aspiegamer
Member
Procedural Generation lets you cheat God while designing games, which is why it's awesome. This game is shooting a billion times over its weight class while at the same time almost feeling like too simple a concept in many ways.
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No Man's Sky Confirmed Feature List
- Thread starter thehillissilent
- Start date
Do you have any examples in games? I'm genuinely curious
Coulomb_Barrier
Member
Just saw this, thanks OP, some stuff I didn't know in there.
valkillmore
Member
It's not just procedural generation though. Can't put a price on a clear vision, artistic direction and the biggest one of all; a focus on compelling game play, which is something Im afraid has either been largely ignored or skimmed over by some of the games detractors.
I fully expect the next gameplay trailer to blow us all away all over again and I can't wait. They seem to be programming and math wizards!
BlueTsunami
there is joy in sucking dick
I just hope there's crazy shit that the algorithm can spit out based on chance. Like some crazy ass unobtainium like mineral thats remarkably rare and you're able to craft crazy shit from it.
IAmRandom31
Banned
" Empty "
And just look at the vision these guys have
Wild architecture. Strange landscapes. Mysterious structures.
These guys have a vision and they are throwing their love at it. Murray sounds like me sometimes. Dreaming of jumping into a ship and just ... going somewhere. Finding something. Doing something. You don't know what it is until it is done, but in the end you want to call up a buddy and go " DUDE YOU WILL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT I SAW! "
That to me is what No Mans Sky is about. Travelling the stars in search of something, you don't know exactly what but when you find it .... unforgettable. MAKE IT HAPPEN HELLO GAMES! When they have a vision like what I see above. I know their mind and heart is in the right place.
The best thing about it. They can build their base universe and just go nuts with it if the game takes off and makes them rich. They can build on this beautiful universe and .... do anything.
TheChewyWaffles
Member
This is gonna be this gen's Spore isn't it?
Coulomb_Barrier
Member
" Empty "
And just look at the vision these guys have
Wild architecture. Strange landscapes. Mysterious structures.
These guys have a vision and they are throwing their love at it. Murray sounds like me sometimes. Dreaming of jumping into a ship and just ... going somewhere. Finding something. Doing something. You don't know what it is until it is done, but in the end you want to call up a buddy and go " DUDE YOU WILL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT I SAW! "
That to me is what No Mans Sky is about. Travelling the stars in search of something, you don't know exactly what but when you find it .... unforgettable. MAKE IT HAPPEN HELLO GAMES!
The best thing about it. They can build their base universe and just go nuts with it if the game takes off and makes them rich. They can build on this beautiful universe and .... do anything.
Omg this game. Damn. After reading through the OP and looking at those screenies, this remains one of my most anticipated titles in years.
I just love that sense of loneliness with you stuck on a planet in a million planet universe waiting to be explored. I love the fact that you could just log all the types of wildlife you uncover on a single planet if you wanted to. The fact that only 10% of planets have life is also neat so that there's a sense of wonder when you do find living things.
This game sounds like something Bullfrog would have made in their heyday.
Possibly. I don't think anybody has ever played it.
I'm not getting my hopes up like some people ITT. Did that with Starbound recently and got burned badly.
King Tubby
Member
This is only the 400th comment to that effect.
I don't fear a Spore repeat if only because the developers here seem to have a very clear and focused vision, and from what I've read the development of Spore was fairly troubled.
Coulomb_Barrier
Member
For it's visuals alone, even if it were just some kind of visual space tour without anything to do, is reason to be optimistic.
What do I know though. Never played Spore, and its review average is quite high. So that could be a compliment or the opposite.
Fatal Error
Neo Member
if there is a 1% chance to find a non-primitive life, I'm curios what happens if people started killing them all?
there is no way this will ever be a problem. I don't think people realize the incomprehensibly huge numbers they're talking about with the number of planets they have.
It basically means if, say, the game sold to 5 million people - and it's probably never going to do that - each of those five million could visit a single planet every minute and they'd never run out of new sights for, like, centuries. There is no conceivable way in which players will be able to wipe out all life in the universe. It would take millennia.
