Jump to content

DU suffers from an identity chrisis since JC got sacked. What kind of game are they even making now? Anyone?


Warlander

Recommended Posts

@NQ-Deckard @NQ-Pann @NQ-Sesch @NQ-Entropyand any other devs along with the new CEO. Please feel free to come in and have a convo.

 

I want to start by saying that I don't hate DU/NQ even if that is your impression you might have of me. I never feel like it is too late for any game and spend my time constantly adapting and adjusting my thought process to try and save games or to point out the pitfalls. Lets pump the brakes for a second and hit pause long enough to be real for a moment and have a constructive conversation between the devs and the community to come to some kind of consensus on where this game needs to go to start moving forward. Its never too late until the lights go out.

 

Everyone here along the devs needs to take a moment and ask ourselves:

  • What is NQ trying to accomplish making at this point?
  • What is the end goal here?
  • Is this game worth playing?
  • Is this game worth paying money for?

 

If you cant come up with a reasonable response in your mind for all 4 of these basic questions something is going terribly wrong.

 

Knowing what needs some love in this game is a start and must be said that no matter how hard things get or how much people might lash out at the developers we are all still behind you and believe in you that you can do what must be done to turn this around (/hugs). But it takes realizing things arent going so hot to start to know what needs to change and admit when things go wrong to start building trust and self respect in yourselves, your game, and your company. Respect is earned and not given. Not listening to the community is making matters worse and we can spend all day pointing fingers at each other and figuring out how to punish people via system mechanics or we can come together to build a game worth playing.

 

All is not lost as this game has all the tools, systems, and everything it needs to be successful if NQ can adopt agile game development as a mindset and salvage what works and what needs to be nixed, tweaked, or added to turn this game around. Its all there its just what needs to be applied and adapted to cut through all the red tape, limits, and removal of systems to see what needs to be done to save NQ/DU.

 

But before all that NQ has to have a meeting and really sit down and rethink what they want to accomplish here. What is being developed is not working and doing more of the same and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Lets have a galactic round table discussion on this and actually talk about how to move forward rather than what was origionally promised, what it has become, and look forward to the future.

 

 

 

Everyone should now ask themselves what type of game do we actually have here:

  • Is this a PvP game?
  • Is this a Building game?
  • Is this a mining sim?
  • IS this a flight sim?
  • Is this a Civ builder?
  • Is this an IRS sim?

 

Peformance VS Gameplay VS Graphics = Playable VS Fun VS Eye Candy

 

This is the gold standard of MMOs and you dont get all three at once without sacrificing from all three in a balancing act. DU went full eye candy and does not have the gameplay and performance aspects fine tuned to be playable or fun vs having voxelization.

 

The main thing here is it takes x1000 longer to build than it takes to destroy things in this game. This sets up a situation in which there will be a huge buildup to Territory Wars and 10 seconds of fury and then what? In all PvP games you are allowed to gain about x10 what you need to throw away on participating in battles to justify the losses suffered day in and day out to want to actually enguage constantly in fighting in a full loot game. Origionally this game was set up to do that until it was strangled with red tape and punishments while not filling the true exploits and the resulting sinks unequally applied across the board.

 

Demeter pretty mch all but prevents PvP from ever happening on mass scale with minimal gains per month for T1 ore even though we now have infinately finite or that is rarer and more sparse than before. The problem is the sinks are not directed properly by how much weath or useage you have on the server and just defaulting on tax is going to wipe out anyone who was waiting for launch from ever coming back to the game. Or that Ore being removed and the geometry reset was supposed to add performance but when you add all the complexity back in and then some it turns gains into temporary boosts as eventually it will go back to how it was before if not worse.

 

But even before that as a civilization building game with planets and wars not allowing each planet to be its own progression system to even wage war on other planets and not having all ores available at base to progress through the whole tree of elements and having certain planets having more of specific ores than others was a bad design choice since the ore spread appears to be strategic but its not as much as it gives those on the furthest planets supremacy over progression that will collapse down without balance or means for planets to fight each other and be able to wage war if that is the point.

 

But at the same time the civ aspect is disjointed as the planets themselves have no goverments attached to them to pick sides or any kind of RTS elements in terms of required infrastructure as much as everyone just doing their own thing as disorganized groups vs planets with orgs working together. Or some kind of system that takes thee taxes and creates a chain of missions paid for by the taxes that serve a purpose rather than a sink to accomplish some kind of goal like paying people to fight, mining ore to create work orders for industrialists, pilots to transport goods logistically to markets or government dry docks to build ships, trade runs to markets or other planets, and flying escorts or intercepts on the missions created to drive combat to happen as a civilization tied solely to the tax system to function as a society in the first place.

 

The only reason we need protection bubbles in the first place is because players arent born into a faction as much as just thrown to the wolves. If you could choose what planet you wanted to be part of and had a part to play in that society and invest in it and share faction protection with your peer to work towards something or randomly born into a planet that had everything you needed to progress to an extent that allowed you to progress to T5 and act in both an org and faction based capacity it would be a better game where players could take over multiple planets until huge planet factions form this game would be better off.

 

The thing is the way ore has been changed and the time it takes to build vs how quick it is to destroy throws a wrench into PvP as mining is now pretty much destroyed as a driver for Pvp to ocvcure, mine asteroids each weekend, or the abysmal rates, rares being rare and sparse, and making PvP or war equally as sparse and compounded by taxes that do nothing for anyone compounding PvP from happening.

 

Where this thing goes from here is up to NQ, but a conversation needs to happen between the community and the Devs to decide the future of DU worth investing into and trusting the community. All is not lost by a longshot. But until a Galactic Roundtable happens and the standoff on both sides is quashed or NQ swallows their pride and comes to the table to re-envision and rebrand themselves to restore trust and faith with agile development nothing changes if they are no longer passionate about building a game worth playing.

