General / Off-Topic Any Dual Universe Pre Alpha players here? It's NDA covered... But damn!

GraXXoR

GraXXoR
It's NDA covered so I can't share any game stats (performance or screenshots or other data....) but damn, it's fun.

The pre-alpha is out and currently there's max inventory of all craftables for bug testing.

DU distinguishes between Atmospheric and Space flight so "amphibious" craft need two sets of engines, thrusters etc...

Built my own 100m Battle Cruiser, built a monster skyscraper about 200+ M high... Launched my ship from the landing deck in said skyscraper...
Anyway, managed to fly my ship to a few moons and landed safely..

All round epic stuff..

However, the best best thing about DU is that it is entirely LUA programming based. You can program your commander's station, you can add programming boards anywhere. They have proper IO, internet connection (for in game browsers).. You can program terminals to take input from sensors and make decisions to control output..

With LUA code, your ship truly becomes ours. and there even real engineers creating much improved PIR based flight control software already!!!!
Pretty much everything except decorations are linkable to LUA in game.
There are even "database" widgets which can store actual in game data which can be transferred or even hacked/stolen. LOL.

Check their youtube videos...

Sorry, not able to tell you much else... can't wait for the game to move into Alpha.
 
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CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead
Isn't that LUA code notoriously slow once enough is running at once?

I'm pretty sure x3 uses it for, well, everything. And it often ends up running like a bag of crap. :D

I'll look in to this DU thingie, if there's anything to look at... :/

Silly NDAs.
 

krylite

krylite
Interesting to hear, how big is their galaxy? About players able to script in-game console modules, I'd dreamed about this idea in a much more limited way for ED's ships at some point, but then again, there's already a load of external scripting done by some ED players already.

Edit: I looked at some videos. It looks to me like part a "lego" building type game with ambitions to be single "shard"/sever game mmo. It seems to me like a realistically done tradeoff effort, unlike CIG-arrets managed overblown fiasco. If they can do a giant galaxy of systems keeping all this functional, it could be a competitive alternative to ED maybe..
 
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GraXXoR

GraXXoR
krylite said:
Interesting to hear, how big is their galaxy? About players able to script in-game console modules, I'd dreamed about this idea in a much more limited way for ED's ships at some point, but then again, there's already a load of external scripting done by some ED players already.

Edit: I looked at some videos. It looks to me like part a "lego" building type game with ambitions to be single "shard"/sever game mmo. It seems to me like a realistically done tradeoff effort, unlike CIG-arrets managed overblown fiasco. If they can do a giant galaxy of systems keeping all this functional, it could be a competitive alternative to ED maybe..
Click to expand...

According to the homepage their galaxy is currently about a dozen planets with moons... And I'm not sure the scale but I'd say it's about 1:20 real since deep space happens at about 5km up. But terrain is accentuated, so planets appear far more mountainous than real ones would.
Basically atmospheric planets and barren planets behave quite differently... On barren planets, your ship relies on space thrusters etc to move, but on atmospheric worlds, the more efficient atmospheric engines can take over.

LEGO. Never really thought of it like that, but I suppose you could call it that... It's actually called Hybrid Voxel, with voxels and "regular" elements interacting as opposed to Minecraft which is almost entirely voxel based.

The LUA runs on your local machine and not on the server and only output to screens and actuators is shared to the shard. Screens are handled differently and with less server reliance than actuators so the shared load is minimal. I believe that screen output is also rendered on each client rather than streamed from the server.

So, for example, all the hard code that controls your ship runs on your own PC and the output of that code is sent to the server and passes sanity/cheat checks from there the output is sent to the actuators.

I don't know if the game itself is programmed in LUA.

According to the youtube videos, they can achieve high numbers of players because combat will not be calculated with raycasting or volumetrically accurate positioning but rather select and target based with chances to hit and miss based on distances and conditions, etc which means they don't need to know millisecond specific locations.

This is a great compromise between EVE and ED, IMO.
 
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OnePercent

OnePercent
yeah I'm one of them; but I haven't had time to get on one of the pre-alpha test sessions, so one question can the client finally run in 1440P yet?
 

GraXXoR

GraXXoR
Not sure I’m allowed to answer that. But even if I could answer it, I wouldn’t say anything positive. So I won’t.
 
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Codger

Codger
I signed up for it, but so far I've missed the short play periods. So I can't say much other than that :)
 

OnePercent

OnePercent
You can share media that are already released to the public, like these found on their twitter; these pretty much reflect what the current client looks like at least, and its capabilities.

Db4N_UiX0AA-4Qo.jpg:large

[video]https://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/989864681249673218[/video]
DbUK6_sWkAEO5zg.jpg:large

DaMEnfVWkAAzeRr.jpg:large

DZoBkwEW4AA_sxy.jpg:large


And this area is the starting location; it's like the start location on a popular minecraft server hehe;
DWz_nqNWkAABUKP.jpg


In a way, this game sort of feels like a fully editable voxel version of planetside ;^)

Though the devs vision are to offer player freedom unforseen in an mmo; Emergent gameplay is the total focus of Dual Universe.
 
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