Four rescues during this testing period raises our Alpha 2 count up to 19 and our total rescues to 33.

Haunty carried out the first two rescues to kickoff Friday. The first being a fuel run to the new spaceman @Emyrs1701 who encountered a few problems on their way back from Teoma and ran out of fuel.

With a fancy jetpack strapped to their back, players can effortlessly EVA around or in-between constructs, or just float off aimlessly into space as one @sadmandono accidentally did. Haunty was able to pick them up a few hours after their previous rescue and expedite a return to their craft.

A mishap on Sunday afternoon found myself picking up  @Madrummer after they also got separated from their construct in space. 

Finally, as the test was wrapping up on Monday morning, Annabella assisted a new player who got trapped in space (yes, this is possible) on a friends construct. 

-----

On the second of this month, @Haunty claimed 6th place in a race hosted by the DICE organization in his construct named "Scrambulance" among. Congratulations on the great showing!

Congrats to everyone who was involved. The success of this event excites me greatly for the future.

-----

Aside from all this, I did put a small dent in my medium fuel transport after a bit of thoughtfulness. With some ingenuity I've been able to boost the fuel carrying capacity and even add on some storage room to boot. This particular construct, as mentioned in a previous post, has been sitting largely unfinished for months now, it's really about time I start working on it. 

Still batting around an idea for that large fuel transporter I was talking about a few posts ago. I can't wait to start working on it.

That's all for now, until next time, fly safe everyone!

- DarkHorizon

View the full post in the Forums!

Eyes & Ears has partnered with DYNAMIC AEROSPACE INDUSTRIES to provide both our customers, and ourselves with quality craft, in addition to a launch point for Eyes & Ears to coordinate its rescues from. Additionally, they have opted to allow their customers to take advantage of our Emergency Pass subscription service which lets their customers rest assured that if trouble ever finds them, that we are never far behind.

Not to be outdone by our first affiliate Vulture Corp!

While the precise details of both are still contested given the lengthy timeframe leading to release, Eyes & Ears considers these very important steps in our role of rescuing stranded or wayward Noveans!

We are pleased to have both by our side and are eager to work with more.

If you're interested in affiliating with Eyes & Ears, feel free to private message me here or on the forums, or drop a line in our Discord!

No rescues were made this test so that allowed me to work more on ship design.

The small (core) craft that I mentioned previously, it will have a medium (core) mothership that also serves as a bulk fuel transport with over... 600L of fuel storage?

This craft was originally devised in Alpha 1 testing as I was looking into future gameplay of larger ships needing resupply where three small tanks and half a medium simply wouldn't do. After the original concept was created and I realized I had a large empty upper deck that I didn't know what to do with, I decided to turn it into a storage space to launch and stow the smaller rescue craft mentioned in last weeks test.

After recoloring the entire craft with a base white, I took to more real-life inspiration for my design. On the back left and right third of the local fire trucks I noticed upward diagonal patterns in a yellow/red-banded color.

With this out of the way, I decided to do some work on the sides with a red-trimmed Z stripe that is present on various emergency craft. Since we're dealing with space, it's an added spot for illumination and a glass covering. Prior to adding lights, I pondered just leaving a gap exposing the internally alternating space and atmospheric fuel tanks. The jury is still out on this as to which I like more so I'm open to community input.

Inspiration: 1 2 3

With the rear and lower starboard (soon port) faces featuring designs, I'll be working more on the remaining faces and further working on the interior.

----------

The entire construct, for the most part, is very heavily in its initial design phase. From there I'll be working on creating enough fuel to fill all the tanks (donations always accepted!) so I know how much in the way of engines I need unless I actually decide to whip out a calculator and math the whole thing.

I'm not concerned at all about the smaller construct, if anything, I'm waiting on new elements before I decide to make any serious changes to this particular construct as element size, engine power and other variables required.

--------

In the non-testing space, I'm hoping to have some meetings with the team this Saturday. In-game +/or over discord will be great. I have yet to throw out any formal agenda, but points of discussion will again be logo additions and some additions to the website.

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this description of my activities this past test regarding Eyes & Ears. If you have any content suggestions, I'm always open to hearing them.