 

NQ also needs to start selling full items like skinds, alternate parts, and anything they can that does not create unfair advantage to the game via power creep or P2W shop items to bring in more revinue and for example I would pay for different color forcefields, larger than standard different colored forcefields, etc and im sure other people would as well bringing in more money than NQ was never counting on VS putting it behind some kind of recruitment pyramid scheme that does not really work when DU has such a bad rep in the community.

 

As well as NQ really needs to start using Crowd Sourcing since many people here would devote time to help DU if NQ would accept it. Scripting and all that works but since it is not fully compatible or vetted / limited it destroys more performance and causes more lag than if NQ was like hey help us build and Auto Pilot system and come together and we will add it to the game and then optimize it and give it to everyone as a standard feature of the game without having to go through 3rd party sites and potentially getting viruses or other nefarious scripts that break the game more than they add if scripts were vetted before being added for actual practical purposes.

 

There are/were many talented people with valueable modeling, graphic art, sound engineering, UI, or Coding experience that could be harnessed like an army of unpaid devs if they simply realised the potential of modding communities or people willing to donate their time to adding value to the game. All NQ needs to do is give them a purpose that and what they acutally need made that they dont have the budget to build or things they wanted to add they dont have on the roadmap or on the back burner.

 

Either way DU needs to decide what it wants to be and how to fix the issues made under JC to carve out a new path and a new identity and a pipeline for success which only happens if NQ comes to their senses and starts talking to the community.

 

Together we can affect positive change and save this game.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I enourage everyone to post your idea of the changes you think need to be made to DU to actually turn this thing around while remaining constructive and positive.

 

This is a list of things I have been compiling and without all the commentary.

 

This is a list of changes that must happen to make this patch work going forward.

 

Orgs:

  • Orgs should be given Population Caps / to limit the damage they can do to the game.
  • Org Exp Caps for specific talent trees to create a well balanced organization similar to a salary cap for hockey/sports teams in order for Orgs to be forced to choose who they want to keep, axe, or bring in.
  • Orgs should have Tile limits to how much land they can grab via talents like Cores in how many TU's they can put down and the influence of the game they are allowed to control.

 

Taxes:

  • Taxes need to be based on individual planets/moons and not across the board since different tiles on different planetary bodies are not all created equal.
  • Taxes need to be based on what is actually in each individual tile and not across the board. Being stuck with a T1 ore tile is not the same as someone bogarting T5 ore tiles and reflect the ores available into the tax.
  • Taxes in general should not be just some kind of floating number that is injected into the economy and deleted when paid. Taxes need to go into a NQ master quanta org account and then used to pay for missions to not just creating endless quanta and inflation.
  • Using availability of taxes per planet/moon to fun missions and paying more/less average taxes coming in with a fluctuating average of what they pay out by how many missions are being run with realisitc supply/demand availibility. If nobody runs missions they are worth more or if too many are running them they go down to an average base pay to put taxed quanta back intot he game.

 

TUs:

  • The actual seeding of ore does not actually matter anymore either and making things rarer and sparsely populated makes things worse.
  • This patch should have introduced TUs with Grades (XS-L) and Rarity (Basic-Unique) in which you could buy up larger clusters of tiles (1/7/13/19 ect) with Rarity playing into higher tier ores it adds, Rate of ore gained by rarity, and the actual bonus given per cluster with an imposed total cluster limit like cores via talents you can drop by the Grade each planet will let you drop to limit land grabs.

 

Mining Units:

  • Requiring hundreds of mining units and Tiles is the wrong direction by going with Less=More when it should be about doing more with less tiles and limiting landgrab monopolies vs prospecting.
  • Mining units should allow players to instead of progressing their talent tree to hit pause on talents and use that Experience to prospect mining units individually to inceeae yields baked into individual elements.
  • Or doubling or trippling the output of mining units in general to allow for progression to happen and allow people to actually have more fun playing the game rather than playing an IRS Repo Tax sim.
  • Or there needs to be actual org based Industrial mining rigs that allow orgs to actually generate a realistic amount of resources per hour to play the game rather than requiring hundreds if not thousands of Tiles being purchased.
  • The charge system needs to be swapped out with an active mining function where players use the mining unit to actively mine a 2D surface and find and mine sprite based nodes and make it an active activity or if nobody is there it auto mines.

 

Ore/Seeding:

  • The ore should not be made rarer or sparsely populated with infinitely finite L/h rates we have now. Everyone needs a chance to actually experience progression.
  • Every Planet should have at least the ability to create space fuel with the necessary ore to do so.
  • Every planet should have a spread of T1-T5 ore that makes some aspect of parts and have the ore they need to make those planets important.
  • All planets and moons should have all ore types seeded in regions around the planet so that a planet can wage war against another planet so that certain planets arent better then others. The quantitiy of the tiles with ore or the amount gained on each planet should be the main factor but each planet should be relatively self sufficient.
  • Ore Rates P/h need to be increased x5-10 what they are not to allow for progression, production, expansion.

 

Scanners:

  • Scanners should have a depth range attached to each ore type and ore tier that allows people to scan on the ground to detect ore. If using AGG scanning you can only see what is there below you to a certain extent limiting land grabs if they are just passing through rather than landing and scanning especially if they are using ships that cant fly unless they use AGG.
  • Scanners should also require the Mining Charges since it deals with mining to opperate the scanners so that it limits land grabs by only scanning 10 tiles every 35 hours since it is part of mining.
  • Asteroid scanners should also rely on auto mining charges to cut down on the number of asteroids you can mine every 35 hours since it is part of mining.

