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Dual Universe FAQ/Sources


Cybrex

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This is a "General Knowledge" thread to help provide newcomers with a list of hot topics, answers, FAQs, videos, and other miscellaneous information that pertains to Dual Universe. This thread will not contain everything about DU, but merely help to point you in the right direction. I have done my best over the years to keep this thread up to date for newcomers, so if there is something you think is missing and should be added, just private message me with the information and sourcing.

 

You are also encouraged to join the Official Community Discord for Dual Universe if you have questions, or just want to be involved in the community. 

 

PSA: Use the SEARCH FUNCTION in the forums before making a thread if you are new. Chances are, it has already been discussed and beaten to death.  

 

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-> Release Roadmap & Alpha Announcement <-

 

Official Links:

 

FAQ from the Main Website

 

Trello Community Suggestions

 

DU Gamepedia (wiki)

 

• Developer Blog

 

• Kickstarter Page

 

Youtube Page

 

          • DU Community Discord

                 Official Discord FAQ (Forum Link)

 

           Soundcloud/Soundtracks

 

           DU Reddit

 

 

Forum Links:

 

 "Ask Us Anything" Thread by NQ-Nyzaltar

 

• Forum Rules thread by NQ-Nyzaltar

 

Pre-Alpha FAQ and Rules by NQ-Nyzaltar

 

DU DevDiary Video Guide by Shockeray

 

 

Other (Non-Official) Media:

 

Dual Universe Explorers (Podcast)

 

Ark Central (Community News)

 

Dual Insider (Community News)

 

Dual Universe Sleepers (Fansite/Blog)

 

• Outpost Zebra (Blog)

 

Community Org/Player Map (Community Tool)
 

 

Common Topics: (NOTE: All information below is subject to change at any time. Official responses from the developers, and sources, have been linked to each subject.)

 

• Price Model will be Pay To Play

 

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• Free Trial period: between 2 and 4 weeks.

• Monthly subscription (optional with a PLEX-like system)

• Possible (cosmetic only) Cash Shop. If deployed, we will make it in order that every month, players who have paid a subscription will be able to get some cash shop items for free.

 

 

 

 

• "Virtual Simulator" for builders to build in peace

 

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Virtual Simulator: enabling player to enter a virtual world (call it “inception syndrome”!). While in that virtual space, the player would be able to design any construct, in a completely peaceful setting. This would help builders to design their construct and create their blueprints safely, without being interrupted by any PvP action. For ships, it will also be possible to test their flight mode, without risking a crash or wasting resources!

 

 

• "The Economy"

 

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Standardized Currency: Currently, there is no plan to enable players to create their own currency, for several reasons: - Risk of imbalance: If there is something that needs to be stable for a sandbox game, this is the in-game economy. 

 

- Development priority: Many features are quite long to develop (even the basic ones). And as this type of game mechanics implies a complex game design behind it in order to work well, it would cost a lot of development time. And for now, it's far from being in priorities

 

- Fun to play: We are not entirely convinced that enabling players to create their own money would be fun on the long run, nor really very easy to understand and master for most of the players (look how the economy in real life is complexified just by that). While we don't want to go "mainstream" in the game design of Dual Universe, we don't want either to go for a game that will only appeal to a very small population of players. We also need numbers to create a MMORPG full of player-driven stories!

 

 

 

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LUA/DPU: We just finished designing and implementing one of the most critical and distinguishing feature of Dual: the capability to script any construct that you make. A construct is anything that you build in the game, it can be a ship, a building, a space station, or whatever. It is a physical object, it can move, collide with stuff and potentially include hundreds of "Elements", which are operational units that you can craft or buy, and freely position inside your construct to add functionalities to it. Examples of Elements are: propulsion engines, control units (computers), doors, weapons, batteries, containers, accelerometers, radars, targeters, drone bay, elevator, and many more. The way the construct orchestrates all these Elements is through scripts, and what we call "Distributed Processing Units".

 

 

 "FTL Travel" answered by NQ-Nyzaltar in the Ask Us Anything thread

 

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Warp Bubbles/Stargates: We have in mind to introduce FTL drives at some point. We want to gamify this notion, to make the FTL drive a central element of a large ship infrastructure. You can imagine being heavily damaged during a battle and unable to flee because the FTL drive is detroyed or scrambled, which would start a race to try to repair it and escape. Some people in the ship crew will most likely be dedicated to maintenance of the FTL drive, no matter what. To clarify: the goal of FTL drive is to allow your ship to do interplanetary travel.
 
