NQ quietly rolling out 0.24 ..

[JohnnyTazer]

7 hours ago, Hexonymous said:

Actually, if you recall, I almost didn't play the game, and it was you that convinced me to try it. And what did I say was the reason I almost didn't play ?  "That DU channel is toxic". And your reply to my was "Ignore them, they are just bitter.".

 

The exception doesn't prove the rule. 99% of the people who play DU or give a try will look at YouTube and twitch before any forum.  Ask around.  When looking to play a new game I use word of mouth of friends from gaming communities, watch YouTube, and check out streams.  The "community" is the last thing I would look at, and 99% never look at. 

[Novean-118237]

12 hours ago, ShippyLongstalking said:

we know it's early access...but we aren't just judging NQ on the last 6 months, but the last 6 years.

 

As a developer, you should understand that six years of alpha on a project is a long time (even for game dev) -- especially when they didn't build their own engine and didn't stand their own servers. Hell they didn't even pick a robust engine with industry-standard adoption, they picked Unigen2. 

 

As a dev, i'm sure you can imagine what a six-year-old codebase stuck in alpha might look like, especially considering that NQ's leadership has never worked in game development before or led a tech company of this size. I'm sure you can imagine how difficult it is to build up a stable core when major features aren't even designed yet. They still don't have a solid design around major concepts like PvP. 

 

to be honest.....if i were a new player coming in after playing DU for a small amount of time, I'd probably think people here are super negative, but it's because we've seen things, yo. 

 

i get your point, but give it a few months before insisting we're irrationally toxic or trolls. we actually know a lot about the development of this game, not just being pessimistic for its own sake. 

Since you brought this up, I will clarify something here. Under normal circumstances, a game company can push a game out in about 6 years. Give or take. That is about the average. But those companies use engines that are already made.

 

DU is based off a completely new technology, and thus, a new engine. So it's going to take quite a lot longer to produce something. I'm actually impressed at how far they actualy have come with the creation of this engine from scratch.

 

With this knowledge, they came into this thinking one way, and over time they realized they had to change a few things. And this is why they put the info into the Terms of Service that things could change. The players should know this if they bothered to read the TOS.

 

And to what you are saying that you "know things". You really don't. You only know what you have seen as a player, NOT as a developer. So you have no clue what really is going on behind the scenes.

 

SHOULD NQ be more transparent ? YES. That much I definately can agree on. So I get the frustration there. But everything else, you all knew what you were getting into when you signed up.

[IvanGrozniy]

On 3/17/2021 at 5:34 PM, Jizzlobber said:

Given how absolutely toxic you lot are, good and good riddance.  I backed this game very early on, forgot about it until after .23 dropped, and just now getting into it and you vets are CANCER.  Most toxic community I have ever seen, and as a life-long gamer, that's saying something.   I would say you lot are driving more people away than lack of features, support, or any other thing you want to whine and cry about.  Every time I come here looking for info, I want to uninstall.   First post btw, because all you vets cry and whine so much, people like me don't even want to participate ffs.

you'll change your tune when you get all game mechanics figured out and start peaking under the curtain.

[SirJohn85]

10 minutes ago, Hexonymous said:

Since you brought this up, I will clarify something here. Under normal circumstances, a game company can push a game out in about 6 years. Give or take. That is about the average. But those companies use engines that are already made.

 

DU is based off a completely new technology, and thus, a new engine. So it's going to take quite a lot longer to produce something. I'm actually impressed at how far they actualy have come with the creation of this engine from scratch.

 

With this knowledge, they came into this thinking one way, and over time they realized they had to change a few things. And this is why they put the info into the Terms of Service that things could change. The players should know this if they bothered to read the TOS.

 

And to what you are saying that you "know things". You really don't.

 

 

 

I'll just throw in that they use Unigine as their engine, which was not developed in-house but bought in from outside.

https://unigine.com/

 

If wiki is to be believed, there were a few single player games and no mmorpgs that made it to release.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unigine#Games

 

The more you know.

[IvanGrozniy]

21 minutes ago, Hexonymous said:

DU is based off a completely new technology, and thus, a new engine. So it's going to take quite a lot longer to produce something. I'm actually impressed at how far they actually have come with the creation of this engine from scratch.

 

It isn't based on any new technology. Literally everything in DU is unoriginal. Down to the voxel system, which was a 2002 paper by a couple university students... see here: https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=!AEvwC4fqcCK0Lug&cid=279C0413866AC417&id=279C0413866AC417!867593&parId=279C0413866AC417!2514&o=OneUp. Another game used this very paper in their game, and that game collapsed do to a host of reasons, lack of pvp being a huge part of it... and a lot of those players then came to DU. Rinse and repeat.

 

Arguably the only thing that could be said to be unique is the spaghetti json that servers and clients exchange with each other known as the "single shard" universe. Which again, isn't unique either. And it's already proven NOT to be scalable at all. Plus source code is leaked, so... yeah...  nice words, nice marketing, but nah fam, that's not the reality.

 

For this to truly be an mmo,  A LOT of work needs to be done on the low level... the more top-end systems they add the worse the underground gets.

[Novean-118237]

3 hours ago, SirJohn85 said:

 

I'll just throw in that they use Unigine as their engine, which was not developed in-house but bought in from outside.

https://unigine.com/

 

If wiki is to be believed, there were a few single player games and no mmorpgs that made it to release.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unigine#Games

 

The more you know.

I see, so the original announcement I saw on it a couple years ago, about them making new tech, as the first to hold 30K players is wrong then.