 

Sinks:

  • Property Tax works to an extent but it should be dialed back by at least 50%
  • Destructive Elements should be re-introduced to keep the economy flowing now that resources are unlimited.
  • Usage of Elements should cause damage as a slow dot for engines, AGG, hoverpads, Warp Drives, hoverpads, industry elements, and even miners where they constantly run or while they are being used in either a form of overheating causing damage or a wear and tear baseed sink.
  • Single use damage sink where if you use a door, seat, screen, etc it causes a small amount of damage each time that should require repairs every once in a while.

 

Missions:

  • Using the Tax apparatus as a NQ master Org quanta bank account per planet as the driver for missions and use supply/demand surplus to pay base price or paying more beased on taxes collected.
  • Making missions driven on actual work orders on collected taxes like getting paid to mine ore, then work orders for industrialists to make specific items, then creating transport missions of actual items to mission locations (markets that are understocked), and also paying PvPers to fly escorts, and also PvP missions to intercept those resources.
  • Typing the Market Bids/Deliveries to the missions to the work order system/Mission System.

 

Talents:

  • Clone the Talent system and add a new talent tab for an Organization Talent System with its own experience pool called "Research Points".
  • Every player would have an independent personal Tab but in whatever Org you are in the individual Org Research Contribution would be added together in what individual Org Perks they want to research that makes it so if you change orgs it deduct the research from the old org and applies it to the new one.
  • Org Research should be for things like prospecting (improving ore outputs on tiles for each type of ore), Core/TU limits, Caps (pop/exp caps by exp tree), Industry (Element caps, processing boosts, output boosts), and whatever else is needed.

 

Loyalty Program / Login Bonus:

  • Every Consecutive Day you log in the L/H output on all ores increases by 1 with no upward limit. If you dont log in the bonus is reset.
  • Every Day you log in you get additional Rewards like Elements, Skins, Voxel boxes, Rations, Gas Cards, Etc that rotate each month or some kind of Loyalty credit version of quanta that can be used to choose what sorts of supplies or rations you want.
  • Consecutive Logins reduce Tax rates by 0.01% with some kind of upward limit.

I do intend to keep adding via edits.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Bigger picture view -> Recent interviews by new CEO have stated NQ is a 'Metaverse' company that is developing voxel tech to use/licence in any virtual world that gets established. From this we can deduce DU is a tech demo of the voxel tech first and a Sci-Fi MMO game second.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

And what was the great, well defined identity this game had before JC went out? 

 

I dont think that DU's issue is missing an identity. 

I think DU's issue is not providing sustainable joy for most players. 

 

A fix of most issues, would be adding NPCs, avatars and ships. 

 

Maybe that would confuse the identity of the game even more. But it would make it sustainable from the emotional point of view. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 minutes ago, Dracostan said:

Bigger picture view -> Recent interviews by new CEO have stated NQ is a 'Metaverse' company that is developing voxel tech to use/licence in any virtual world that gets established. From this we can deduce DU is a tech demo of the voxel tech first and a Sci-Fi MMO game second.

 

Interestingly terrifying development I would say.

 

If they sacked JC for being an overly ambitious person who couldnt deliver the new CEO is 1000 times more ambitious than JC ever was and I really hope the new CEO knows what those types of statements mean and what it truely takes to pull it off. It's true that the metaverse of gamifying life through VR/AR/IR/FR is the future and building an all in one out of the box toolkit is the way to go and I do support it.

 

However, It is going to take likely 1-2 billion in investment capital to even scratch the surface and they are about a decade behind the 8 ball on that front in respect to companies like Voxel Farm, SpatialOS, and Euclideon or possibly even Daybreak Games/SoE in terms of their market they created as an asset library players could buy or sell voxel assets and both the studio and the player got paid and also the possibility of going blockchain with NFT type asset store. Or some heavy monitization in game and some deep investments. Thats not including all the dynamic content generation tools unless they are just going to sell a blank versions of DU which those other companies do better barring the space engineers elements the rest pales in comparison to better studios on all fronts.

 

Just seems like a bridge too far when their house is on fire.

 

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Warlander said:

If they sacked JC for being an overly ambitious person who couldnt deliver


No, they removed JC from the command, because he promised a utopia impossible to maintain.

A place here players would build nations based on principles and morale.
A place where players would create nearly all the game content instead of creating exploitable content to grief other players.
A place where every one would be happy PVPing.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have to agree that this game has had an identity crisis for a good while now.

The lore and the voxel technology for this game, was all made to enable a "rebuild civilization" MMO. That was THE main description and parameter for this game when it was introduced. But sadly there is not much left of that now. We havn't gotten a new tool/functionality for building civilizations since, well forever.

And so naturally the game has no direction. It is less and less a building game, it can only marginally be called a trading game, exploring is only skin deep, it does not have PVE and it sucks at PVP.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 11/20/2021 at 6:03 PM, Dracostan said:

Bigger picture view -> Recent interviews by new CEO have stated NQ is a 'Metaverse' company that is developing voxel tech to use/licence in any virtual world that gets established. From this we can deduce DU is a tech demo of the voxel tech first and a Sci-Fi MMO game second.

Could you link a video for this please? Personally speaking, that sounds like the saddest DU related news ever.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 11/20/2021 at 11:03 AM, Dracostan said:

Bigger picture view -> Recent interviews by new CEO have stated NQ is a 'Metaverse' company that is developing voxel tech to use/licence in any virtual world that gets established. From this we can deduce DU is a tech demo of the voxel tech first and a Sci-Fi MMO game second.