That's all for now, until next time, fly safe everyone!

- DarkHorizon

View the full post in the Forums!

Eyes & Ears presents its first blog posts which focus in on the personal and gaming side of the man behind the Directors title.

A First Time for Everything

My Gaming Side

Hope you enjoy,

DarkHorizon

Eyes & Ears is now hiring people who love helping lost players return to civilization.

If you're interested in hearing more, check out our page on the NQ Org Registry that you can find linked in our description.

Here's to peace, prosperity, and people getting lost.

Four rescues were made during the past test, that makes 31 rescues for Alpha 2 and 45 overall.

----------

@maxamized started out strong and notched his first rescue early Friday morning by running some scrap out to @Reaper07 on Alioth.

@Dr Rhubarb also scored their first rescue after 283 days in the organization. A lack of being in the right place at the right time both in-game and in real life made his first rescue so elusive. Nonetheless, he was able to aid @Context with what our logs say is a "full ship repair". Not sure how big, but I hope the service was appreciated!

Haunty came to @Erquilenne's aid on Sicari with a resupply of fuel on Sicari.

Finally, maxamized rounded out the rescues this period with another fuel run to @TheMaGoth on Alioth.

The first three rescues were notably in a span of only six hours, more or less with me being totally stuck at work thanks to a change in scheduling. I will say that I was quite happy to turn up during my lunch hour to see the team had handled themselves well during my absence. While this is more or less all individual work, I hope that this is a trend that can continue into the future as the organization and team grows and develops.

----------

This is another short and frank update since it's late in the day for me and I wasn't able to attend testing over the weekend due to some conflicts between my old and new hardware (think it's RAM), hopefully that will be resolved soon though!

That's all for now, until next time, fly safe everyone!

- DarkHorizon

View this post on the forums!

No Jack isn't back in DU form, but when speed is key and you need help ASAP, Eyes & Ears is here for you 24 hours a day (in the future!). It also happens that our 24th rescue so I thought all of this tied in really well with the video.  

Testing started out fairly slow this go-around with me mostly working on coloring up a small construct. My inspiration mostly came from US Coast Guard helicopters which you can view in the following images. 1 2

----------

Enough about me, let's get on with this weeks past two rescues:

Our first Novean, @Pwnst4r found himself stuck on Thades. Still relatively new, a combination of inadequate vertical engines and fuel mismanagement led to their situation. While one of our rescuers was up to the job, their four-hour journey would have proven too time-consuming for me to accept. With my position being closer, I flew out with a supply of fuel and after a rougher than intended landing, Pwnst4r was off.

The second Novean left Alioth but forgot to put space brakes on. Faced with crashing into their destination or force re-spawning, they choose the latter. This, however, left them unable to retrieve their ship from deep space. With no alternative and no one from NovaQuark on hand to handle the situation, a member of Eyes & Ears stepped up and flew the player out to their craft which secured our 24th rescue.

---------

With regards to the upcoming race, I have a few things I'd just like to mention real quick.

@Kurock visited my place at District 1 and we advanced further discussions previously had in Discord. I've purposed the idea of Eyes & Ears setting up a fueling station, nothing too complex, just a couple dozen decorative fuel tanks. No convenience store or canopy and pumps like modern stations so racers will have a very easy time coming and going from this checkpoint without fear of crashing or landing unevenly.

@Haunty has thrown their hat in the ring and will be representing Eyes & Ears in a surprise twist that I had forgotten to mention last week. While Eyes & Ears as an organization isn't seeking fame or fortune with this event, we do seek more community involvement through in-game events such as this, alongside my weekly updates here in this thread.

We wish him and all the other racers the best of luck and if you ever run out of fuel or scrap, you know who to call!

----------

Finally, a few brief things might be added onto the website. I'll discuss those with the team and let you all know when we're ready to present the changes.

A slightly new logo might also be in the works! It's a minor addition to the current logo/banner but it's a change nonetheless. These will also be run by the team before presentation.

That's all for now, until next time, fly safe everyone!

- DarkHorizon

View the full post in the Forums!

​​​​​​​One rescue was made this test, that's 22 rescues for Alpha 2, and 36 overall.

