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DEVBLOG: THE FUTURE OF DU - Part 2: Under the Hood - Feedback thread


NQ-Naerais

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UMMMM....we've been bitching about 'abandoned constructs' forever....and NOTHING!!! Either give us a way to scavenge them, or make them disappear, or something! Not only would that add SOMETHING TO DO....but it would resolve the problem. Send everyone an email saying that unless they log in, their stuff will be gone and accessible by other players in 30-60 days. 

 

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1 hour ago, blazemonger said:

I also believe that expecting or driving people to only speak up when they have positive/nice things to say, means you try to create the illusion that it's all good when it's really not while you are well aware of this. (again, it's a marketing/PR ploy)

 

Let me be clear here, we have no issue with complaints about the game, or even the company if don't constructively. But we will not tolerate abuse to other members of the community or our staff, there is a line.  Simply don't cross it ;) That is all.

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50 minutes ago, Kirth Gersen said:

Teaming with Stadia or Luna which also have the big cloud infrastructures for the servers is just a no brain win-win.

 

Stadia is a failure waiting to happen. It does exactly nothing to help resolve the issue NQ faces and will generally make thing way more complex.

Luna is pretty much the Amazon equivalent of that even when it looks stringer on paper. If NQ could hook up with Xbox game pass, now there is something I could see get big.

 

More realistic though, I'm not sure why NQ has not yet teamed up with Shadow, having DU available on Shadow as part of their offerings would be a big boost and open up the game to a much wider audience. Shadow and NQ also have a lot in common, not in the least  being of French origin. Shadow is about to get a massive boost, being bought by a big player and DU could piggy back on that.. With all the commercial people NQ has on their payroll I'd love to see some of those kind of moves..

 

 

 

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2 hours ago, blazemonger said:

 

I think the status of the game that shall not be mentioned (assuming it's sb) as far as being polished and stable is at best overrated, that game is nothing like DU or the tech behind it in any way, starting with scale.

 

I am merely going off players playing the unsaid game and indicating their single shard server with possibilities.  

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                  I have been trying to figure out how to say what needs to be said without sounding toxic or doomsday-esque.  I don't know how to fully do that so I am going to preface this post by saying I want good things for DU and NQ and the people that make up the NQ staff.  With NQs current trajectory you are in a death spiral.  If you stay the course you are on it is my fear that DU will not survive and all of the NQ staff that has poured heart and soul into DU will be unemployed.  I get the impression that NQ looks at DU and gets caught up with jubilation of the technical marvel that is DU.  To that I agree it is a masterpiece and you all deserve a thousands applauses.  However applause doesn't keep the lights on.  It is my firm belief that NQ needs to let go of the methodical roadmap you are using to develop DU.  Yes if you continue on the course you are on you will eventually make a masterful product.  The problem is you do not have the funding to do that.  

NQ needs to increase revenue. The best way IMHO to get more users interested in the game is to prioritize gameplay loops.  NPC Pirates that players can kill to get things.  Asteroid belts to explore and fight over. Gameplay loops these are the things that will bring users to DU and more importantly retain them.  These foundational pillars NQ are working on to set itself up for a more robust world down the road so you can then add gameplay loops is a recipe of your undoing.  Give the people what they want so that they will give you money to do the things you actually want to do.  Basically this is a long winded post saying " you are putting the cart before the horse" and "it will be your undoing if you do not beware".  Us users will be sad if DU fails but we can go play another game.  Sorry for being the asshole who said it.

 

Edit- it is anecdotal but all my friends in DU have been doing there best to give NQ the benefit of doubt but faith is running low and many have said this is the last billing cycle (3 month sub) that they will pay without seeing some signs that NQ is actually making progress and adding actual game play loops to the game.  I must admit I am more hard headed but I have asked myself "at what point in time do I cut and run". I invest large amounts of time into the main game I play which is DU but I do that to build up for a future.  If there won't be a future (game death) why am I investing for that future? 

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This is going to be a bit of a rant and a apologize in advance but I have spent 100s if not 1000 hours in this game at ths point. You are going to have a very efficient, smooth running game that no one is playing if you do not add features. You are basically telling people to keep paying for a sub while you correct major backend mistakes and take away options that destroy 1000s of hours of player work in HTML.

 

I understand the logic of fixing backend issues but why are you putting out two dev blogs about it? This was basically two devblogs making excuses for why development is so slow. Why are you not putting out devblogs about features that are being worked on? We are not under NDA anymore. There is no risk in telling the player base what is coming down the pipe even if it is subject to change. If you are trying to move the needle to get more people in the game this is will have little to no impact.

