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Research and Development Direction? (in-game)


BruceWilly

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Hello everyone,

When Dual Universe opens (alpha, beta, ect), what do you think will be the most important factors for large organizations like Terran Union to focus their research and development on, and why? Should they focus on energy (batteries, everything need batteries), recon (detention, exploration), firepower (weapons and defense), infrastructure (buildings on ground and in space), or anything else you can think of? 

 

First post, BruceWilly.

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First of all, welcome to the forums!

Well, Alpha and Beta is all about testing the game, its limits, its problems, bugs and so on. There probably won't be much exciting or regular stuff happening during testing, as members will be busy to test the game and experience  or learn all the stuff. 
But seeing as technology is part of this testing, you can't really say that there is a most important factor, it's more like being able to test everything and check the limits is the most important factor. 

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Heyo!

I think JC also mentioned how nothing from Alpha/Beta will be saved, so people are going to test out the craziest methods to: dig, blow stuff up, and fly spaceships.  I'm going to personally enjoy digging straight down and patching up together a horrible hovercraft to ram people down, since it's for science!

 

Seeing some people create makeshift cannons to shoot other people to the moon or at the arkship will be great.

 

On a more serious note, it'll be a nice chance to see how the player skills can be learned in the fastest possible matter or how the skill will affect what you can do.

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As others have mentioned before, Alpha and Beta you will see a lot of going around, people testing all kinds of things, flying, building, mining and so many more things and based on how things turn out and the current interests of the org you will see different priorities for example SLI will work more on R&D. Terran Union is a nation org and thus it will have different interests and will probably try to do work in all the fields considering TU gets enough man power and if they don't have enough man power at the moment to work on different fields as they intend to do the work will probably be outsourced so as to get the nation up and running.

Though I would imagine infrastructure, defense and R&D would be three major factors when it comes to the initial development of TU.

Oh and also welcome to the forums :) 

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Hey, thanks for the warm welcome!

 

Let me see if I understand everyone:

 

Croomar, you're saying in the alpha and beta we will try to break the universe, and help the developers.

 

Shinymagnemite, you say break the game, do crazy things, and skills trees. That helps dev too.

 

Lethys, mechanics. Yup!

 

Aesras, break stuff, crazy things, man-power / out-sourcing.

 

It sounds like we can agree that the alpha and beta will be bit of a “goof-off”, where our actions will help develop DU. The lore says (I think) that alpha and beta access are a simulation to teach X number of people about Alioth before the Arkship arrives and wakes everyone up. Which means we keep our skills and reset the universe. Is that right? That would make exploring the skill tree permanent.

 

You guys are helping, I have a few more questions.

 

Other than Aesras, everyone has given an answer for pre-launch (alpha and beta). What do you think will happen when the full game is released? How could our governing organization handle their research and development? What keeps coming to my mind is an observe and report approach, initially. There is so many unknowns that we must wait and see to figure out what we really don’t know. Now I have more questions. Research and development seems like a black-hole right now, how will we know our taxes are paying off in this department? Do we really need a research and development department?

 

Downloading…, BruceWilly.

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BruceWilly, so first of all I think you miss understood just a bit. Through Alpha and Beta, everything will keep resetting. The only thing we keep are our blueprints and our knowledge of game mechanics. Nothing in the skill tree will be kept. Also, Alpha and Beta will be a mix of goofing off and in depth testing of the game. When we receive alpha and can start playing the game, we want to test all of the game mechanics, this does include breaking the game but not in all aspects. We are going to want to test things like how ship building works and their physics when it comes to flying. We are going to be building large structures and mining away a lot of land to test land generation and detailed in game mechanics. Obviously I don't speak for everyone of this but the dedicated, core players will want to further the developers in solving problems they are having as well as testing new ideas they want to try out and see if we like them. Now don't get me wrong a lot of players, myself included and *cough cough* Twerkmotor will be trying to break the game because the logs will helps the devs but I don't think this will be a main focus for alpha because it will eventually reach a point of annoyance for the devs.