 

"Please buy our tech, look how great it works in this game full of bugs that never scaled gracefully!" 

 

It's likely that the only worthwhile tech here is the voxel to mesh conversion, which implements a public domain algorithm -- yeah, it's impressive and useful, but any company big enough to buy or lease this tech could afford to develop it themselves. 

 

People have been saying this for a long time now -- that NQ just wants to "sell the tech"...but there's limited tech they actually could sell and it isn't clear who their customer would be or why anyone would think that DU is a good vehicle to showcase this tech. 

 

They wouldn't spend all this time and money on DU if it was merely meant to be a demo to show software for licensing -- if that were truly the primary goal, they'd be spinning servers down by now. 

 

This claim is often repeated around here, but just doesn't make any sense to me in terms of raw market viability or NQ's general trajectory. 

 

Maybe I'm wrong and the OP here will post a video fo the CEO stating this point blank, but even then I can only say "good luck" in trying to find buyers. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 11/20/2021 at 5:03 PM, Dracostan said:

Bigger picture view -> Recent interviews by new CEO have stated NQ is a 'Metaverse' company that is developing voxel tech to use/licence in any virtual world that gets established. From this we can deduce DU is a tech demo of the voxel tech first and a Sci-Fi MMO game second.


This is not new, the voxel engine is the ONLY part of DU that is developed in house. Everything else is either 3rd party or modified from existing tech (yes, including the server scaling tech). The voxel engine is heir only real asset and NQ has always tried to promote that as a driver for "metaverse" applications, as far back as 2018 in THIS and THIS article.

 

There were several articles like this early on and it was very clear NQ was trying to position the ENGINE as their main asset and monetize it for thing sother than the game Dual Universe. The voxel tech and in part the mofifications they made to the server tech are the only valuable assets they have. And their server tech really became outdated very quickly (relatively) where potential customers can now get better solutions and even use pay as you go/need it solutions like HPE Greenlake.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Bobbie said:

What is the CSSS tech based on then?

 

The scaling tech as seen in the server tech video is basically the same as what ion many environments is used to dynamically patch nodes in or out depending on their workload. This is not really special at all. What made the applicationhere different is the requirement for a game environment fo rthis process to both be _very_ fast and have _very_ low latency.

What we certainly learned over the years is that there stil lis quite a bit of latency in the system NQ uses, part of it hardcoded. From the massive promises and ideas at the start, those of us who have been here since the start of pre alpha have seen the dialing back of expectations and many situations where compromises had to be made to "Maintain performance".

Right now, things like AvA and even TW are pretty much still a dream with no sign of them getting their time in the sun anytime soon..

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Bobbie said:

What is the CSSS tech based on then?

 

The way I understood it, JC made the prototype himself as a proof of concept, and only founded NQ based on that.

 

Yeah I remember the backend was built using the Actor Model (C++ Actor Framework). They even put the terminology into RDMS.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

IHonestly its all in how they did their limitations or lack thereof since it created huge bottlenecks.

 

For Digging/Teraforming:

 

Digging just seemed to endlessly spam the system multiplied by everyone doing the same thing at the same time that just qued all the damage being done to the landscape until the change was reflected and the system could add/remove terrain and then process all the rest of the qued requests that threw invalid errors, tool jams, etc while the system tried to work through all the que that was built up. Combine that with huge height/sphere sizes, faster digging spam from ti constantly trying to change the landscape and no real limitations on any of it to make sure that whatever shard, helper, whatever could handle the workload without some huge latency buildup of qued actions.

 

And the limitations of the system really shined if you tried to mine within 1-1.5km of people even if you had 2-3 people working out of a 3 hex cluster the system had/has huge problems not only spamming the changes, finally making the changes, updating the changes to the land, and reflecting it to the nearby players and at the same time the que in the system trying to catch up to what those other players are doing at the same time seemed to really compound the problem in close proximity.

 

For teraforming having flattening 7 tiles flat and building up tiles it seemed like the system had the pristine image built into the game on top of whatever you were doing so it seemed like it kept two versions of the same landscape at the same time since I would come in to land at the base and it would render the mountains that were there until the system loaded what was actually there like it had to process the changes again showing giant holes and some kind of mashup of both so there is that.

 

Beyond the double rendering of what is/was there you had the flattening tool that was basically the better version of the dig tool since the system obviously had a bottleneck in the changes you could just endlessly hold the button down or bind your mouse to just hold it down which just endlessly spammed the que to the system. It worked better than most tools and it created so many more jagged edges and with more smoothing talents it created more flat walls and most times you could just run through the wall even if the digging tool was slow so it added even more processing and desync with the rest of the system. It also seemed to have some kind of memory leak on top of that.

 

Then with the way ore was seeded from the surface down to like 1.5km and spread about 500+ meters apart led to the necessity to tear up large amounts of land to get minimal gains in the first place since most nodes were on average -4kl to 12kl with nothing actually there for what you needed to gain. They could have made those same size nodes with 4kl nodes actually having 40+kl and taking longer to mine yet more or digging slower to get more from the same nodes since you basically mined a house or an appartment building and you might be able to make a door or a wall's worth of voxels. And seeing as most tiles had like on average 300kl of most ores that is like 6.5 boxes of ore bur needing to tear up an entire tile to do so.

 

Landscape:

 

It seemed like the way the landscape was set up with the PBR textures was that it showed landscapes with too high rez texutres from too far away without proper shifts between lower rez textures or needing to get up close and personal before they swapped in the highest rez versions. The rendering of voxels from too far away further robs performace if not tuned properly and since the planets are always constantly streaming the updates of the colors as it gets bigger and you see more and more it had to stream it to all the other people you are with. In most cases its not even noticeable. With teraforming mentioned above it double checks what the pristine image of the game is then has to update to the changes before repeating the process  endlessly the closer you get.