Interstellar travel will be the realm of Star Gates, which is another matter entirely. FTL is just "super fast speed" with something like the Alcubierre warp bubble as the underlying tech, and Star Gates are about "instant travel between two nodes" with something like wormholes as the underlying tech. We are not yet sure whether ships in FTL mode will have a physical presence on the server side, if they will effectively travel in some hyperspace and can be intercepted.

 

 

"Unigine 2" Dual Universe will be running off of the Unigine 2 Game Engine

 

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Unigine 2: Unigine is a rendering engine that was well known for GPU benchmarks showcasing advanced Direct X11 features. Quoting their web page, �Unigine 2 is designed to handle virtual worlds of unprecedented scale without limits: double precision of coordinates, supersonic speed of data streaming and huge visibility distance.�. Well, that�s exactly the kind of technology we needed for Dual Universe.

 

"Single Shard Server" In Dual Universe, all players will be playing in the same server

(Video) Server Technology review by JC Baillie

 

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Single Shard Server: The server synchronization is done transparently in the cluster side. You, as a client, will not see any change. There might be a bit of delay internally for the different actors to synchronize within the cluster, but it will most likely be unnoticeable by the user, as the typical Internet latency will be ways beyond the kind of latency your have in a high performance cluster. You, as a player, get regular updates about what is going on around you, not mater which physical server these updates are coming from. As you fall in the shopping mall, your avatar will register and de-register from several zone several times, and people subscribed to these zones (the people “living” on each floor) will get a notification of your passage. Well, that’s the theory and what we get from our first testing scenarios.

 

 

"Active Lock On Targeting" In Dual Universe, combat will not be twitched base

 

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Lock On Targeting: It's too soon to give a lot of details, but here are the basics: what we can say is that it will be much more about tactics than reflexes, in part due to the fact that targets will have to be locked and then fired upon. This won't change as it is a technical constraint to make large-scale battles possible. In Ship vs Ship combat, we will intend to make it valuable to have a crew onboard a ship with several people managing weapons and a central command room to help coordinate the action. As ships will be destructible (as they are made out of voxels), we have currently several ideas in mind to develop combat in some unique ways. For example, the ability  to breach a hull and board an enemy ship. This if of course just an idea at the moment, as we still need to ponder if we can implement such gameplay in a meaningful and balanced way.

 

"Character Progression" There will be no character levels in Dual Universe

 

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Character Progression: In Dual Universe, you won't have a character level. In fact, it will be more a horizontal character progression like EvE Online: Players will be able to learn skills from various fields of activity right from the start and we're trying to design them in a way that the first level of a skill for a basic activity (gathering resources, piloting a construct, using a weapon, etc) can be researched in a matter of minutes, to make all basic types of gameplay available very quickly. For each basic skill, there will be a skill tree. Advanced skills will provide efficiency improvements, or unlock the ability to use advanced tech for a specific activity.

 
Here is how learning skills is represented on the lore side: Cryogenic sleep maintained during several millenia has damaged memories of the Arkship passengers. It doesn't affect instinctive memory like the ability to talk, walk and such, but knowledge is gone for the most part. Arkship passengers might even have forgotten their family in the process, as an unplanned side effect (after all, cryogenic technology has never been tested on such a long period before!). The way to compensate this memory loss is to learn again selected knowledge through brain implant over time (a bit like when Neo learns KungFu in the film "Matrix", but at a much slower pace). The interesting thing is this automatic and perpetual learning doesn't prevent the character to practise another activity in the meantime. It's like a task running in the background onn a computer. Such automatic learning isn't stopping when you disconnect from the game.

 

"Survival Gameplay" Currently NovaQuark are still considering adding survival elements

 

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Survival Elements: We are considering to implement survival gameplay. In the case we would develop this aspect, we haven't decided possible features yet. Some ideas we are currently looking into are harsh environmental conditions, like atmosphere toxicity, gravity, temperature. The goal is to have survival gameplay when you explore a wild, unknown planet, not colonized yet. But once proper gear or element is crafted and population start to grow on the said planet, all the survival aspect would slowly fade as the environment start to be controlled.