 

This is a niche game that takes a decent PC to play. If you are looking to get very casual players in, I very much doubt your minimum specs will ever be low enough. Everyone I know who plays the game regularly has little to no performance issues minus a few edge cases. Most of those players are not playing the game as nothing but quality of life additions and useless minigames like shipwrecks have been added since Beta.

 

There are no alternative ways to play the game. If shipwrecks were relatively plentiful but hard to find that would be an alternative gameplay loop and with the addition of recyclers having the ability to recycle elements that is a whole new way to play the game outside of mining and manufacturing. I appreciate the fact that NQ is reassessing the situation but these devblogs are evidence to me that you still don't get it. Your players are leaving because there is no sign of progress towards new features. If new features are coming in the future just talk about them so we will have something to look forward to. Something to build towards and prepare for. 

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10 minutes ago, DecoyGoatBomb said:

This is going to be a bit of a rant and a apologize in advance but I have spent 100s if not 1000 hours in this game at ths point. You are going to have a very efficient, smooth running game that no one is playing if you do not add features. You are basically telling people to keep paying for a sub while you correct major backend mistakes and take away options that destroy 1000s of hours of player work in HTML.

 

I understand the logic of fixing backend issues but why are you putting out two dev blogs about it? This was basically two devblogs making excuses for why development is so slow. Why are you not putting out devblogs about features that are being worked on? We are not under NDA anymore. There is no risk in telling the player base what is coming down the pipe even if it is subject to change. If you are trying to move the needle to get more people in the game this is will have little to no impact.

 

This is a niche game that takes a decent PC to play. If you are looking to get very casual players in, I very much doubt your minimum specs will ever be low enough. Everyone I know who plays the game regularly has little to no performance issues minus a few edge cases. Most of those players are not playing the game as nothing but quality of life additions and useless minigames like shipwrecks have been added since Beta.

 

There are no alternative ways to play the game. If shipwrecks were relatively plentiful but hard to find that would be an alternative gameplay loop and with the addition of recyclers having the ability to recycle elements that is a whole new way to play the game outside of mining and manufacturing. I appreciate the fact that NQ is reassessing the situation but these devblogs are evidence to me that you still don't get it. Your players are leaving because there is no sign of progress towards new features. If new features are coming in the future just talk about them so we will have something to look forward to. Something to build towards and prepare for. 

I feel like every poster to this thread just needs to spam this:
GAMEPLAY LOOPS WHEN?

Also NQ if you know better than what us users are saying to you ( how you come off). How did you get into the position you are in anyway?

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1 hour ago, blazemonger said:

If NQ could hook up with Xbox game pass, now there is something I could see get big.

I don't see how this would solve their technical  issues or get big. DU is a free game with subs so it doesn't fit in the Xbox Game Pass licensing model.

If you're talking about the cloud gaming aspect of XBox Game Pass (= xCloud), it's for Xbox games only. Their 'cloud' infrastructure are just old XBox One consoles put into blades and racks in their datacenters.

I don't see DU running in to these (plus they'll have to port it to XBox first).

 

 

1 hour ago, blazemonger said:

More realistic though, I'm not sure why NQ has not yet teamed up with Shadow, having DU available on Shadow as part of their offerings would be a big boost and open up the game to a much wider audience. Shadow and NQ also have a lot in common, not in the least  being of French origin. Shadow is about to get a massive boost, being bought by a big player and DU could piggy back on that.. With all the commercial people NQ has on their payroll I'd love to see some of those kind of moves..

 

With Shadow it's worst. It's just like PCs in a datacenter and not the same datacenter that the DU servers are in. Still not a solution for DU. Plus the anticheat system they're using has issues with virtual computers.

 

As for Shadow big boost I doubt that. Their 'gaming' model isn't viable. The candidate big players, except may one, are here to buy the talents and the tech to offer 'desktop cloud PCs' for enterprise (in high demand since with the pandemic). They don't care much about the 'gaming' aspect of Shadow.

 

Whatever, my point about cloud gaming was about solving technical issues for DU not marketing/reaching more players who don't have the required PCs. That's another issue.

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13 hours ago, Kirth Gersen said:

I don't see DU running in to these (plus they'll have to port it to XBox first).

Xbox game pass does not require a game to run on XboX. I also get your point as yes, DU would not really fit the mold in that regard.

 

 

Quote

With Shadow it's worst. It's just like PCs in a datacenter and not the same datacenter that the DU servers are in. Still not a solution for DU. Plus the anticheat system they're using has issues with virtual computers.

