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IGN First: No Man's Sky 21 Minute Gameplay Demo

Beyond the complications, it's like you both setting down randomly in North America with no map and hoping you'll find each other.

Sean's said that there will be a maximum number of player characters that you can see at once, which leads me to believe there's separate instances. You could probably be standing 5 feet from your friend, and he could be in another server instance. And obviously, there's no voice chat. :)

It's just not a multiplayer game.
 
Sean's said that there will be a maximum number of player characters that you can see at once, which leads me to believe there's separate instances. You could probably be standing 5 feet from your friend, and he could be in another server instance. It's just not a multiplayer game.

Aye, I know that bit, it came under the heading "complications", hehe.:)

Just saying even the planets are ludicrously big.
 
Yes: Sean Murray is on record saying he believes NMS should follow the Minecraft model: Consistent, periodic, free updates to the game's base code introducing new features and content for the indefinite future (probably based on the game's success).

He didn't say it explicitly but he doesn't want paid expansions or sequels. In the same vein you wouldn't get Minecraft 2.

That sounds beautiful. You have my money Sean!
you already have it anyway lol

Beyond the complications, it's like you both setting down randomly in North America with no map and hoping you'll find each other.

and taking into consideration the size of the game; both you and your friend are the size of ants :v
 
Aye, I know that bit, it came under the heading "complications", hehe.:)

You know someone is going to dedicate months or whatever to finding their friend and it's going to backfire epically when they land at the exact spot their friend is supposed to be at, and they still can't see each other. Or they DO meet up, and celebrate, and the second they take off and go into space together, one of them vanishes into another instance.
 
Yes and yes
Ok, sweet. This is probably how I'll explore.


Gaf needs to agree on a designated meeting place.

Sure. It might take billions of years but hey, we'll get there eventually.

We’re working to a 64-bit system, which is 2 to the power of 64… or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 possible planets. Even if a planet is discovered every second, it’ll take 585 billion years to find them all!

Source

I seriously hope this game will use cross platform play. We should definitely ask the developers to implement it. It'll increase the chances of running into someone.
 
Aw, that's a bummer. It would be more fun if we could meet up and explore together. But I guess we could try to reach together at a space station? Or are the space stations also randomly generated too?
 
I seriously hope this game will use cross platform play. We should definitely ask the developers to implement it. It'll increase the chances of running into someone.

I think they've said that PS4 and PC are going to be seperate galaxy seeds, so no cross platform.
 
Aw, that's a bummer. It would be more fun if we could meet up and explore together. But I guess we could try to reach together at a space station? Or are the space stations also randomly generated too?

Nothing is randomly generated. The space station that you come across will be the same for everyone that comes across it-- if they ever come across it. The only thing that would change that is if you managed somehow to destroy that space station and save your progress online. Then it'd be destroyed for the rest of us as well. At least that's how I understand it.
 
Aw, that's a bummer. It would be more fun if we could meet up and explore together. But I guess we could try to reach together at a space station? Or are the space stations also randomly generated too?

Starmap/planets/stations/buildings/trees/pebble rocks, everything that is pre-calculated using very complex algorithm. There is no "live random" element to those things.

All your friend need to do is to come to the same location, and game will render the same gameworld to him as it does for you.
 
Aw, that's a bummer. It would be more fun if we could meet up and explore together. But I guess we could try to reach together at a space station? Or are the space stations also randomly generated too?

Not a multiplayer game, man. :)
Meeting up would take weeks/months/maybe impossible. No guarantee that even if you do meet up you can stay together.
 
I think we should just not give this unverified leak/rumor any play. It's basically fan fiction and until it's either verified or shown in game, it's counter to everything that the devs have said so far.
 
I've followed this game in terms of watching vids etc but don't know much about it beyond that. Why is there an issue with the $60 price? I thought this was supposed to be a game with loads of content and variety.
 
I've followed this game in terms of watching vids etc but don't know much about it beyond that. Why is there an issue with the $60 price? I thought this was supposed to be a game with loads of content and variety.

There isn't an issue, among sensible folks.

I think some people had gotten it into their heads that this was an "indie" game, and thus would be $20 or $30.
 
I wonder if people could setup beacons on planets for people to listen into that general direction and possibly discover life. That would be so awesome.
 