Annabella made the fourth and final rescue of their career on Saturday. Sigtyr's construct had a breakdown near one of the markets, after making some repairs they were back in business again.

We wish them all the luck outside of Dual Universe.  

----------

Bugs, don't you hate them?

What should have been a simple trip from Alioth to Sicari where one round trip could have been completed in a gaming session turned into a day long excursion. I can't go into detail about the bugs but lets just say I had to make three trips instead of one. Not the best experience, but what can I say, it's alpha.

The rest of the time was spent on design elements around the fuel hauler. A bit of color and new materials were added to it's largely white canvas of a hull. Couldn't figure out how to make it visually distinctive from the small transport that can dock inside of it so I opted to go with a somewhat similar color layout.  

----------

Finally, work on updating the website is wrapping up. All that remains is interlinking all the pages together, some touch-ups, spellchecking everything (if you spot anything, let me know!), then finally having my team preview it to gather their suggestions for any additions before publishing it live.

That's all for now, until next time, fly safe everyone!

- DarkHorizon

View this post on the Forums!

 4 rescues during one testing weekend. This is so far the most rescues we've made over any single testing phase which brings our Alpha 2 total up to 15 and our total rescues to 29.

This is also a somewhat special event seeing as we have now surpassed our number of rescues made during the Alpha 1 stage, 14. Congratulations to all members of our team who have taken part in helping people in the testing process. While our impact may be small, we sincerely hope it's meaningful.

----------

Aside from rescues (which you can read up more on the forums by following the link at the bottom of this post), much of this test was spent looking at code. With the assistance of a private individual, a few minor yet very useful improvements were made to the small rescue craft. The starboard side of the craft features dual screens which sport an animated GIF of the Eyes & Ears banner (thanks again @Geo!). To increase the sense of role-playing, this banner can be toggled to an alert styled animation designed by @Spiridon with the press of a key-combo.

A bit more work was required to transfer this from a single sign element to two split screens of comparable size, but I think the noticeable definition upgrade is worth it in the end.

With the help of the same individual, the status of VTOL engines are now displayed on the HUD! I'm hoping to have something similar to this show the state of gears, doors, and even flashing lights on the hulls exterior to give it more of that emergency response look. All of this will come in due time.

----------

And finally wrapping things up, a group contacted me during the test about a potential future partnership. Things are still shifting around but I can't wait to see what they bring to the table. No details for now so keep an ear to the ground!

That's all for now, until next time, fly safe everyone!

- DarkHorizon

View the full post in the Forums!

Five rescues were made this test, this is the new highest number of rescues made in one session since breaking four on the week of October the 14th. This brings our total to 26 rescues for Alpha 2, and 41 rescues overall! With only a month to go, only nine more rescues until we crack 50 total, which I think is a very achievable number to cap off 2019! I'm not asking you guys to crash into the moon so we can get some arbitrary number, or am I?  

---------

The first rescue of this test was also one of our newest members of the team! While on my usual watch I had spotted @Rok in the 911 channel in the middle of his first unsanctioned refueling mission. After assisting @FU3GO out in the black sea near Madis, we had a bit of discussion and I brought up the organization which he promptly decided to join during the flight back home.

Haunty went out for the 38th rescue to transport @archerer8791 back to their camp.

I myself went out on back to back missions, first to transport @LISPYxLUNA to a far off construct, they then the followed me around as I picked up another player and dropped them off at their mining site to cap rescues 39 and 40 respectively.

@Flamm made their first rescue during the Alioth Aerospace Expo which was held this weekend at Objective Driveyards base on Alioth. @Kasper_DU was supplied with a fair 2000L of fuel.

----------

In the downtime I put in a fair bit of work on the medium hauler over the course of this test. The single person 'bubble' cockpit was replaced with a three-person bridge. Mind you're head since headspace is somewhat limited. This is somewhat by design given more or less the function over form utilitarian feel that I'm starting to go for.

A new crew compartment is situated in-between the bridge and launch bay with seats for a tight group of twenty. Aside from a couple of windows into the launching bay, doors in and out of either the bridge or bay, and some screens which I'll put to future use, nothing all that special here.