This game is actually going to be really instructive for people how large the universe really is, since even this game is only a fraction of what's really out there.
SymbiantXenos
Member
As the hitchikers guide to the galaxy once said.
Space is big.
Space is big.
Icyflamez96
Member
Well good luck to them trying to live one hundred quadrillion years
RoadHazard
Gold Member
You'll have a galactic map, and also a map of each planet. Discovered planets will be named, and discovered landmarks (including lakes, cave systems and stuff) will be named. Both with a generated latin name and a name given by the discoverer. So really, how difficult does it sound for a group of players to make their way to the same location, given sufficient propulsion methods and such?
Who has said planets without life will be empty? There can still be interesting things to discover and do on those planets. But that seems unfathomable to some people here.
"You create your own adventure" means that it's up to you how you achieve the ultimate goal of reaching the center of the galaxy (if you want to embark on that journey). You can be an explorer, a hunter, a miner, a trader, a space pirate, a fighter on the traders' side, etc. Loads of different things to do to get money (or whatever) to buy better ships and upgrade your equipment. No, there won't be NPCs giving you specific quests to do these things, and yeah, you'll have to use your imagination a bit. If you have none, well, then this is probably not the game for you.
Sooo many people don't. And I bet most of them didn't actually read your OP. A lot of the stuff people don't understand or are completely unaware of is answered there. Sigh.
The difference is that Minecraft not only didn't have quests, but it didn't have a goal at all beyond what you set as your own goals (AFAIK). This game absolutely does have a goal, which so many people seem to have missed. You're trying to make your way to the center of the galaxy, for reasons that are currently unknown but will be explained through in-game lore. To achieve this you'll need better and better ships, and to achieve that you'll need to do one of the many things you can do to earn money. Not that hard to understand. People who think this game is just aimless exploration haven't understood it at all. There's a very clear driving force. Read up on stuff before complaining about it, people.
Like I said in a previous post, 1% of 18 quintillion is still 180,000,000,000,000,000 (180 quadrillion, or 180 million billion) planets. You think a few million players are ever gonna even make a dent in that number? Let's say 10 million people play the game, and every one of them kills all the life on 10 planets (which is never actually gonna happen - remember, these planets are large). That's 100 million dead planets that previously had advanced life on them. Oh well, 179,999,999,900,000,000 such planets left, off we go to the next one!
Or to make it even more ridiculous, let's assume each of these 10 million players managed to kill all the life on 10 planets every day (which is of course ridiculously ludicrous). That is, 100 million new dead planets every single day. Now we're getting somewhere, right? Well, it would still take these 10 million players 1,800,000,000 days, or 4,931,507 years, to finish off all the planets with "interesting" life (the 1%). Five million years.
People severely underestimate the numbers we're dealing with here, I feel.
Severely.
I mean, seriously, even our calculations here is ignoring other factors. For example, these planets are MASSIVE. Said to be 'planet-sized', but let's just say for shits and gigs that claim is exaggerated and each planet is basically the size of the Red Dead Redemption world. A player will have to stop at that planet for X amount of hours literally annihilating every creature there before moving on to the next planet. At this rate, the numbers become an even more incomprehensibly huge hurdle.
Trust me, potential bros going to buy this game. Planetary genocide will NEVER be your concern lol
legacyzero
Banned
I wish Hello would put out some awesome Hi Res wallpapers :/
IAmRandom31
Banned
If I wanted wallpaper of empty planets I would head over to the NASA website
lol gaht-daang
legacyzero
Banned
RoadHazard
Gold Member
Yep. Even though the universe/galaxy isn't technically endless, the content in the game for all practical purposes is. All the people who will ever play this game combined will never even scratch the surface.