 

 

"Territory Control" In Dual Universe, you will be able to own pieces of land

 

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Territory Units: A territory tile is an asset like any other, and when you claim it, you become its owner. Like any other asset, a tile is associated to a set of powers that define what can be done with it. For example: whether you can enter it, create constructs on it, mine it, open a market in it, etc. Compared to a neutral tile, an owned tile does not bring much more to its owner, because the owner has all the rights on it. What is interesting however is that, like with any other owned asset powers, the owner is free to grant or limit these powers for anyone by associating them with appropriate tags (see the previous blog post of “Rights & Duties Management System”, or “RDMS”). If those tags are granted with financial duties, the territory is effectively rented, against a certain monthly fee. So you can for example own a material rich territory and rent it for mining to a mining corporation. You can also decide that only very special people are allowed to build constructs on your territory, making sure that you surround yourself with friends, etc.

 

"Rights And Duties Management System" Sophisticated system for managed roles in your organization

 

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RDMS: The central idea of the RDMS (Rights & Duties Management System) is the notion of “tag”. A tag is basically a string of characters that you can create. The owner of an asset can do two things: 1. assign some tags individually to each of its powers, 2. give tags to other players (or organizations). Thus, being granted a particular power is simply a matter of owning at least one tag that is assigned to that particular power. Example: I own my container C and I create a tag “friend” that I assign to the power “open” of C (this power might have already other tags assigned, it doesn’t matter). Then,I give the tag “friend” to Alice, my friend, so that she can access the container C.

 

"Stealth Technology" Stealth tech is currently being considered by NovaQuark

 

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• Stealth: We plan stealth technology in Dual Universe (even if it's not planned soon).

 

Afk cloaking is indeed a problem in EVE.

Psychological warfare is interesting, as long as it involves activity from the player wanting to do it.

 

From what we have analyzed, afk cloaking has been possible because of a few things:

- the fact that all players in the solar system are displayed on the local chat. If you see someone you don't know, it migh be a spy, or someone planning an ambush.

- the fact that a player can leave from a safe area (space stations) from a unique point (easy to ambush). 

- the fact that a player wanting to leave the solar system generally needs to use a stargate (also an easy place to ambush).

 

As Dual Universe won't work "solar system by solar system" and there won't be only one point of entry/exit for a safe area, this kind of abuse should have a lot less impact in Dual Universe. And if it still does... well, we keep your suggestions in our papers as possible ways to handle it  ;)

 

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well done sir. well done. now we have a master post to direct people

 

Absolutely! I'll be trying to keep up to date with all the information, but so far I think I have covered "The big questions" we see frequently around here.  

 

As I mention in the OP, if anyone has suggestions, just PM me!

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Nicely done I also have started to go to all the repeat post and try to link all other relevant post together. surprisingly easy with just a couple of keywords. 

 

I have noticed a couple of other ones that seem to be asked a lot, food and water needs and how logging out will be handled.

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Nicely done I also have started to go to all the repeat post and try to link all other relevant post together. surprisingly easy with just a couple of keywords. 

 

I have noticed a couple of other ones that seem to be asked a lot, food and water needs and how logging out will be handled.

 

If you shoot it to me, I can tack it on to this post. Shouldn't be that difficult.

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Sure are you wanting links to all the post or just information from the devs?

 

I suppose both. I'll work with it and try to format it so it's easy to read.

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That i can do.

 

Food and water ifo

 

Dev blog

At this stage, it is not clear if we will have enough time until the alpha to implement NPC animals to come and bother you during the night, as well as serve as hunting preys. But that’s the idea, because you will need to feed yourself, and the nanoformer cannot make wood-based lunch for you!

 

Other post

Food, Sleep, Logout location etc.

Food and Water

 

Log out info

 

Havent been through them all as of yet but at first glance i haven't found anything from the devs on this subject

 

Other post

 

Food, Sleep, Logout location etc.

What happendes when you log off?

Preferred logout mechanics?

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Alright, I'd say I'm at a point where I am comfortable to say the thread is good for now. I'll have to reformat in the future as we get new information since it'll be too much for one post - but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. 

 

If it is too difficult for anyone to read, just let me know and offer a suggestion if you can. Thanks! :)

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Im wondering if anyone knows how the friends or group management will be handled like a in game chat, or like a proximity voice chat? For example you play with a group of friends and have them on a list could you tell who is who around you and could see there tag from a distance?

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  • 3 weeks later...

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