 

A lot of great questions about R&D and this is definitely going to be a big aspect in the early stages of the game. Most of the focus will be developing stargates and core units/territory units I think. As the game progresses we will see new mechanics and new things to research surface further pushing the R&D aspect of the game. Each org will handle their R&D differently and depending on what they want to focus on (i.e. military, control, mining, trading, etc.) they will focus on that line of research to further themselves. This sort of observe and report may be something very small orgs do in order to further themselves based on the very large orgs but the large orgs will be heading R&D because it will be vital to growing fast, becoming wealthy, and expanding out into the universe. Unfortunately we won't know if our taxes are going to good use until Alpha and Beta release so we know the exact difficulty when it comes to building new technology but definitely count on a huge push towards R&D from big orgs. 

 

I know it was said already but welcome to the forums and I hope I answered all your questions and more.

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Hey, thanks for the warm welcome!

 

Let me see if I understand everyone:

 

Croomar, you're saying in the alpha and beta we will try to break the universe, and help the developers.

 

Shinymagnemite, you say break the game, do crazy things, and skills trees. That helps dev too.

 

Lethys, mechanics. Yup!

 

Aesras, break stuff, crazy things, man-power / out-sourcing.

 

It sounds like we can agree that the alpha and beta will be bit of a “goof-off”, where our actions will help develop DU. The lore says (I think) that alpha and beta access are a simulation to teach X number of people about Alioth before the Arkship arrives and wakes everyone up. Which means we keep our skills and reset the universe. Is that right? That would make exploring the skill tree permanent.

 

You guys are helping, I have a few more questions.

 

Other than Aesras, everyone has given an answer for pre-launch (alpha and beta). What do you think will happen when the full game is released? How could our governing organization handle their research and development? What keeps coming to my mind is an observe and report approach, initially. There is so many unknowns that we must wait and see to figure out what we really don’t know. Now I have more questions. Research and development seems like a black-hole right now, how will we know our taxes are paying off in this department? Do we really need a research and development department?

 

Downloading…, BruceWilly.

 

Well ofc - the purpose of Alpha is ONLY to help the devs. There is no need for shenanigans, org haters and such - that's NOT what Alpha is meant for. Nearly the same thing with beta, but there you can dig into all game mechanics and come up with some plans for release.

 

NO, you DON'T keep your skills from alpha or beta. EVERYTHING gets wiped.

 

What do you think R&D is like? In a sandbox and MMO like this R&D is ONLY about mechanics. Because there is NOTHING else to develop....

A R&D department can focus on

- how to get to certain skills/ships/elements in the game with the least effort and time (basically spreadsheets)

- how to use certain game mechanics (for example if ramming is a thing - how to use that effectively)

- what kind of weapons are in game and how do they work (can a large turret hit a small fighter? how? why? is tracking a thing? what formula defines tracking?)

- how to build a bunker/base with maximum defenses (what elements are ingame and how to use them to their max - where to place turrets. And no, the most obvious and logical spot for turrets may not be the best one)

- how to build effective ships (layers of armor, shields, where to place engines, weapons,...)

- LUA scripts (efficient and well working scripts)

- perhaps it's possible (later?) to develop blueprints - to make them more efficient/less consuming/whatever

 

THAT is R&D and it's only about game mechanics

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Welcome to the forums.

 

Like others have said, alpha and Beta are more for testing the game itself and everything will be wiped after words including skills.

 

R&D will most likely focus on designing new ships for more specialized purposes. I doubt man power will really affect the ability for groups to innovate and, indeed, smaller groups may end up having an advantage.

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Gentlemen,

you have given me excellent details, and a lot to consider. I'm glad the skill tree thing is cleared up (whoops). 

 

It seems like every time a question is answer another one comes up. After reviewing this forum it sounds like I've been asking everyone what R&D is, and how to do it (which I was). I am also looking for the right question to ask, I think we're close. How could a large org R&D department promote innovation, by investing in small groups and offer salaries, or search for single achievements and offer a single compensating payment or commission percent? How do you put a value on, or bargain for someones idea or mind? How do you protect intellectual property (in-game)?