If NQ and Shadow were to partner up, many people around the world would get access to the game, it runs great on the existing platform is and when NQ fixes the issues which exist since 0.24 and no, these do not have anything to do with EQU8 which works fine on Shadow.

 

Sure, Shadow would not solve NQ's back end problems, but it would expose many people to the game. Some will like it, others may not.

 

 

Quote

As for Shadow big boost I doubt that. Their 'gaming' model isn't viable. The candidate big players, except may one, are here to buy the talents and the tech to offer 'desktop cloud PCs' for enterprise (in high demand since with the pandemic). They don't care much about the 'gaming' aspect of Shadow.

 

We already know who the two remaining bidders are and we also know both are interested in Shadow for what it is, not just for the tech. That is not the point of this idea though. Shadow is the only platform which actually delivers customers a full fledged gaming specced Windows PC through low or medium specced hardware locally and very reasonable cost. Shadow works and works well, it supports your existing hardware and controllers.. I can stream a game I play to Twitch from my phone through my Shadow PC if I want to. I can and did play DU on my phone and tablet for years before 0.24 and it worked well.

 

Google will write off and drop Stadia on two years as another experiment. It is well behind the leader in this field which is Microsoft who offers a mad level of games and support on xbox gamepass. But I guess that is not the topic of this thread so I digress and will leave it here..

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I'm loving what I'm hearing, but...I think we can all agree there are two major things we need to see the next couple updates.
BETTER ROTATION TOOL! Please please please give us more axes of rotation!  Having to bullshit around it by making weird structures, placing it on them, flipping, rotating, move it, etc etc, it's just stupid.  It doesn't make building any more intricate, just frustrating and it's silly that you don't have a multi-axial rotation tool.  EVERYONE would appreciate this.

FULL VERTICAL VIEW! I know you probably didn't include the ability to aim straight up/down so people don't just AFK and dig straight through the earth, but so what? For building and placement and repair etc purposes, it's just ridiculous.  I mean, just make it so with the mining tool you can't aim up/down at the full angle, but give us the ability to look straight up and down, ESPECIALLY in build modes!

 

Thanks.

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Space Mom always said "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all"

So to NQ: Keep the communications coming.  I am loving them.

To sceptical players: Keep saying what you think. This is the only way to make the product better.


To the fanboys and white knights, I have nothing to say. 

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5 hours ago, blazemonger said:

 

... that game is nothing like DU or the tech behind it in any way, starting with scale.

You are absolutely correct. That game actually runs properly. But.. they are vastly behind in the permissions realm, and thusly, not yet having to deal with the intense database issues. The key that makes it run 10 times better is their intelligent use of localized instancing in oh-so-many situations. But, their net-code issues are quite similar to that DU is suffering from. 

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13 minutes ago, Lethys said:

Good for NQ to officially say something which players pointed out months ago. 

 

Third blog will be more interesting tho and we will see if they keep communicating or let it die again

 

Pretty much yeah... I mean... like a post before said "how to say nothing using a lot of words". 

 

I want real changes and progress, not... this... for my taste this is just another "We've heard you" for 6th time.

 

But hey, if people are supporting this instead of actual changes/progress, I guess there is nothing else to do/say.

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just curious, I thought the mission system was suppose to be released as part of 0.24? Was that not true? I really like playing DU but it does seem like talking about 0.25 before the full release of 0.24 is creating confusion for me at least. Is NQ going to finish the release of 024? is the mission system coming? What is the NEXT thing happening. You keep speaking about the "Road map" but it doesn't seem very clear to me.

 

are we getting the second half of 0.24?

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12 hours ago, Kirth Gersen said:

Given what this game want to achieve, imho, the only viable solution would be cloud gaming. This game is made for cloud gaming.

Trying to sync a 'client' in each player PCs is just a technical nightmare:

  • there are cache/sync issues
  • load time / zoning time
  • LUA script sharing and performance
  • latency 
  • physics issues (remember alt-f4 to stop ship and how it's badly solved)
  • requiring an anti-cheat system on each PC which leads to more issues
  • but more importantly: In the mid & long terms it will prevent adding some major attractive features to the game because of its client/server nature and technical limitation.

On the other hand, cloud gaming could solve all theses issues and reduce a lot the operating costs.

Teaming with Stadia or Luna which also have the big cloud infrastructures for the servers is just a no brain win-win.

With total control on the clients and the physics engine which could be unique and server side.: just imagine what could be possible.

DU is the 'killer app' cloud gaming desperately needs and cloud gaming is the only long term viable technical solution for a game like DU.

I just don't understand why NQ isn't going this route, even more that they're already giving tons of cash to Amazon AWS.

