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Game Informer: 30 minute 'BTS' video of No Man's Sky

J

JehutyRunner

Banned
No Man's Sky is one of the most ambitious games ever made and we're excited to feature it as our cover story for the January issue. The small team out of Guildford, England is using procedural generation to create an entire galaxy worth of planets, asteroids, and space stations to explore. While visiting the studio, we sat down with the founder of Hello Games Sean Murray to learn about the tools, math, and science behind the game. We should stress that this video is captured from an older version of No Man's Sky and Murray is often using a debug camera and has access to tools that players will never see.
Click to expand...

Link

About to start watching this. Was literally about to go out and get a late dinner when this went live! But it's the demo they showed at E3.
 
G

georly

Member
When this game got announced, my thought was 'So what? There's no gameplay that appeals to me here,' but the more I watch and see of it, the more I think I'll enjoy just exploring planets for fun. I'm really looking forward to see what other gameplay mechanics get layered on top of exploring and what was already shown. I'd love if there was some sort of sense of progression, but that may not be necessary for this game to be good.

Really excited to see what comes of this. It's really growing on me.
 
C

curb

Banned
I can't wait to find out how much this game is going to cost.

Five minutes into the video reminds me of how this is one of my most anticipated games of
hopefully
next year.
 
H

hawk2025

Member
First five minutes impressions:


OH DAMN, the caves.

The variety in this environment. And this was a planet that was completely procedurally generated.
 
K

King Cobra

Banned
original.jpg


It's almost as if they want all our money :,)
 
B

Big_Al

Unconfirmed Member
Cheers OP :) I'm looking forward to this but part of me does wonder how much they can realistically do to make an extremely varied game with different environments etc that you want to explore with the size of the team that they are.

I'm sure as hell happy to see them try though.
 
Ray Wonder

Ray Wonder

Founder of the Wounded Tagless Children
Well, I guess I'll have to wait until I get home from work to watch this. Gonna be a torturous 45 minute drive.
 
T

Tuck

Member
Man, this guy from Hello Games is so charming. I just love seeing him talk. He gives off such a humble "I cant believe people care about our game this much" kind of vibe.
 
H

hawk2025

Member
Kinthalis said:
I gave up on that darn video player.

But isn't this the same thing they showed at the trailer at, was it e3?
Click to expand...



No.

He's showing exactly how the planet is being randomly generated in real time as you move through the planet by using the dev tools.


Derpyduck said:
I watched for 10 minutes before the player eventually just quit, but in those 10 minutes I saw nothing resembling gameplay. Not sure what this "game" actually is.
Click to expand...


It's not gameplay, he is showing it using the free dev camera to illustrate the random generation process.
 
S

sinxtanx

Member
Game Informer knows about YouTube embedding but feel like they can handle thousands of people wanting to watch a 30 minute HD video with their own server
 
J

jiggle

Member
I hope my planet is one of the lush ones

If the environment is being generated as you go
Does the game save what was created?
 
T

Tuck

Member
Draw distance is unfortunately really bad. Would love if the game loaded more at once so you could see off into the distance. Maybe its different on different planets?
 
B

bananafactory

Banned
Tuck said:
Draw distance is unfortunately really bad. Would love if the game loaded more at once so you could see off into the distance. Maybe its different on different planets?
Click to expand...

Could be fixed or improved already, they stated that this footage is from an old build.
 
H

hawk2025

Member
jiggle said:
I hope my planet is one of the lush ones

If the environment is being generated as you go
Does the game save what was created?
Click to expand...

There is no way it's saving what is created. The file sizes would explode much too quickly.

What's happening here is that Hello has coded up a bunch of functions:


f(X_it) = Y_it


where Y is a massive set of variables that's calculated at every time t by every player i that's in a current planet.

But it also fixes some of the "inputs" of the function: This planet will have dinosaurs, this planet will tweak the parameters so there are more caves, this other one will be full of vegetation.

And then you put random generation on *that*.

Hello controls and creates the function f(X) by generating assets and the underlying distribution of the randomness that X follows. The massively-sized output "Y" cannot possibly be saved anywhere.



Edit: This made very little sense. I'll try to rewrite it properly soon :(
 
JetBlackPanda

JetBlackPanda

Member
jiggle said:
I hope my planet is one of the lush ones

If the environment is being generated as you go
Does the game save what was created?
Click to expand...

If I heard him correctly, its being generated on the fly but the mathematics will always make that area the same? because the formula can only come to one answer?

something like that?

am I way off?
 
A

Auto-Reply

Member
I wonder if those floating rocks are intentional or not, part of the difficulty he spoke about when creting caves etc. Looked kinda out of place here and there.
 
C

Cess007

Member
oh man. Oh Man. OH MAN!! Just seeing those caves within a minute of the video, and i was already feeling something in my pants
It was my phone tho
 
bargeparty

bargeparty

Member
So wait, what happens when you continue to go around one planet? Is everything different when you get back to where you started? Does it remember somehow?
 
T

Tuck

Member
Auto-Reply said:
I wonder if those floating rocks are intentional or not, part of the difficulty he spoke about when creting caves etc. Looked kinda out of place here and there.
Click to expand...

Pretty sure those are intentional. Floating mountains are cool. Like in Avatar.
 
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