Of special note, on Sunday, I had a small stroke of genius. Normally, if the game is having an issue and you end up getting respawned, it's at the north pole of Alioth. It's here where I've positioned what I like to think of as a storm shelter of sorts, in particular, I was thinking of a blizzard given the environment.

Above all this shelter serves as a means for other people to call on us for transport to some location on Alioth. It's one of those 'nice to have that you never want to use' sort of thing, so if you get stuck up in the snowy white, you know who to call!

----------

Finally, I wrapped up work on the website and have pushed it to the public. It's mostly the same thing except for a few additions of various design elements, and some new odds and ends to make things look more stylish.

In addition to a bit of rewording of some other phrases throughout the site, that should about cover everything major. I might push out a few smaller things but those would be largely inconsequential overall.

That's all for now, until next time, fly safe everyone!

- DarkHorizon

View this post on the Forums!

It was a quiet period this go around with no recorded rescues. While I would be tempted to say that's bad news for us, it's really good news for all of you!

Our 10th member was just added to our team today, welcome DarkTemplar to our organization as our first dispatcher!

The role of a dispatcher in Eyes & Ears is much as you would expect it to be in real life.

In Dual Universe, it's not much different.

Dispatch is a role where a watchful eye on Discord is more useful than one in-game alongside the ability to organize during times of high volume. As testing moves into PVP and our inflow of calls increases to the point where a dedicated dispatcher is needed, I'm sure that our dispatch staff will find the role plenty engaging.

One other tidbit of info. I was in talks with Kurock earlier today about an upcoming race organized by DICE at some point during the last test of October. I'm currently seeing how Eyes & Ears can get involved but given my current hardware related problems (PSU is now RMA'ed) I'm not too entirely sure how things will play out. At a very minimum, I hope to have some sort of advertising space.

Further details to come.

That's all for now, until next time, fly safe everyone!

- DarkHorizon

View the full post in the Forums!

Three rescues were made this test, that's 42 rescues for Alpha 2 and 56 rescues overall.

----------

On Friday evening I had heard a distress call from @Driktheviking who, for real life reasons, ran out of fuel on their trip to Sinnen. With the rest of the team either offline, not responding, or not as close as I was, I decided to set out with fuel on hand. Having gone to bed earlier in Europe, and nearing Midnight in middle America, I flew the entire way and refueled Dirk's tanks before retiring myself for the night, and considered rescue 54 a lock.

Rescue 55 proved a bit interesting where various problems had presented themselves throughout the process.

Respawning the day after at the north pole of Alioth, @Melvin requested a rescue to return him to one of his constructs floating up in space. Since this construct was still whiten Alioths gravity, this presented a minor technical problem which required a retrofitting of the rescue craft being used thanks to me committing a mathematical rounding error. We landed back at base to refit and this is where problems started occurring. I won't go into any detail about these issues in particular, but it was enough for Melvin to summon a squad-mate of theirs to pick them up.

Haunty set out from Alioth to assist @Develon who ended up stuck in space a little over 100 SU from Alioth. Their refueling wrapped up rescue 56.

----------

Minor progress was made on the fuel transporter this go around, alpha 3 being most of the reasoning but my lack of creativity the other. Both side rows of fuel tanks have been removed since I don't yet know how I want to integrate those into the construct. The more I think about it the more I'm considering splitting this construct up into a handful of different types.

I think further major work will be put on hold until Alpha 3 comes out, which I'm being led to believe shouldn't be long now.

For the time being, all that's really being done is adding elements, I'm fairly content with the hull design as is and don't anticipate too many changes going forward for now. 

----------

That's all for now, until next time, fly safe everyone!

- DarkHorizon

View the full post on the forums!

8 rescues were made over the past eleven days since holiday testing began on the 19th. That makes 39 rescues since Alpha 2 started, and 53 rescues since Alpha 1.

We hit our late goal of rounding out 2019 with 50 recorded rescues which, in my opinion, is pretty darn incredible. We're only a small team of do-gooders helping people out in the testing phase. Having come this far off of people getting stuck out in deep space, burning up on re-entry (haven't had a lot of these rescues surprisingly), or simply being re-spawned somewhere they shouldn't have and needing a lift to more familiar territory.