 

(disclaimer: I've programmed networking code for games and dealing with client/server issues in the last 20+ years so it's not just a 'feeling').

This dude needs more upvotes!!! This right here needs to get noticed!! I completely agree!

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No. 

You have to deliver a *game.*

Some kind of content. Something for players to do while we wait for you to get your back end sorted.

From my perspective, as the leader of a small organization, I have to answer to my members.

My members do not want to log on. Because there is nothing for them to do.

If nothing comes and I have to expect half a year or so of you trying to fix your back end, I have a very simple choice.

I will have to tell my members to unsubscribe and that we will look back in a year or so.

And we will go play some other game. I will go generate content somewhere else where I have the tools to do so.

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Still no idea where to find these. I didnt get an email alert, its not in the forum, its maybe on the official page? discord? Facebook?  No idea but i thought the idea of having email alerts was to get stuff like this so i would not have to go search everywhere.

 

Recap, apparently i was blind and it was on the forum, but since i only open general stuff lately i never saw it.........sleepyhead

 

Reading it all, there is nothing new and i dont have any hope from what i read. Simply said its a description of where NQ could have done better and why some mistakes were made.

 

Fix the mistakes, kill the stuff you introduced killing the playing field and then move on

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10 hours ago, spacecat said:

just curious, I thought the mission system was suppose to be released as part of 0.24? Was that not true? I really like playing DU but it does seem like talking about 0.25 before the full release of 0.24 is creating confusion for me at least. Is NQ going to finish the release of 024? is the mission system coming? What is the NEXT thing happening. You keep speaking about the "Road map" but it doesn't seem very clear to me.

 

are we getting the second half of 0.24?

 

 

It was very bugged and people lost money due to the bugs in PTS.  It was more a promise to pay XYZ than anything else.  Needs a full re-think tbh.

 

Honvik

Premier of the Empire

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18 hours ago, Kirth Gersen said:

Given what this game want to achieve, imho, the only viable solution would be cloud gaming. This game is made for cloud gaming.

Trying to sync a 'client' in each player PCs is just a technical nightmare:

  • there are cache/sync issues
  • load time / zoning time
  • LUA script sharing and performance
  • latency 
  • physics issues (remember alt-f4 to stop ship and how it's badly solved)
  • requiring an anti-cheat system on each PC which leads to more issues
  • but more importantly: In the mid & long terms it will prevent adding some major attractive features to the game because of its client/server nature and technical limitation.

On the other hand, cloud gaming could solve all theses issues and reduce a lot the operating costs.

Teaming with Stadia or Luna which also have the big cloud infrastructures for the servers is just a no brain win-win.

With total control on the clients and the physics engine which could be unique and server side.: just imagine what could be possible.

DU is the 'killer app' cloud gaming desperately needs and cloud gaming is the only long term viable technical solution for a game like DU.

I just don't understand why NQ isn't going this route, even more that they're already giving tons of cash to Amazon AWS.

 

(disclaimer: I've programmed networking code for games and dealing with client/server issues in the last 20+ years so it's not just a 'feeling').

I don't have any experience writing games but have spent 25 years building and writing software for large scale high performance distributed computing systems and would definitely second this.  Putting things like physics simulation on an unreliable client at the edge of the network is a problem which will need to be fixed at some point IMO, you'd really expect that stuff to be done inside the server cluster.  With this stuff in the client, large scale battles, for example, are never going to work at all because one computer lagging/breaking can freeze the simulation for everyone else.

 

Also I'm guessing putting the simulation in the client probably stops multiple clients from running in 'lockstep', so the client has to tell the server 'move ship X to here' and server has to tell every client that and it happens over and over.  Whereas if simulation is server side the clients can be aware, so the server says 'ship X is here and moving in this direction at this speed' to all clients and they just move it independently.  Then you just tell the clients when things change, which is a lot less frequently.

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18 hours ago, blazemonger said:

It is well behind the leader in this field which is Microsoft who offers a mad level of games and support on xbox gamepass

You're really confusing what Game Pass is and Stadia v xCloud. 

You're comparing oranges and apple.

xCloud is only about streaming XBox games because it uses old XBox consoles hardware. There are no PC gaming cloud streaming service from Microsoft. 

Game Pass (without xCloud part) is just a licensing trick for PC games on your PC. It's not cloud streaming.

And technically everyone in the field agree that Stadia is way ahead in term of quality and latency (plus xcloud is still limited to 720p where Stadia is at 1080p free or at 4K with  a sub).

As for Google killing Stadia this is just an opinion so far...

 

But I agree this is way out of the topic of this thread.

 

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