For another funny example, if 10 million people were to play the game (which I sadly think is a bit generous), and they are all very ambituous and eventually visit 10,000 planets each (this could probably technically happen with massive amounts of playtime and very short visits to each planet), that's 100 billion planets visited when it's all said and done. That's a lot, but how much is it actually of the total? 0.000000005%. None of which have actually been explored, just briefly visited. And 17,999,999,900,000,000,000 planets have never been visited at all. It's just absolutely staggering, and impossible to wrap your head around.
valkillmore
Member
And the voids that weave between. I cannot wait.
IAmRandom31
Banned
Really is insane. Which Is why I like the idea of an almost FTL esque mission to find your way to an end point, the center of the Universe where lord knows what awaits you. And along the way you run into, again lord knows what.
I know one thing if there was ever a game tailor made to the SHARE ecosystem of the Ps4 this is it.
One thing I would love is if you could put materials together to build monuments or something like that. A self created mark you can put on the planet. Perhaps use them as galactic markers perhaps leading someone along the path you walked as you found all these amazing, mind boggling things. Imagine landing on a planet and suddenly stepping over a hill and seeing a giant monument in the distance. You get up to it and it is a personal message from another explorer. Beckoning you to another set of coordinates, leading you to another place in the galaxy.
Yup. I love thinking in space-huge numbers, it's amazing. This game is going to really be instructive.
I can't wait to see how varied their generation system is for planetary evolution. So many dead planets (as it should be!), but the few that have amazing life are going to be such a great reward for our exploration :O
Why is that staggering, though? Given the present state of technology, going wide in this manner isn't the least bit challenging; the real challenge is in going deep and trying to capture, in some fashion, the incredible complexity of the physical universe in the rules that govern and shape the procedurally generated worlds.
I mean, they keep throwing out Big Numbers regarding the size and scope of their universe, but I feel like our real focus should be on the degree to which they're able to make just a single world a compelling experience. After all, how many planets would you bother to explore if each planet was as compelling as a Mass Effect 1 Mako side-mission planet?
I'd been trying to contain my excitement in check for this game since details are so sparse but this was enough to push me into hyped territory. Gotta get a PS4 for when this comes out. I love that this has an offline mode. With planet sized planets, someone could dedicate decades to a planet wide genocide of a species...and it would take them that long. That's amazing.
Was hesitant about dying resetting all of your gear, but going off the scale of this game, they couldn't possibly create enough upgrades to last someone the years they could spend playing this. This is a good way to keep the progression going, and add tension to exploration and firefights (for fear of death). Coming across a giant rampaging dinosaur is a bit more threatening when you are fully geared out and afraid of losing your stuff. As long as the data you've collected through exploration is kept I don't mind this choice.
Was hesitant about dying resetting all of your gear, but going off the scale of this game, they couldn't possibly create enough upgrades to last someone the years they could spend playing this. This is a good way to keep the progression going, and add tension to exploration and firefights (for fear of death). Coming across a giant rampaging dinosaur is a bit more threatening when you are fully geared out and afraid of losing your stuff. As long as the data you've collected through exploration is kept I don't mind this choice.
RoadHazard
Gold Member
As for being "instructive" in a scientific way, it's actually quite misleading if the game is really just one massive galaxy (which is what they've said - I've never heard them say there are several). The Milky Way "only" has about 400 billion stars, and the newest estimate I can find is that each star on average has around 1.6 planets. So that's approximately 640 billion planets in the Milky Way. That's just nothing compared to this game. In terms of number of planets NMS is the equivalent of about 28 million Milky Ways (not in size though, as I expect both stars and planets to be a lot closer together than they are in real life).
EDIT: Actually, these two articles make it sound like there are indeed multiple galaxies, which I hadn't heard before. If what Sean is saying here is accurate, everyone will start out in the same galaxy, but there are more in the game's universe. Perhaps once you reach the center of that first galaxy you'll start over in another one, and so on. I also learned that planets move and spin, which I was hoping for but hadn't seen confirmation of before. Hype reaching even higher levels!
Yep, I love that they're doing it this way rather than making everything everywhere "interesting" and full of life. Finding such a planet should feel special, like an event.