 

Voxels:

 

Beyond the double load of the landscape, checking what resoloution you needed while it loaded, thenalso loading and rendering the same thing for a triple  dig with the resolution needed during that if you are moving around while it is doing all that made the latency between the client as laggy as possible. Some patches I could see our orgs tower like 15km out, Sometimes 4km, sometimes I could see out space station 5.5km up and other times they would adjust the true max distance it it would appear again.

 

Its the same thing with like luminescent glass. Its a plain texture but it seemed like even if you did a checker pattern leaving gaps you could travel like .5km away and it would look like the whole wall was nothing but luminescent glass you could see from as far away as like 2-3km with just a wall of an XS core even though it just needed to render the basic texture as it shouldnt have been that bright like a flood light to see it from that far.

 

Lighting:

 

With lighting as well it then added another layer on top of all that where luminescent voxels created one layer of light that needed to be rendered and then there were multiple other lights that were needed such as headlights were directional projectsions of light or other lights that were direction or full sphere based lighting. You could stack the lights to create multiple layers of lights that went through walls and made everything glow. If you didnt everythign felt pitch black even if you had L lights unless you stacked them. But by stacking multiple lights it would take the triple dip of rendering the land, voxels, and the layers of light with the resultions necessary then had to multiply the amount of lights needed.

 

Elements

 

Then layer on Elements that constantly run like industry elements, transfer units, in addition to all the meshes that get rendered or the screens that constantly either are loaded and not being shown or seeing them and actually having to render the imagines with changing resolutions.

 

Scripts

 

With all the element scripts constantly running in an area that is further draining the performance you then have all the rest of the player scripts that need to be loaded when you get into range.

 

Final thoughts

 

It sounds all well and good until you have this level of symphony constantly running and loading under the pretext that players would develop the world for the devs and since its not uniifed with limited amounts of the scripts being actually part of the game rather than attached and doing checks on if what the script is doing can affect server or client side changes via how fast the script checks for updates and everything else the system is trying to do, update, and render it makes for an unplayable experience unless NQ decides to vet player added content and polish it so that it works with the system rather than bottleneck everything in conjunction with their bad code even if the tech would otherwise work.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

From an all in one sort of world generation and hosting solution there is a huge amount of work to do for even basic parts of this software, server engineering/infrastructure, and the possible gameplay it can achieve. They might as well as a company do another kick starter for that as a premise since if that is their ultimate goal milking people for subs for a game they arent really doing much with while siphoning funds and making something quite different is pretty shady. 

 

Obviously they saw Everquest Next / Landmark, Crowfall, SpatialOS, Voxel Farm, etc and JC saw dollar signs since there was no space version when in reality as this was being develop EQN and LM failed and Crowfall was a flop since voxel games dont sell unless you go low fidelity or low rez like MineCraft in the sense that its basic, its easy to learn, easy to play, has survival elements, crafting, and you can teach your 3 year old to play it in 5 mins and 2 billion people bought a copy.

 

As a platform all prospective developers need to do is look at the games that fail or flopped trying this system before Du or just look at all the YouTube channels, Twitch Streams, and social media and see what a train wreck using this tech is and the huge limitations it has without extreme limitations or optimization and move on. Just look at the top 10 MMOs by players and there is no voxel based MMO. Top 10 MMOs? Not a single voxel based game. Top games of 2021? No voxel games.

 

If they are going for some kind of platform or all in one tool there are tons of engines, platforms, or dynamic generation tools out there and all those companies do it way better than NQ. Even in its current state NQ is as basic as they come and voxel engines like Voxel Farm are way ahead and have other tools like architecture generators already under the hood, prop seeing, etc already there. What was the term EQN:LM used when they shut EQN down? "It wasn't fun" and with the watered down out of date version of voxel farm they used ended up breaking the version they used to the point props and elements would migrate.

 

This type of endeavor will require:

  • A kickstarter for the platform itself to make it viable
  • Buying Subs with In-game Quanta
  • Premium Tier'd Subs T1-5 that comes with perks
  • A loyalty System
  • Heavy Monotization via a fluff shop
  • A Secondlife / Landmark they Marketplace to buy assets with real money
  • Data Mining via Crypto Currency
  • Data Sharing via Torrenting
  • Crowd Sourcing
  • A competent team led by a CEO that makes MMOs and not Single/Multi player games.

 

This platform needs its own independent investment so it is not sapping resources from DU so the platform isnt the main focus if the game is the Tech Demo.

 

NQ should give an option for FTP with the option for using in game currency to buy a sub out of the market to get Quanta out of the system. Obviously they need to shore up the Quanta printing of Missions first but a FTP Pay to Sub model to get people to play and have a version of the game with harsh limits for playing for free in TU's, Cores, and Elements so that they can play the game and potentially buy a sub if they play the game and put in effort to buy a sub with Quanta and preventing people from buying more than 1 per month so that the players cant trade them so you arent giving out a life time sub to someone who exploited trillions since the start of beta.

 

Premium Subs need to be added in which give adjustable tax rates, supplies, skins, dyes, are gven for more money that are not game breaking for those who wish to support NQ and in return given perks by the Tier they sub.

 

NQ needs to adopt a loyalty system for how long people play the game and pay NQ. It can be the same as the above mentioned perks and relies on how often you log in as the escalting factor of what perks you get. And also how many days you log in even if you miss a day giving some kind of rations or perk, monthly ship, whatever.