For the most part, these random or unexpected accidents are just a small start. I think after PVP comes out we'll be seeing a lot more requests for assistance. Don't worry folks, we'll be there.  

----------

As for rescues, @Armedwithwings was our first rescue of the test by Haunty with a simple pickup on Alioth and a return to their base and a lock on rescue 46.

I would take care of rescues 47 and 48.  A recently placed structure at a NQ designated respawn point proved useful when @ilodev sent out a call for help. I flew over and we were just about to take off again when @RJ respawned as well. After hearing their stories about how they were both doing their respective thing before a bug got in the way of their activities and respawned them, I dropped both off at their desired points on Alioth. Rok would pick up @Brahmnz the very next day at the same spot.

Ardes provided @BaileyVandenbroek with some fuel and building advice. No doubt it proved useful and scored rescue 50.

On Christmas day Ardes would meet up with @Jack_Blade who crashed underwater. Sounds like someone's soft water landing didn't go as expected, luckily Christmas miracles do come true.

While on Symeon, Rok assisted @vihalvor with a repair and rescue 52.

Finally, rescue 53 happened out in space near Symeon where Rok supplied @Protius with some fuel and netted rescue 53.

---------

No major updates on my end. My new hardware didn't exactly play nice in the days after the previous update.

That's all for now, until next time, fly safe everyone!

- DarkHorizon

View this post on the forums!

Another test come and gone, two more rescues this session makes for eight in Alpha 2, and 22 total. Eight rescues is a little over half the number of rescues we made in the entirety of Alpha 1 so I think that's a good sign that people are taking notice!

Haunty made their first rescue on record, congrats!

Outside the tests a minor addition has been made to our website.

Normally after rescues are completed, rescuers will ask the former victim a few brief questions on how things went, along with any feedback they have for submission on our website on the Stats & Stories page. This process has been moved over to our website in the form of a new Feedback page. 

Partly inspired by the US Cost Guard as seen in the E&E banner, and suggested by one of the organizations members, I'm thinking of a renewed color scheme replacing black with a slightly dark shade of white, red and blue for accent colors, and black as a lesser trim option.

This won't impact the background of the website as the current layout makes it easy to read in gamers dimly lit rooms. Links however may go from red to the more traditional blue while the white font color will not change.

Finally, in more regrettable news, some of my hardware issues from earlier this month are back which means that I personally am out of commission as far as testing goes.

Possible motherboard issue but I'm leaning more in the direction of the power supply. Throttlestop indicates PL1 in yellow under Core if that gives anyone any ideas, please discuss it with me via DM.

Don't worry though, you can still find me on Discord both on Eyes & Ears Discord server and the Official DU Discord. Members of Eyes & Ears will still be conducting their rescues during tests like normal, just enter the 911 room in chat, or stick your head in our Discord and we will assist you the best we can.

That's all for now, until next time, fly safe everyone!

- DarkHorizon

View the full post in the Forums!

With one rescue made over the course of this recent test, Eyes & Ears has secured its 25th rescue. 

Perhaps it was luck that more rescues didn't need to be made this weekend!

Our agenda (link) which was initially focused on only a few topics that I expected to take no more than 15 minutes quickly expanded and ended up taking over an hour in-between questions and what I think was some productive discussion about various topics.

Among some of the changes or additions you can expect:

• A slightly modified look to our current logo and banner in favor of something a touch more recognizable with our real world counterparts.
• A few updates to our website:
  • The 'About Us' page will see the introduction of a manifesto, charter, and a list of values held by Eyes & Ears.
    • This may get an entirely separate page, I will be discussing things further with my team.
  • Our Mission will be expanded upon.
• A PDF file which we will distribute to those who call upon us with best practices so they need not call us again, or at the very least, as frequently!
• Additional graphics in our Description tab on the community website
• More media created from with in Eyes & Ears
  • @Spiridon has offered us his expertise

Finally, after gathering input, our website itself will be undergoing some minor changes. With a focus on speed and responsiveness, I dialed back some features of my website like parallax images (archive) in favor of static ones like which you see in our current design. These features and more will be returning in a future iteration as all members that I had interviewed said that they were more than happy to wait a second or two longer (in my testing) for more design elements over the purely static website of today and will announce when these changes roll out.

