• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

No Man's Sky Spoiler Thread

Oh wow, i just thought that was the game having some issues. I don't remember it being that bad in the game previews we have seen before.

Every trailer or gameplay demo has demonstrated it in some form. It's most noticeable in sections where the player is flying around just above the surface of a planet. Most of the demos from last year the draw-in was way worse, with creatures spawning mere meters from the player.

But make no mistake, No Man's Sky will get absolutely blasted for the way this tech works. All realt-time procedural generation suffers from this issue in one form or another, and most people have zero clue how any of this stuff works. It doesn't even matter that such a game is literally impossible to make any other way with today's tech (technically, financially or otherwise). It's unfortunate, but hey, what can ya do?

It's probably one of the reasons why a bigger, more established developer hasn't attempted something like this. There's no easy way of solving draw-in issues without just throwing way more horsepower at the problem until people stop noticing. And people are even less forgiving of AAA studios than they are of indie developers.

...also what the hell am I doing in the Spoiler thread? Gah I blame Sean Murray.
 
I must say I'm really excited by the prospect of them emphasizing how totally unfinished the leaked version considering most everyone who has seen the leaked version thinks it looks awesome. Really makes their position much more believable than if it looked like a disaster.
Yeah, from my perspective, the game looks phenomenal after watching at least a dozen hours of stream so far. If they're telling me they feel like it's not good enough yet, anything they add by launch is like... An amazing extra.
 
Yea I got the twitch directory open. I was watching him for a bit but muted lol

I opened another one and the guy was in one hell of a cave system and both his exosuit inventory and his ship inventory were full so he just started chucking stuff out when he found the element he was looking for. Even his weapon charge is depleted at this point.

But he just managed to get it recharged and dug a hole near straight up to get out of the cave. And his ship is totally out of range now.
 
Hopefully this will fix the Pop in issue aswell.

Eh... I don't know about that (see below). Perhaps on PC by a bit, but we'll see.


I thought it was pre generated?

Per the game's algorithm, sure, in a sense. The formula to generate everything is there and when you fly to it, it knows exactly what to generate there, but it's not pre-rendered and just hanging out, chewing up resources. It gets spun up when you get there hence the pop up you're going to encounter everywhere, all the time. The game's install size (6GB or so?) should be informing us that we're not installing a pre-rendered galaxy onto our machines, but likely the assets to be called on by the game's algorithm, telling it what to render at a particular moment when we get there, and then to toss it when we leave, freeing up resources.
 
Every trailer or gameplay demo has demonstrated it in some form. It's most noticeable in sections where the player is flying around just above the surface of a planet. Most of the demos from last year the draw-in was way worse, with creatures spawning mere meters from the player.

But make no mistake, No Man's Sky will get absolutely blasted for the way this tech works. All procedural generation suffers from this issue in one form or another, and most people have zero clue how any of this stuff works. It doesn't even matter that such a game is literally impossible to make any other way with today's tech (technically, financially or otherwise). It's unfortunate, but hey, what can ya do?

It's probably one of the reasons why a bigger, more established developer hasn't attempted something like this. There's no easy way of solving draw-in issues without just throwing way more horsepower at the problem until people stop noticing. And people are even less forgiving of AAA studios than they are of indie developers.

...also what the hell am I doing in the Spoiler thread? Gah I blame Sean Murray.

So you think that PC version won't be a inch better than PS4 on that issue ?
I don't know what to pre-order...
 
nms5amyeynh.png

This doesn't make sense to me. They talk about not judging them on the game on disc that has been worked on over 2 years. But this shit we cranked out in a month totally changes everything...

Doesn't make sense. Oh well will see Day 1 on PC.
 
This doesn't make sense to me. They talk about not judging them on the game on disc that has been worked on over 2 years. But this shit we cranked out in a month totally changes everything...

Doesn't make sense. Oh well will see Day 1 on PC.
Very well could be features and content they couldn't get in before the gold deadline, and just used the month to focus their effort on those elements, to have them ready for the release

Unlikely it was worked on within this month alone.
 
So you think that PC version won't be a inch better than PS4 on that issue ?
I don't know what to pre-order...

Buy it for whatever platform you feel most comfortable playing on. I could see PCs benefitting from better pop-in load times, but that pop-in is going to exist. No way around that.

This doesn't make sense to me. They talk about not judging them on the game on disc that has been worked on over 2 years. But this shit we cranked out in a month totally changes everything...