 

Adopting monotization and adding money people would normally give but cant for customization. Seeing as random dye boxes are now lootboxes and banned in most countries NQ could sell dyes in any color for $1 a piece and take all these gaudy parts and add a primary, secondary, and tertiary color you can dye each part and require X amount of dyes by Grade/Rarity. NQ could also sell different glowing Dyes for both parts and players as well that act like the glowy players if you lock onto someone but actually in the game via dyes you can purchase for $2 ea to make parts or character customization a thing and profit. NQ also needs to sell the skins for forcefields in all colors, avatars, and anything else they can put up there like pets for repairs.

 

This game needs an ingame market for Voxel Builds, Ships, and Scripts so that the things we make can easily be bought in an in game version of the marketplace but for realworld money or in game currency. Anything that sells is split by NQ and the Player who made it and helps further fund the game or the player gets a majority of the in-game Quanta if they buy it with Quanta. To list in the marketplace should cost to post it in the market and be based on how much you intend to sell it for like on E-Bay up front so if you sell things for $100 it would cost $10 to list initially for a year and then since it is digital you can then sell however many you want or a set amount.

 

NQ Should also consider selling assets via block chain as NFTs or launching their own Crypto Currency to help fund the game via the same concept as above but through the blockchain as NFTs as their own exchange that is only meant for NQ Coin to pay for NQ assets and allowing players to use a crypto miner and encypted transactions and even farming out mining their data to those with some extra time or if you are just playing afk NQ can reserve the right to use your account to mine instead of draining resources and at the same time pay people for doing so to help cover their subs.

 

NQ could also emply torrenting in the background to free up some bottlenecks of taking their server data that is client side and using a P2P network to transfer that data to everyone and cut down some of their bandwith costs and only use encrypted data and not allowing people to host/post their own to corrupt the pool and gain a lot quicker data transfer with seeding from the players internet bandwith in conjunction with NQ.

 

Employ Crowd Sourcing for systems they want but dont have the budget for and asking players as a team to help them by working together with the coding before cleaning it up and adding it to the game. Players will donate their time for free if they feel part of the team and have just as much talent in many cases as dev teams in all the same fields. NQ should at least try it.

 

Employ qualified people who are capable of pulling off what they want to accomplish within acceptable timeframes or stretch goals. This time is limited yes but at the same time they dont seem to understand simple mechanics let alone really complex dynamic systems that will be needed to create a robust tool or platform. They may have hired a new CEO but from what saw it said Nicolas made single player games and this is not that and they want to make something 100x more complext than just an MMO.

 

This is what this type of solution calls for:

  • Dynamic world/system generator
  • Dynamic Resource Generator
  • Dynamic Weather Generator
  • Dynamic World Healing/Erosion Generator
  • Dynamic Resource Repopulation Generator
  • Dynamic Environment Generator
  • Dynamic AI Generator
  • Dynamic Character Generator
  • Dynamic Creature Creator
  • Dynamic Element Generator
  • Dynamic Ship/Vehicle Generator
  • Dynamic Structure Generator
  • Dynamic City Generator
  • Dynamic Effect Generator
  • Dynamic Weapon Generator
  • Dynamic Asset Library
  • Dynamic Quest Generator
  • Dynamic Event Generator
  • Dynamic Performance Generator

 

World Generator:

 

NQ has built a scaleable world generator capable of building pretty decent planets like Alioth that could be scaled up further as its own single environment if it was 2x or 3x the size it is now as the game environment which is pretty decent. AS a space game 1 solar system is pretty cramped even if the planets are as big as they are with nothing to explore but player generated content. 

 

Also that the world they did build dont seem to have that great of biomes propigated into the system. Some of the mountains are nice but there arent really any oceans as much as 50m deep lakes everywhere vs other planets that have the polar opposite with min or max +/- heights with rookie generation that shows the needle points peppered in. It seems like they kinda fine tuned it with every planet but the origional scripts used were fairly generic. It needs to have at least one smoothing pass or an eriosion generator or tault lines simulated if the planet has fault lines.

 

And also that there is no Gas Giants in the generation tool. There is also no liquid molten core planets as much as just balls of dirt, snow, sand and not comprised of layers like a jaw breaker by the gravity. If the intent was to make a mining sim it would have been a good idea to layer in sediment on top of a stone layered construct that made it harder to dig the further you went down until you hit magma and died or that all the nodes they made were stone/metal minerals and if they used geology the world should have been made of granite, limestone, sandstone, etc with the randome ores that are more gem mineral based like malachite that made no sense.

 

Resource Generation:

 

NQ has also built this Dynamic Seeding Generator already but as mentioned above it made the mistake of not making the world out of stone as a construct with the sediment layered above that. Since typically the core of a planet is iron wether its molten or solid and other metals layered around that. If it has a cracked mantle crust then it seeds the metal where the metal rose up from the core between the broken rock layers in which we mine as seams.

 

If they are trying to sell this as a platform they are going to have to figure out how to make the ore work since any dev studio that want to use this platform will want the MineCraft experience and the closer you can get to using a system with geology the more lucrative it will become to actually using this type of dynamic content.

 

I imagine it probably scared NQ that if they actually made the world out of stone via granite, malachite, etc that it would have been too much and we would have just mined out whole planets for trillions of stone based mats. It should have been that way since it is made out of many types of stone and we need it for all sorts of things. The only thing they didnt think of was limits in the sense of how fast you can dig or how much you get with the seeding they had. 

 

You should have never been able to run through the wall with a 30ft tall/wide sphere ever and it should have been about doing it in a group with a limited amount of damage like a real world mining crew where it takes a long time to get to the ore and mine it and then process it enough to finally refine the ore to finally make something with it. Had they made a 4kl node 40+kl and slowed down the mining in general to make what you do find worth it or actually creating geology to where there were specific regions to mine at a pace that wouldnt cause extreme latency due to the speed and then  made it harder to mine by the depth/pressure along with the layers of stone requiring higher tiers of mining equipment they failed to make this whole thing would have made more sense to get to the ore seams.