It's not staggering that they're able to do it. That's just math, and the precision of the numbers they're using. What's staggering is trying to imagine that many planets. Just the sheer amount of stuff this game will contain. It's simply impossible. Whether they will be interesting and varied enough is a different matter. Also very important, of course, but it doesn't make the number 18 quintillion any less mindblowing. 18 quintillion planets, and you can land on and explore any of them.
Anyway, this massive number isn't really important by itself. What it allows the game to do is let each and every player be the explorer of an uncharted part of the galaxy and discover planets no one has ever been to before. With just, say, a million planets there's a real possibility you'd run out of undiscovered planets if the game got popular enough.
IAmRandom31
Banned
Just downloaded and played around a little with that Space Engine mentioned earlier.
Holy ... mother ... fuck
I had no idea games could do this man. Absolute insanity. By one dude! You can fly around the f'in universe at 5000x the speed of light, hover of a galaxy, point to a spot, fly to that spot, locate the orbits of the planets, then the moons of those planets, fly toward the moon, watch as it gets more and more detailed, then go to surface level and look up at the stars.
HOLY MOTHA.
Impressive stuff
God I can't wait for NMS
Holy ... mother ... fuck
I had no idea games could do this man. Absolute insanity. By one dude! You can fly around the f'in universe at 5000x the speed of light, hover of a galaxy, point to a spot, fly to that spot, locate the orbits of the planets, then the moons of those planets, fly toward the moon, watch as it gets more and more detailed, then go to surface level and look up at the stars.
HOLY MOTHA.
Impressive stuff
God I can't wait for NMS
Melvinator
Neo Member
Thanks for the info OP!
I'm liking what's been shown,
Does anyone know if Stars were mentioned?
There are some unbelievably huge ones out there...
check this video out,
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fKTu6B4Rgek
I'm liking what's been shown,
Does anyone know if Stars were mentioned?
There are some unbelievably huge ones out there...
check this video out,
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fKTu6B4Rgek
jellies_two
Member
I really hope the hype doesn't sink their vision because what they are trying to build, someone has to build sooner or later.
But the expectations will be ridiculous and won't ever be satisfied.
If you walk around minecraft although it has all these different landscapes within literally 30 minutes you get a feel for all of it. For the algorithm that generates the world.
Even though every minecraft square mile is unlike every other square mile just looking at it immediately you can see the same algorithm was at work and probably minecraft addicts can pick small improvements from one code release to another just by walking around a bit.
So the expectation that there is this infinite variety in NMS is going to come up against the reality of a very finite chunk of world building code. If there is a billion or only 100 planets to check out if you get a feel for the algorithm, there won't be a lot more to see.
If the developer allowed the game to call home to download new procedural generation code after release, it would be cool. Then a new planet might really offer something worth posting screen shots of. For the first person to trip that new code.
But the expectations will be ridiculous and won't ever be satisfied.
If you walk around minecraft although it has all these different landscapes within literally 30 minutes you get a feel for all of it. For the algorithm that generates the world.
Even though every minecraft square mile is unlike every other square mile just looking at it immediately you can see the same algorithm was at work and probably minecraft addicts can pick small improvements from one code release to another just by walking around a bit.
So the expectation that there is this infinite variety in NMS is going to come up against the reality of a very finite chunk of world building code. If there is a billion or only 100 planets to check out if you get a feel for the algorithm, there won't be a lot more to see.
If the developer allowed the game to call home to download new procedural generation code after release, it would be cool. Then a new planet might really offer something worth posting screen shots of. For the first person to trip that new code.
Why doesn't the first page mention anything about the center of the galaxy thing? There are so many details there, it seems odd it would have been completely left out.
Also:
So for the nice screenshots shown above, you might literally have to find 99 bad planets before you get 1 that looks like that.
This sounds like there ARE some sort of resources you can collect, though I guess they don't consider that "inventory". Maybe it's used for fuel?