 

I appreciate everyone taking the time to think about my questions. If any other forum has similar ideal already explored please share it with me, I want to avoid being repetitive.

 

Downloading..., BruceWilly

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As Lethys has mentioned, R&D is all about focusing on game mechanics, how to get the max output out of anything, whether it be ship design, scripting the ship and so on.

Why R&D is needed, first of all DU is a MMO game, while you will find solo players you won't find players who are the best at ship building or fighting or flying or trading all at the same time, its about how the community gets together to create something. So lets keep TU as an example, TU will need a R&D org so that the people in TU who want to build ships or script or something get the opportunity to come together, create together and make something that they can be proud of, get on some new ideas and stuff like that. Now people who don't want to build ships don't have to as the ships are being built by the R&D dept. Its not just about R&D but any other field of interest like trading, exploration, military all essential for any org out there.

 

When we talk about innovation, creating new ships, finding new ways to do things, I think the game structure basically endorses that, orgs might want do things differently, what may work for a 10 man org may not for a 100 man org so they need to find different ways to do different things.
As far as paying people goes, well some orgs will pay some may not, how an organisation works is entirely upto them so yea. 

As far as protecting property goes, lets say Blueprints of a ship, now there are two kinds of blueprints. Master Blueprint and Copy Blueprint, a Master Blueprint is owned by the person or the org who made the ship, using a master blueprint you can break apart the ship to see whats going where and then there is a copy blueprint which doesn't tell you how a ship is build and you can sell a copy blueprint on the market so you can protect your design, though keep in mind scripts installed on a ship can not be kept hidden.

Or maybe you say own a ship already, now a ship has a control unit, and the beauty of RDMS comes here is that till the time the control unit is yours the ship is yours but if one hacks the control unit or replaces it with his own well bye bye ship.

Same with territories, there is a territory control unit which needs to be placed to mark the territory as yours and well if you have read about it a bit then territories come in shape of hexagons(am not sure about the dimensions yet), so one needs to replace your TCU(or maybe hack?) to steal your territory, I think devs also said that TCUs placement and all takes about a day so you have plenty time to defend your area.

But hey, what about your containers or stuff? well using RDMS you can define who has access to those containers which may hold your goods and all so that is that. but keep in mind that nothing is completely safe so yea.

Happy Gaming ;) xD

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Gentlemen,

 

you have given me excellent details, and a lot to consider. I'm glad the skill tree thing is cleared up (whoops). 

 

It seems like every time a question is answer another one comes up. After reviewing this forum it sounds like I've been asking everyone what R&D is, and how to do it (which I was). I am also looking for the right question to ask, I think we're close. How could a large org R&D department promote innovation, by investing in small groups and offer salaries, or search for single achievements and offer a single compensating payment or commission percent? How do you put a value on, or bargain for someones idea or mind? How do you protect intellectual property (in-game)?

 

I appreciate everyone taking the time to think about my questions. If any other forum has similar ideal already explored please share it with me, I want to avoid being repetitive.

 

Downloading..., BruceWilly

 

"How do you protect intellectual property (in-game)?"

As Aesras pointed out, blueprints will be protected anyway. And for any other idea (considering R&D is only about game mechanics): you just can't protect those. Especially not in a large organization. If your R&D department figured out how to effectively kill a shield bubble with 5 ships, I assure you that after a week everyone will know because either of leaks in your org or because you gave away the "secret" by yourself in attacking 10 shields. Such "ideas" can't be protected but have one benefit: reputation.

 

"How could a large org R&D department promote innovation, by investing in small groups and offer salaries, or search for single achievements and offer a single compensating payment or commission percent? How do you put a value on, or bargain for someones idea or mind?"