 

They added in gem based minerals like malachite but never bothered to any any other gem or crystal based resources that should have been added along with built in cave systems and networks.

 

But when you make the seeding so that you have to dig 500m between nodes at 30m high/wide and most tiles having like 300kl of each type of T1 ore with 4-20KL of anything higher and 1.2+mil L of ore per tile and needing to destroy a 1.25km tile to do that there in lied the problem. And considering most planets in the first place have pretty much the same resources with only a few being able to be able to mine them with extreme heat, cold, air, wind storms, sand storms, liquid nitrogen oceans, gas giants, etc 

 

Dynamic Weather Generator:

 

NQ needs to build a Weather Generation tool that relies on a floating equation of wind, humidity, temperature, time of day with random values with each day cycle that when certain event triggered it can that start to make weather events occur like clouds, rain, thunderstorms, snow, hail, sand storms, etc to accomplush a variety of things to happen in simulated ways.

 

Wind does not need to be anything other than a random direction arrow around the mini map that simulates wind on an aircraft or walking, running, or driving depending on the genre. Temperature when simulared for hot/cold regions could be used to drain stamina faster or to freeze a player slowly and make their actions slower. Air or whatever gasses a planet is comprised of can also slow down or create a survival aspect if air is required to mine under water or on a planet without air. Water could be made scarce or undrinkable depending on if it is fresh or salt based. Simulated hail storms, or sand storms could eaily cause small dots to tick on everything above the surface or specific gasses when mixed with weather events could also act as acid rain events that tick hp on everything above the surface or not in a static construct. Other weather events could be fire storm bombardments where fireballs or metor storms pelt the landscape as a quazi weather event. Along with different liquids like liquid nitrogen instantly freezing constructs or prolonged cold causing constructs to be slower or take longer for warmups.

 

World Healing / Erosion Generator:

 

NQ needs to make a robust tool that is efficient, optimized, and low server stress that heals the world from all the damage players can cause that is neither too fast or too slow in how much it heals or has an overall smooth over time so that all the jagged world generated landscape stays efficient and give better performance.

 

World healing should be a very slow process you would not notice so that it uses as little resurces as possible while healing the holes over time. Combine that with a quick pass on server reset that again heals the world a bit more than the background healing when patches, maintenence, or resets occur. And then after that using a tool that just randomly fills in a certain amount of tiles that are completely empty of resources or if no such tiles are available it raises the threshold to fill in tiles with a certain % of resources left in the tile so that the system will let you mine, then slowly fill it in over time, and eventually just reset the tile.

 

Dynamic Resource Repopulator:

 

NQ needs to make a Resource Repopulator Generator so that when people mine the ore and when that ore eventually leaves the system all the ore going out of the game gets put back in at the same rate to keep an ecosystem of progression going to where players are not getting less and less as time goes on.

 

Dynamic Environment Generator:

 

NQ needs to make a Dynamic Environment Generator that has dynamic flora propigation in which has resources that can be collected from flora if there is a crafting system for edible consumables, wood, etc so that flora props are organically generated from existing props around them every so often that can be sped up or slowed down based on the weather system or player activity.

 

And having flora in which spawns changes size as it grows using exp based on light, water, humidity, or the soil type it spawns on tied to multiple dynamic systems where it generated experience in the flora prop until it levels up and grows and eventually dies but grows content organically.

 

Dynamic AI Generator:

 

NQ needs to make a Dynamic AI system that has AI actors and Boids which act in predictable ways and able to be scaled to be as smart or dumb as a project needs to boost performance that also allows for NPCs to do basic player functions like drive, fly, transport, craft, purchase things from the market, build structures, or fight players with basic strategies like patrol, assault, waypoints, flanking via waypoints, retreat to waypoint, etc.

 

Dynamic Character Generator:

 

For the Dynamic AI Generator it will take a Dynamic Character Generator to populate NPCs. In Du a character generator would be easy to just make a generic random colored avatar and then use the Dynamic AI to drive it. In other Games with shallow Tier Progression it would be easy to assign a random set of clothes, armor, or weapons and let the NPCs do what the AI tells them but is absolutely required.

 

Dynamic Creature Generator:

 

Like the Dyanmic Character Generator, the Dynamic Creature Generator is required for boid based npcs that are slightly different. What is required is bipedal, quadraped, tripedal frames that has various inputs for lage structures, fur, skin types, or centaur like torsos with sockets for arms and types of hands that can be added along with hair, horns, antlers, etc if traditional animals need to be adapted to aliens, chimeras, different races, or whatever the project calls for on the fly and all the armors and things that they need the character generator will equip them with.

 

Dynamic Ship/Vehicle Generator:

 

NQ should create a Dynamic Ship Generator that builds a vehicle wether its a car, truck, jet fighter, ship, space ship, or wagon that relies on a basic frame with modular sockets or parts of hulls that are element or voxel based that attaches defenses, weapons, constianers, engines, and everything needed with random placements for things like wings to create variety that also applys random PDs so NPCs or whatever have a set look via the frame, paint jobs, symbols, and ready to use that they can fly or drive plugged into the other dynamic systems.