 

Thanks for the info.

[Novean-118237]

3 hours ago, IvanGrozniy said:

-SNIP-

 

For this to truly be an mmo,  A LOT of work needs to be done on the low level... the more top-end systems they add the worse the underground gets.

I totally agree with this. And it really does take a LOT of work, AND TIME.

[blazemonger]

You can spin "creating technology" in a number of ways. 

 

1. NQ based their voxel engine on the mentioned paper yes, but they did write the engine. Frankly, I expect that a lot of the issues we currently (in 0.24) see originate here probably combined with the side effects of point 3.
2. NQ based their server tech on a well established load balancing technique. The unique aspect here is that this is applied in a game environment where latency is a major factor, much more than i a "normal" cluster environment.
3. NQ uses a number of middleware tools which have quite the overlap in functionality. Especially YEBIS is one that I still have no idea why it is used as most of what it does can be achieve in Unigine just fine. And yes, I do feel that a lot of the issues we currently see actually originate in overlap between these different 3rd party tools.

 

DU started in UE but NQ moved away from it because UE really can't handle the scale that they are trying to achieve in DU and I'd say they were correct in doing so. Purely based on the scale aspect I'd say that Unigine makes sense but it's not a game engine so a lot of the needed infrastructure still needs to be done separately and that is where I expect the biggest problem for DU lies. The backend and database management overall is where DU is struggling. It would seem to me the game engine/cluster is actually pretty stable but it's the backend causing most of the issues we are seeing. And frankly, it has been that way since pre-alpha and NQ never really had been able to solve that problem up to this day.

[blundertwink]

10 hours ago, Hexonymous said:

And to what you are saying that you "know things". You really don't. You only know what you have seen as a player, NOT as a developer. So you have no clue what really is going on behind the scenes.

Always interesting when people go into "but actually, let me tell you" mode without doing much research first. 

 

to be fair, 6 years in development isn't bad for a game like DU at all, it's completely reasonable...but 6-7 years to not even get to beta...? That's a different story. 

 

you're right that i don't know the perspective as a dev...but that doesn't mean i have 'no clue' what's going on behind the scenes, because there are plenty of clues.

 

Major bugs that regress or have been unfixed since beta, them doing DB changes on a live server without even testing it first, high dev turnover, leadership with no experience in game dev, and them writing all the code until today without having a complete game design plan...

 

how do you think that project actually looks from a dev perspective? not trying to be sassy, actually just curious.

 

i personally cringe at the thought of spending 6+ years writing code without even having a complete product plan...and more cringe at the fact that many of the devs haven't even been there 2 years, so they're piling onto legacy code after dev turnover. The slow progress kind of speaks for itself as to how well this is going. 

 

big ambitions require big plans -- DU is huge on ambition but lacking on a plan, and i'd be shocked if the tech didn't reflect this. 

[Novean-118237]

6 hours ago, blazemonger said:

You can spin "creating technology" in a number of ways. 

 

1. NQ based their voxel engine on the mentioned paper yes, but they did write the engine. Frankly, I expect that a lot of the issues we currently (in 0.24) see originate here probably combined with the side effects of point 3.
2. NQ based their server tech on a well established load balancing technique. The unique aspect here is that this is applied in a game environment where latency is a major factor, much more than i a "normal" cluster environment.
3. NQ uses a number of middleware tools which have quite the overlap in functionality. Especially YEBIS is one that I still have no idea why it is used as most of what it does can be achieve in Unigine just fine. And yes, I do feel that a lot of the issues we currently see actually originate in overlap between these different 3rd party tools.

 

DU started in UE but NQ moved away from it because UE really can't handle the scale that they are trying to achieve in DU and I'd say they were correct in doing so. Purely based on the scale aspect I'd say that Unigine makes sense but it's not a game engine so a lot of the needed infrastructure still needs to be done separately and that is where I expect the biggest problem for DU lies. The backend and database management overall is where DU is struggling. It would seem to me the game engine/cluster is actually pretty stable but it's the backend causing most of the issues we are seeing. And frankly, it has been that way since pre-alpha and NQ never really had been able to solve that problem up to this day.

So I was right, they did write the engine. Thanks for clarifying.

I knew I had read that and "did my research" somewhere. I know I'm old, but I'm not that old... yet.

[blundertwink]

8 minutes ago, Hexonymous said:

So I was right, they did write the engine. Thanks for clarifying.

No, that's not what is commonly understood by "engine" -- engine means the game engine itself, which they didn't write. it's an industry-standard term that's well-understood -- "voxel engine" is a server-side component that they created, but not even close to the same level of complexity as a game engine. 

[Novean-118237]

2 minutes ago, ShippyLongstalking said:

No, that's not what is commonly understood by "engine" -- engine means the game engine itself, which they didn't write. it's an industry-standard term that's well-understood -- "voxel engine" is a server-side component that they created, but not even close to the same level of complexity as a game engine. 

I am fully aware of what the difference is. I never said "Game" engine. I am fully aware of what I read, and what blazemonger confirmed.

[SirJohn85]

1 hour ago, Hexonymous said:

I am fully aware of what the difference is. I never said "Game" engine. I am fully aware of what I read, and what blazemonger confirmed.

Which engine are you talking about then? The client comes from unigine. The server tech was built between 2014(?) and 2016.

 

The wandering of npcs following any points is not a peculiarity as such. It is only the points that are passed on to the clients that are then rendered. And in this video the bots were just walking around. Everything else that flew the few constructs were players.