Coming from eve online and as a very interested player in game mechanics this is what happend in eve: We had a weekly fleet-op on singularity (test server) and just tried all kinds of different things there (different e-war modules applied to each other, tactics, maneuvers, pipebombing (watch it on YT - really cool), grid mechanics ...) and tried to figure out the underlying formula for hitting, tracking, evading and so on. After weeks and months we had a rough idea of what was going on and started to develop new tactics, using those mechanics.

 

So this kind of thing will be in DU as well. Trial and error, figuring out formulas to calculate hit chances with excel, understanding shield mechanics and how to use them in a fight, using server ping/latency to do stuff, ....

You'd need guys who dig deep into the mechanics and have an understanding of how game engines/physics engine work for your R&D team and who always pay attention to what they are doing and why this happend.

 

To me, R&D is no special department because no one I know wants to just run around all day and try to break things or figure out game mechanics. It's somewhat fluid and interested players can and will break the game to figure out the mechanics, but they will do that while doing other stuff (like trading, fighting, flying,...).

It's up to you if you pay them or not but to bring that example from eve again: I got everything I wanted from my corp on the live server because in a sandbox mmo with all the different meta, the only thing that can give you an edge over others is a better understanding how to use game mechanics to their maximum efficiency. 

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  • 3 months later...

Do we have any idea on the timescale of research?  I heard something similar to eve but cut back a little.  Which is kinda what i'm hoping for, but I was wondering if they've talked anywhere officially on that?

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Do we have any idea on the timescale of research?  I heard something similar to eve but cut back a little.  Which is kinda what i'm hoping for, but I was wondering if they've talked anywhere officially on that?

 

Not many infos about that. We just know that technologies will require a large amount of time to discover, so there'll definitely be some kind of timesink, so the best guess is that will be similar to eve. Regarding the amount of time, to discover techs to build and pilot the first basic ship at release, will likely require something like 2-6 weeks, so you get the idea. 

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I hope research will have "hidden" variables (you have to test them extensively in order to determine the stats and put it on its statistics, which allows people to scam [Ayyy live demonstrations!] but will greatly increase immersion and make dedicated facilities to test such things.)

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Do we have any idea on the timescale of research?  I heard something similar to eve but cut back a little.  Which is kinda what i'm hoping for, but I was wondering if they've talked anywhere officially on that?

 

It will all depend on how much time you invest in the game. If someone says 2 weeks and you play 1 hour every day for 2 weeks, it won't be the same as 5 hours each day for 2 weeks. NQ wants this game to be an investment into learning aspects of the game. The more time you put in, the more skill you get out.

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It will all depend on how much time you invest in the game. If someone says 2 weeks and you play 1 hour every day for 2 weeks, it won't be the same as 5 hours each day for 2 weeks. NQ wants this game to be an investment into learning aspects of the game. The more time you put in, the more skill you get out.

That said you should elaborate a bit more: softskills. Hardskills (the ones you gain with your char for skilling) are the same rate for everyone. You won't get more hardskills because you play more than some other guy

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That said you should elaborate a bit more: softskills. Hardskills (the ones you gain with your char for skilling) are the same rate for everyone. You won't get more hardskills because you play more than some other guy

I am curious on the current view of tbis as well. From what I understand its an Eve like training system, real world training time regardless of play, which i love for those who have jobs.

But It would be nice to reward those who are doing things in game. Lets say im training mining, amd its earning 1000 points an hour towards the next level. Say I am mining while doing it, it could be like a standard MMO. I get 1xp for every m3 of iron I mine, giving me an extra 25xp an hr. Or some other small but noticable ammount.

Now I also see the skills as being like in Eve, 5 levels that give access to bonuses, or maybe 10. But not 100 levels. And each is exponentially longer to train.

So say Miming 5 is a 25 day training time, by playing a lot and mining a lot I can cut a day or 2 off the time.

 

To me this makes sense, youre rewriting your memory by the neural interface system. But clearly you can still learn and make your own memories ontop of that as you are going about your business in game.

Maybe a limit would be you cant learn similar skills at the same time. So you cant earn additional mining points while queing mining, but you can earn points trade skill, chrisma based, since youre selling items and making trades.

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