, or a sentry turret, or w/e. They are not voxel entities and can be "attached" to a construct without causing arguements in the game's logic - mainly that unclaimed voxel entities are not subject to dynamic changes. That way, people can deploy expendable modules, like setting up covers for advancing up a corridor within a space-ship, or for marines on board a ship, to defend by deploying barricades ala Rainbow Six : Siege to delay the boarding party's advance, even if the marines have no rights to edit anything on the Construct itself.

 

Also, to disambiguate, the "grids" are essentially a box space that mvoes with the Core Unit. It's a space in which within it nothing can be edited aside from the owner of the grid or the people with authority in general. This is necessary, so people who buy your stuff off of the market, don't immediately copy your ship's design and start reselling it as their own. It's a sandbox game, and the devs have to intertwine certain aspects of the game to make it work as a whole. So the grids around a Core Unit, are there to make sure you ain't griefed in more ways than one, either by trolls building an effigy to Lord Dickbutt, or people just ripping off your hard work on the market.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Also, to disambiguate, the "grids" are essentially a box space that mvoes with the Core Unit. It's a space in which within it nothing can be edited aside from the owner of the grid or the people with authority in general. This is necessary, so people who buy your stuff off of the market, don't immediately copy your ship's design and start reselling it as their own. It's a sandbox game, and the devs have to intertwine certain aspects of the game to make it work as a whole. So the grids around a Core Unit, are there to make sure you ain't griefed in more ways than one, either by trolls building an effigy to Lord Dickbutt, or people just ripping off your hard work on the market.

 

In regards to having a construct/ship design and then someone reselling it as their own you need to lock the blueprint design to the original designer and only the originator should be able to make copies of it.  However, you would also have to prevent reverse engineering of the construct/ship else someone can just deconstruct it and then build the same item and save as a blueprint with them as the originator.   I do like the idea JC mentioned that you can have add-ons to a design (like a mod) to a specific blueprint.

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In regards to having a construct/ship design and then someone reselling it as their own you need to lock the blueprint design to the original designer and only the originator should be able to make copies of it.  However, you would also have to prevent reverse engineering of the construct/ship else someone can just deconstruct it and then build the same item and save as a blueprint with them as the originator.   I do like the idea JC mentioned that you can have add-ons to a design (like a mod) to a specific blueprint.

Well, the RDMS does cover who can copy your deployed Blueprint on a construct. However, nothing prevents people from copying the ship's hull (that's the design of it) - unles NQ has some pattern recognition installed for it, which is a bad idea if so, cause after a while anything will be "copyrighted" in the game.

 

Reverse engineering on scripts is quite impossible, as JC did say they will have them run encrypted client-side so people don't by a construct, copy its voxel -hull and then copy the scripts as well and just resell it. 

 

As for scripts like "orbital trajectories" around a planet, that's just math, anyone who has done entry level physics and math will figure out how to set up a ship on orbiting around a point - essentially, going in circles, since planets do not move around a star.

 

I guess NQ has something figured out for this, at least, making reverse-engineering an actual challenge, rather than herp-derp copy pasting. :P

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Script Obfuscation will be the key, until NQ can come up with a reliable encryption mechanism.

 

The coder can obfuscate if he knows what he's doing.

Obfuscation is tricky, especially for the Average Joe builder in the community.

 

And to be honest, even ecnryption will be broken eventually. Sure, NQ can have a Terms Of Service article indicating that any and all attempts at decrypting NQ encryption is copyright infringement, but I can't see a possible way for NQ to track who actually broke the encryption or not, after the fact,

 

Unless if they pull a Library of Babel and save scripts that way on the server to be distributed to buyers of a vehicle ands save the ID of the construct / script combination and arrangement through the same algorithm that produces the planet.

 

That way, if a person was to replicate the EXACT SAME construct / script combo as you, they would alert the NQ server that a copy has been made without a blueprint original behind it - a copyright system - but only if the culprit tried to save the replica construct as a Blueprint Original.

 

But even then, the "copycat" would only be able to SELL the reverse engineered vehicle, not reproduce it via blueprints en masse.

 

It's an interesting conundrum, finding "rip-offs" of famous in-game ships in some backwater world where the locals have made replicas of a ship but they got no way of blueprinting it cause it would inform the servers of their actions.

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