 

Dynamic Element Generator:

 

NQ needs to make a dynamic Element generator to where if they make say an XS Atmo Engine it automatically generates the S, M, L, XL+ assets at the same time with all the stats and everything properly scaled with variables so that you can have it multiply effects, as well as using PBR textures that can also automatically apply colors for ratiry (Basic-Unique) or for different designations such as military, freight, maneuvering or whatever subset designations they wish to create on the fly that auto scales an populates the whole set instantly applying primary, secondary, and tertiary colors or applying guild symbols/sigils to the props when made by a guild/org.

 

Dynamic Structure Generator:

 

NQ needs to make a Dynamic Structure generator for various structure types that if you want to build a house it uses different variables and automatically generates a structure via # of rooms, floors, roof height, and some check boxes for different types of rooms with some sliders to where this tool will just auto generate the building. NQ should also consider a genre drop down menu to make it easier to select what types of textures or architecture it will generate.

 

Dynamic City Generator:

 

Once Structures are Generated NQ needs to make a tool that can quickly generate and populate a city and place all the cores to carve out the space that is generated or the distance between the buffer zone similar to the tool in "Sunking/Sunken City" that made it easy to generate an entire city fast as well as being able to go back with the structure tool and the voxels/textures to quickly swap/pain different building to make it unique and organic. 

 

Dynamic Effect Generator:

 

NQ should consider creating a dynamic effect generator that uses particles, waves, streams, sparks, smoke, fire, and whatever else a project might need that is tied to the dynamic Element Generator sothat once the assets are generated and scaled it automatically takes the size and power values and creates an effect that gets attached to that Element.

 

Dynamic effects can also be things like fire spreading to combustable voxel/element/prop tags that will consume HP and grow the fire effects until there is no combustable fuel to consume or fuel to burn if it gets damaged and leaks fuel based on the damage or causes explosions and scales fire sprites/effects organically.

 

Dynamic Weapon Generator:

 

NQ needa to make a Dynamic Weapon Generator that has different modular pieces like for instance a pistol with a grip based on what its made of (wood, metal, pearl, bone), mag capacity or number of rounds in the case of a revolver, type of iron sights, and barrel length that also takes into account what it is made of, any energy lazer rounds, and generates a random weapon. The same could be randomly generated with rifles.

 

For other genres you could have different pommels, grips, guards, blade length, tips, wooden poles, shafts, etc that will auto generate medieval weapons or whatever weapon you want to make from beer bottles, etc.

 

Dynamic Asset Library:

 

If NQ goes with a digital player made content marketplace or Crypto Blockchain Marketplace Exchange for game assets made by the studio or by modelers, texture artists, sound engineers, voxelmancers, or scripters These dynamic systems can take advantage of a dynamic asset library to where people can purchase assets or other studios using the platform can buy asset bundles that go directly to NQ or split between NQ and the content create to quick impliment and deploy assets to get a game started and able to run.

 

Dynamic Quest Generator:

 

NQ has built a basic version of a quest generator but it is necessary to build a dynamic quest generator that can create a variety of missions such as escorts, intercepts, patrols, transport, work orders, resource orders, SoS missions, Salvage missions, Scuttle missions, distress calls, crash sites, assaults, battles, and anything else you can think of with out NQ needing to do anything other than spawn some kind of content or make some kind of content occur if nothing is happening to restock markets or whatever other function they need.

 

Dynamic Event Generator:

 

Depending on community enguagement a Dynamic mission can be generated to create interest in the gmae via small to large scale events like generating asteroids, meteors at planets attached to dynamic cores to world ending giant asteroids that must be mined or they impact and do damage on a planet to generating mining events, alien attacks, to wars, spawning giant space stations to assault with space pirates, to any kind of event they want that can then take all the keywords and generate a social media post to call attention to the event.

 

Dynamic Performance Generator:

 

NQ should after all that make a tool that will automatically scale performance so that during peak times, player activity spikes, or large scale warfare is taking place the server will automatically tone adjust variables to optimize performance if its texture resolutions, toning down dynamic systems, weather, or whatever to make things more playable.

 

 

 

 

 

These types of systems opens up the game development world to an allin one tool that can pretty much instantly create a random game that can be fine tuned or added to with custom assets to make it more unique. This type of tool can be achieved as all of these individual systems all exist and there are 100 companies doing this already. Unless NQ does this what they have made is sub par to even the simplest solutions and all those companies do it better already.

 

The more of this complete platform in a single player, multi player, or Massively Multiplayer game the more lucrative it will be to studios to want to use this type of system.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Article here (I thinks !)-> https://www.bitcoinisle.com/2021/11/18/what-is-metaverse-the-future-vision-for-the-internet/ with original article here -> https://capital.com/what-is-metaverse-the-future-vision-of-the-internet [BE AWARE, UK can't see this page due to crypto advertising rules] and both NQs (https://www.linkedin.com/company/novaquark) and Nouredines (https://fr.linkedin.com/in/nouredine-abboud-89b3ab1?trk=author_mini-profile_title) LinkedIn pages speak of 'the Metaverse' and how the voxel tech used in DU is the basis for a distributed buildable virtual environment, to be applied to 'other projects'.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Dracostan said:

Article here (I thinks !)-> https://www.bitcoinisle.com/2021/11/18/what-is-metaverse-the-future-vision-for-the-internet/ with original article here -> https://capital.com/what-is-metaverse-the-future-vision-of-the-internet [BE AWARE, UK can't see this page due to crypto advertising rules] and both NQs (https://www.linkedin.com/company/novaquark) and Nouredines (https://fr.linkedin.com/in/nouredine-abboud-89b3ab1?trk=author_mini-profile_title) LinkedIn pages speak of 'the Metaverse' and how the voxel tech used in DU is the basis for a distributed buildable virtual environment, to be applied to 'other projects'.

 

 

Wow, thanks for the links guys.

 

Interesting, hilarious and sad.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...