Basically correct. You may be able to see each other IF you happen to be the lucky 0.001% that can get close enough to be on the same planet at the same time, but even then you won't be able to interact in any way. If your main interest in NMS has anything to do with multiplayer, you will probably be disappointed. Supposedly they may explore more MP avenues in the future, but this will still be, essentially, a single-player game.
It would be nice if there was a way to fast travel to where your friends are. Until then, this is my OT suggestion:

No Man's Sky |OT| Except for the Lucky 0.001%
 
So I understand the generation stuff now. For some reasons, I always thought everything in this game would be randomly generated and spawned at different locations across the universe. Turns out that they are all pre-calculated and waiting for you to discover.
 
Thinking of some good OT names. Using some scifi space quotes and stuff I think of.

No Man's Sky |OT| In space, no one can see your gameplay.

No Man's Sky |OT| There is more planets in this game than atoms in the universe

No Man's Sky |OT| The sky is the limit only for those who aren't afraid to fly

No Man's Sky |OT| Everywhere I go, I'm the first

No Man's Sky |OT| All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there
 
No Man's Sky |OT| All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there

XS5LK.gif
 
Oh I get your point mate, I was just trying to explain that it is different biomes on a grander scale, if you get me. Rather than travelling around a planet to explore different biomes, they've made it so you have to jump planets to explore different biomes. If you think of it in a Minecraft context, all of that is in one world, but to push the spacetravel aspect, they've just put it up a few steps onto a planetary scale.

I get exactly what you're saying though, it would have been interesting to land on a snowy pole rather than a desert equator. But it's just in this instance they've upped it so the different biomes are from exploring, say a solar system rather than a singular map.

Mind, I do wonder if when (if?) the bring in basebuilding, they might choose to include different planet biomes.

It's all exciting anyway. ;)

Base-building should be fairly simple to implement given what we've already seen. From the latest IGN footage, It seems buildings in the game get "plopped" right on top of the environment and carve out a nice level surface for themselves to sit on. It shouldn't be too much harder to let players plop down these buildings at some point. Plus storing a prefab or randomized structure location should be a tiny, tiny bit of data vs trying to map terrain deformation. Something that could easily be stored on the Atlas database.

As Sean has stated, they're interested in goading players into exploring the universe, rather than staying in one place, so that's probably why they haven't prioritized adding in a feature like this.

Different biomes though, not happening. From their stated goals, 1 planet = 1 biome, or planet "type".
 
You'll laugh. I mean, COULD they be true? I guess. But it's so unlikely that I found it funny.

That one the other poster just posted actually sounds somewhat possible after the confirmation that there are both NPC's and larger trading ships you can own, but I don't want to even entertain the idea of stuff that may or may not be real.
 
I think we should just not give this unverified leak/rumor any play. It's basically fan fiction and until it's either verified or shown in game, it's counter to everything that the devs have said so far.

Agreed. Reads more like a wishlist than anything approaching a leak.
 
What's odd is Hello Games hasn't said anything recently about the frequency and percentage of planets with life.

Early on, they said 90% of planets in the game will have no life at all, and of the 10% that do, 90% of those will just have really simple life, so in effect only 1% of planets in the whole game will generally look like the planets we've seen in the previews where aliens are walking all over the place. That doesn't mean the other 99% will be empty, they just won't have complex life all over the place. I imagine those planets will probably still have interesting geographical features, resource deposits, and other points of interest like crashed ships. For the people worried about planets getting too similar, if Hello Games keeps up the 90-10-10 rule then actually finding a planet that looks like the green ones we've seen in the previews should be a rare occurrence.

Another thing that's concerned me though is that every single planet we've seen so far has had an atmosphere, and a thick one at that. There haven't been any that look like the moon or Mercury or Pluto.
 
No Man's Sky |OT| Doing What We Do
No Man's Sky |OT| Just Alien's

To continue the Serenity Theme and the fact we will lose years to this game:

No Man's Sky |OT| Take me out to the Black, tell em I ain't coming back

For those who liked the idea of the game but think it'll be boring:

No Man's Sky |OT| I got 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 problems but a pitch ain't one
 
Pretty sure that's not how procedural generation works. You have one equation, and each planet has a value that that equation uses to generate its terrain and creatures uniquely. Literally every possible numeric value is used, so you can't modify the identifier of the planet. And you can't "change the equation" because then you'd have a unique equation for each planet which is too much data. Unless you can point me to a direct source where they explicitly mention the approach they take, I'll assume it's just not possible, or at least not what they're doing given their approach here.

All true. BUT they can easily save changes you make locally on your machine. With the terrain likely being generated as a 3D grid of points/blocks (which are then smoothed out so it doesn't look like Minecraft - although certain elements, like scanned minerals, totally do, so that probably proves that), they just need to remember which blocks you've blown away. That's not much data, basically just a set of coordinates for each one. Then, when the same terrain is generated again the next time you visit, that data is loaded and those blocks are removed from the generated terrain (which would otherwise be the same as when you first saw it).