Auto-Reply
Member
What makes Minecraft special is not that it has randomly generated maps, it's that the player can completely transform it and every position of every block will be saved. At least to me that is the real trick why Minecraft has become as big as it is today.
If you remove this feature then I doubt we would even remember the name.
So I'm not really understanding the comparison of both games.
If you remove this feature then I doubt we would even remember the name.
So I'm not really understanding the comparison of both games.
Katzenjammer
Member
Difficult enough that I as a developer wouldn't put in any development time making sure that thousands of players can meet and interact with each other directly. It sounds like a huge effort of development and testing, for a feature that the vast majority of players will never experience. It also goes against their philosophy as I understand it (this being designed as a single player game). It makes more sense to implement multiplayer in a passive manner, akin to the message bottles that were added in Wind Waker HD.
That's why I said 'spiritual' successor. Dangerous is (potentially) a fully realised multiplayer version of Elite-as-space-sim, whereas NMS ploughs the 'sci-fi' elements of Elite IMO, being less a space flight simulator with real physics and so on and more an accessible journey of wonder. Kind of Greg Egan vs Iain M Banks IYSWIM.
And yeah, I guess the BBC B is a 'PC', but not in the Wintel sense that term is mist commonly applied to, in the same way the Spectrum & C64 were PCs.
My post was more a reaction to the same tired crap that always gets posted in NMS threads ranging from the 'It'll be boring' to 'it'll be 5 planets repeated a zillion times' and the most common one 'it'll be another Spore'.
Which is a shame, because the OP is great, and the funniest posts in the thread are the ones saying 'we don't know anything about this game yet'.
Handy Fake
Member
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Awesome video. Very difficult to fathom size and scope.
Sho_Nuff82
Member
If the planets and star systems are the same in everyone's games, a star map will emerge. It will be, as you say, a huge endeavor, but I don't doubt the persistence of invested gamers, especially when this hits PC. The game is supposed to have some sort of trade economy after all, that wouldn't be possible if no one ever found anyone.
Coulomb_Barrier
Member
I absolutely love the idea that, even though you will probably never meet other players in NMS's universe, you can do things that effect everyone else and stuff that all other players are notified of.
Like the example in OP is if you wipe out an entire race, you'll be in the history books. Or if you are the first to discover an advanced alien race and travel to their homeworld.
Like the example in OP is if you wipe out an entire race, you'll be in the history books. Or if you are the first to discover an advanced alien race and travel to their homeworld.
Veritigo_X
Member
I think the comparisons are coming from the 'no quests' aspect of the game. It seems like some people are confused about that and I feel like Minecraft's approach of doing what you want is comparable.
I'm still quite sceptical of this claim.
Not sure if some realize how god damn massive even Earth is. A 1:1, explorable scale planet x 5 gabillion would be beyond ridiculous in scope.
Coulomb_Barrier
Member
I really don't know what you are expecting. It's a space exploration game. By it's nature, the gameworld has to be procedurally generated to allow for multiple planets. Otherwise it wouldn't be much of space exploration game.
Unless you think the devs should have created a single, super-complex world which you spend all your time in. But then it'd have nothing to do with space. Or do you require that they map out and realistically simulate an entire system, like our Solar System?
Handy Fake
Member
" Empty "
I just noticed the armadillo things.
Stiflers Mom
Banned
I remember just playing Starglider 2 on the Amiga back in the day for exploring and seeing new crazy shit that happens... Like the "Space Whales" for instance...
Looking back, that sounds kind of esoteric, but these were the 80ies..
Looking back, that sounds kind of esoteric, but these were the 80ies..
UpDownLeftRight
Banned
But it's been done. They weren't even the first to do it. Using procedural generation you could generate a planet the size of Earth, or if you wanna go bigger then Jupiter. There's really nothing holding you back from generating a planet the size of the Sun, or even Canis Majoris which is 1200 times the size of our Sun. Elite Dangerous has got to get that star in their game at some point so, well it has to be possible! And that's going to have over 400 billion star systems too.