Encouraged with this meeting, I'm already planning a second and already have a list of things I want to ask in my head.

----------

@Ardes refueled a dried up Novean with a quick spot of fuel on the far side of Alioth where civilization is perhaps more sparse.

----------

Three new members were added in an unprecedented time frame over the course of the test!

A big welcome to:

@Annabella - Rescuer

@JackTricolor - Rescuer, Dispatch, Supplies Manager 

@maxamized - Rescuer, Pilot

----------

Always open to content suggestions as usual.

That's all for now, until next time, fly safe everyone!

- DarkHorizon

View the full post in the Forums!

This will be a relatively thin update compared to past updates. No new rescues were made and aside from resource extracting, I didn't do anything worth discussing.

Most of this past test was done in preparation for this coming week's test. The main spectacle, as you all know, will be the upcoming DICE race, scheduled for November 2nd. I wasn't able to complete as much as I had hoped to but I suppose it will have to do.

As far as the future is concerned, I've floated the idea for another team meeting at some point during the next test, both in-game and through Discord.

The previous meeting we had on October fifth went well and I've already implemented some suggestions that were pushed forward by the team. Some of these changes will be previewed in our next agenda while a few new things will come up including: 

• The upcoming DICE Race
• A preview of the changes to the logo that was pushed during the previous meeting
• A list of values held by our organization
• Ideas for a PDF to distribute to those we help and post publicly in the forums

This is, of course, preliminary and will be expanded upon as the week progresses.

That's all for now, until next time, fly safe everyone!

- DarkHorizon

View this post on the Forums!

Just a brief programming note, Eyes & Ears made its 20th rescue during this past test. Yamamushi also made their first rescue, good job!

Read more here.

Safe flying,

DarkHorizon

Two rescues were made this test, that's 21 rescues for Alpha 2 and 35 overall!

I took off on Friday evening to transport @Kasper_DU from the North Pole to a marketplace where they were subsequently picked up by their organization. Having quickly fulfilled the request and needing no further assistance, I returned home and marked down rescue 33.

Annabella secured the second rescue as the test was ending. Lowly space traveler @Redneckwombat got stuck in the black void between Lacobus on their way to Alioth due to computer problems. With some real-world technical support and a fuel resupply, Anna helped the player fix a problem for them both in, and out of the test environment. That's what I call a team player, and a lock on rescue 34.

----------

Not a whole lot happened this test on my side of things. Work was mostly done on the fuel transporter which to me doesn't feel like much progress was made, but I'll let you be the judge of that.

Starting out with the main feature being the raising of the landing platform in the docking bay allowed for some additional room for fuel storage in the storage deck. Seven medium space tanks and six medium atmospheric tanks were added.

Container storage space that was formerly at the back of the constructs fuel bay is extended to the front of the docking bay and only a short walk from the bridge.

The bridge itself is currently designed to seat only a single person. I might just expand this head and neck of sorts to more of a wide bridge section for a small three to four-person crew that's more or less the width of the craft.

Texture was added to the floors while depth was added to the now four voxel thick walls around the windows. A bit of black and white contrast was added to the boarders around the windows and along the baseboards, meanwhile some lighting elements were either tucked into the walls or extended over walkways for optimal brightness.

----------

With all the work on the interior, the exterior hull got very little love. What I did get done, however, was mounting some engines, vertical ones in particular.

----------

Finally as far as the Lua front goes, aside from fuel tank gauges, I'm planning on also implementing @Melvin artificial horizon script which I sadly didn't get to play with since I was too engrossed in design.

That's all for now, until next time, fly safe everyone!

- DarkHorizon

View this post on the Forums!

All great things start small, and today Eyes & Ears accepts its fifth member, Dread Reaper!

This also marks our third rescue during the Alpha 1 phase. Yes, we are accepting rescue requests.

Also, during the alpha tests, players are free to view the ships flown by Eyes & Ears at District 1.

The small version is a dual environment, dual-purpose personnel transport and fuel resupplier that can be stowed in it's medium sided counterpart.

Its medium mothership is currently under construction, but the external hull and pilots room are already designed.

- DarkHorizon