I don't know if this will happen, but it's certainly feasible. You don't store entire planet equations or whatever, just the changes made to the generated result.
 
What's odd is Hello Games hasn't said anything recently about the frequency and percentage of planets with life.

Early on, they said 90% of planets in the game will have no life at all, and of the 10% that do, 90% of those will just have really simple life, so in effect only 1% of planets in the whole game will generally look like the planets we've seen in the previews where aliens are walking all over the place. That doesn't mean the other 99% will be empty, they just won't have complex life all over the place. I imagine those planets will probably still have interesting geographical features, resource deposits, and other points of interest like crashed ships. For the people worried about planets getting too similar, if Hello Games keeps up the 90-10-10 rule then actually finding a planet that looks like the green ones we've seen in the previews should be a rare occurrence.

Another thing that's concerned me though is that every single planet we've seen so far has had an atmosphere, and a thick one at that. There haven't been any that look like the moon or Mercury or Pluto.

Uh. I'm prety sure it's like 90% are barren and 10% will look like what we've seen in the trailers.

Might be wrong, but that's last i heard.
 
No Man's Sky |OT| And you get a star, and you get a star!
No Man's Sky |OT| In Search Of Molyneux

All true. BUT they can easily save changes you make locally on your machine. [...] I don't know if this will happen, but it's certainly feasible.

Yes, Sean confirmed in a Q&A with Game Informer that small changes (terraforming, killing animals, etc) are saved locally for you. Big changes (blowing up space stations) are saved for everyone.

Uh. I'm prety sure it's like 90% are barren and 10% will look like what we've seen in the trailers.

Not 90% barren, just not teeming with life. There will be some completely lifeless worlds, but as a 'reward' for exploring them they will also be rich in valuable elements to mine.
 
No Man's Sky |OT| Even this OT is procedurally generated.

No Man's Sky |OT| Where ever you go, there you are.

No Man's Sky |OT| I got 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 problems but a pitch ain't one - I like this one.
 
I'm still voting for No Man's Sky |OT| Journey to the Centre of the Universe

Not 90% barren, just not teeming with life. There will be some completely lifeless worlds, but as a 'reward' for exploring them they will also be rich in valuable elements to mine.

You could be totally right. I'd have to go way deep with Google and I have neither time nor inclination for that :P

10% of the planets will be normally populated though, right?
 
All true. BUT they can easily save changes you make locally on your machine. With the terrain likely being generated as a 3D grid of points/blocks (which are then smoothed out so it doesn't look like Minecraft - although certain elements, like scanned minerals, totally do, so that probably proves that), they just need to remember which blocks you've blown away. That's not much data, basically just a set of coordinates for each one. Then, when the same terrain is generated again the next time you visit, that data is loaded and those blocks are removed from the generated terrain (which would otherwise be the same as when you first saw it).

I don't know if this will happen, but it's certainly feasible. You don't store entire planet equations or whatever, just the changes made to the generated result.

One would think that the save file size would grow significantly as a player explores more and more planets though.
 
One would think that the save file size would grow significantly as a player explores more and more planets though.

Which is very true, and leads to more questions about the nature of this feature. Questions that, unfortunately, Hello Games has been reluctant to answer succinctly.
 
One would think that the save file size would grow significantly as a player explores more and more planets though.

If each planet is technically just a seed, then there are a couple of kilobytes of data for changes made by the player, then surely it would take tens of thousands of planets before the memory would become an issue?
 
Basically correct. You may be able to see each other IF you happen to be the lucky 0.001% that can get close enough to be on the same planet at the same time, but even then you won't be able to interact in any way. If your main interest in NMS has anything to do with multiplayer, you will probably be disappointed. Supposedly they may explore more MP avenues in the future, but this will still be, essentially, a single-player game.

Even if you can not interact it may give you the possibility to travel together on... wait for it... journey. Hello Games just need a nice theme if players meet and prolong it.^^

That ign first look video was great, alone for the scale. :D

Did miss it or the shown build had no tearing, what I have seen in prior material.
Second thought was PSVR support, but so far away with the october release and the question remains if NMS will support it.

In my mind the game have to.
 
You could be totally right. I'd have to go way deep with Google and I have neither time nor inclination for that :P

10% of the planets will be normally populated though, right?

Looks like I was remembering wrong on this. In this Verge preview from 2014 the writer says, "The developers have set themselves a 90–10 rule. 90 percent of all the planets will not be habitable and won’t have any life on them. Of the 10 percent that do, 90 percent of that life will be primitive and boring. The tiny fraction of garden worlds with more evolved life forms on them will thus be almost as rare in the game universe as they ought to be in the real one.". Of course that was two years ago, so they might have tweaked the ratios since then.

Did miss it or the shown build had no tearing, what I have seen in prior material.

It has no tearing. Hello stated that the previous video had tearing because of a problem with Sony's capture equipment.
 
I just still can't get behind this game yet. I don't know, having just watched the demo and still feeling a big amount of apathy. I mean, it's *technically* impressive, for sure. It's an incredible engine to be able to generate all that onscreen on the fly. But...watching that new demo, the planets continue to all look like they'll just be different variations of the same thing.

The plant life, the animals and aliens will just look a little different on each subsequent planet, you repeatedly collect resources, name animals and plant life, "learn new languages" etc, but for what exact purpose? I personally like games with goals. I know the goal is to reach the center of the universe, but that gameplay loop of 'find planet, land, scan stuff, kill a few aliens, trade, off you go again' looks like it'll get boring to me personally real fast. Though that speaks to me personally more I suppose. That's why Mass Effect is the perfect blend for my tastes. It's nowhere close to the *amount* shown in No Man's Sky, but you still explore, you discover things, you customize, all while there's also a strong narrative, a goal, a story, character interaction.

I'm not at all saying it's a bad game by any means, but being so procedurally generated...nothing's hand crafted, and that's just not something I'm into I guess. I'm very happy for anyone excited for it. I think it deserves to be enjoyed by millions who want to enjoy it. More games, the merrier.


To me No Man's Sky is childhood dream come true you wanna know why?

I will never explore real space or planets even mars or the moon only a few ever set a foot on the moon long time ago. As a child i always dreamed to visit other planets but also to fly in space set foot upon a new planet to discover stuff nobody has seen like new plants,huge caverns,lost civilizations etc.

I love science fiction but my mind goes beyond this i have spend many nights on my vacation in france at the different coasts in my childhood lying with friends on the beach watching the night sky seeing the milky way and shooting stars. Thinking what is out there what is there to explore? It always was fascinating to me. And now with No Man's Sky i can do exactly that that childhood dream to what i said land on a new planet discovering it for the first time but also learning on what i can do there to get resources,better equipment,better ships to go to the center of the universe.

I like mass effect also it is story with choices but No Man's Sky i tell my own story because when me and my friends are going to play we all have different experiences and different adventures to tell. It is freedom most games don't have on a scale like this i can hop in my spaceship and leave the planet and come back in the future if i want to,i can land on other big spaceships learn new languages to speak to other species.

To me i am Christopher Columbus on a larger than life scale of exploring the universe and the milky way in a big way that's why i am so excited for this game. Also the procedurally generated makes it even more exciting because no planet is the same as the last one. Will i see a hot planet with lots of plants or is it a planet with a poisoned environment? You will never know that makes it unique to each planet you visit.
 
One would think that the save file size would grow significantly as a player explores more and more planets though.

Which is very true, and leads to more questions about the nature of this feature. Questions that, unfortunately, Hello Games has been reluctant to answer succinctly.

Did I miss new pieces of information? In the new footage Sean mentioned again that environmental damage is not being saved. It will respawn as soon as you leave so there is nothing to store in any save file. The save file probably only stores stuff like your inventory, ship, location and whatever you learned about the universe so far.
 
Beyond the complications, it's like you both setting down randomly in North America with no map and hoping you'll find each other.

I pretty sure that the "theorical concept improbable reunion" and how the game is really coded is two different things...

Is it REALLY confirmed that we play in a multiplayer interconnected world like the dark zone of the division ? (ex: Possible to see other player on the planet or other players/ spaceship in station or in space).

In a practical world aka game development with dead line, it seem much easier for a team of 6 people to create a single player only game and populate the world with AI ships. No networking management, betatesting, etc...
 
Did I miss new pieces of information? In the new footage Sean mentioned again that environmental damage is not being saved. It will respawn as soon as you leave so there is nothing to store in any save file. The save file probably only stores stuff like your inventory, ship, location and whatever you learned about the universe so far.

This is from a previous, but recent interview asking more specifically about the terrain deformation features. Can't remember which one exactly, possibly one of the translated ones (a french one maybe?). There have been so many now >_<
 
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