Doesn't make sense.

I think people are just reading too much into it. It's a day-1 patch that happens with tons of games, some a lot more demanding than NMS and some a lot less. There are likely bugs (some that we've seen) that got quashed after it went off, feature complete, to cert, as well as maybe some small tweaks here and there. Ultimately, everyone is going to get to play the version of NMS that HG wants us to see starting next week. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. It most certainly doesn't need to be some sort of anti-consumer nefarious marketing ploy to squeeze out extra pre-orders or whatever tin foil hattery I've been seeing in this thread tonight.
 
Very well could be features and content they couldn't get in before the gold deadline, and just used the month to focus their effort on those elements,mto have the, ready for the release

Unlikely it was worked on within this month alone.

But if they're software essential features, it didn't go gold. Unless they got a crazy pass from Sony to meet the new delay deadline (which I could totally believe)
 
But if they're software essential features, it didn't go gold. Unless they got a crazy pass from Sony to meet the new delay deadline (which I could totally believe)

Sony let it through cert with a couple of game-crashing bugs in what are frequently played areas or loops in the game (as opposed to someone doing some outlier activity to cause a crash), so there's something happened there.
 
Very well could be features and content they couldn't get in before the gold deadline, and just used the month to focus their effort on those elements, to have them ready for the release

Unlikely it was worked on within this month alone.

That's my theory. That what got Certified was a basic build of the game. But this patch was being worked on since before that and is needed to really 'feature complete' the game, and they figured they could finish it by the announced, delayed date(August 8th).

But if they're software essential features, it didn't go gold. Unless they got a crazy pass from Sony to meet the new delay deadline (which I could totally believe)

I'm thinking they might've gotten a pass? Like in order to get it printed on disc, to get it out to the masses, they had to cert it a month before the announced date, and that's simply the basic necessities of the game, whilst the patch contains all the stuff they didn't complete in time.
 
So you think that PC version won't be a inch better than PS4 on that issue ?
I don't know what to pre-order...

No, the PC version could, and by every account SHOULD be better than the PS4. All of this proc gen stuff is highly CPU and bandwidth dependent, and while the PS4 does pretty well on bandwidth, its CPU is barely laptop-grade.

Hello Games would have to account for this extra power and take advantage of it to lessen the "pop-in". And right now we have no idea if they've done that or not, or if it will even be possible to mod that aspect after-the-fact. But where there's a will there's a way, and I'm sure someone WILL find a way eventually even if Hello Games doesn't give us control over the proc gen variables.

So if you're on the fence, I guess....just wait? But know it will NEVER be fully solved on this gen of hardware, even if it is less noticeable on PC.
 
No, the PC version could, and by every account SHOULD be better than the PS4. All of this proc gen stuff is highly CPU and bandwidth dependent, and while the PS4 does pretty well on bandwidth, its CPU is barely laptop-grade.

Hello Games would have to account for this extra power and take advantage of it to lessen the "pop-in". And right now we have no idea if they've done that or not, or if it will even be possible to mod that aspect after-the-fact. But where there's a will there's a way, and I'm sure someone WILL find a way eventually even if Hello Games doesn't give us control over the proc gen variables.

So if you're on the fence, I guess....just wait? But know it will NEVER be fully solved on this gen of hardware, even if it is less noticeable on PC.

I've got a Skylake 6700k, 32GB of RAM, and a GTX970. I could run the game in ramdisk and it would probably have almost no visible lod changes.
 
No, the PC version could, and by every account SHOULD be better than the PS4. All of this proc gen stuff is highly CPU and bandwidth dependent, and while the PS4 does pretty well on bandwidth, its CPU is barely laptop-grade.

Hello Games would have to account for this extra power and take advantage of it to lessen the "pop-in". And right now we have no idea if they've done that or not, or if it will even be possible to mod that aspect after-the-fact. But where there's a will there's a way, and I'm sure someone WILL find a way eventually even if Hello Games doesn't give us control over the proc gen variables.

So if you're on the fence, I guess....just wait? But know it will NEVER be fully solved on this gen of hardware, even if it is less noticeable on PC.

Thanks to you and Fushichou187, I guess i'll just wait the extra days but it surely will be hard. :(
 
No, the PC version could, and by every account SHOULD be better than the PS4. All of this proc gen stuff is highly CPU and bandwidth dependent, and while the PS4 does pretty well on bandwidth, its CPU is barely laptop-grade.

Hello Games would have to account for this extra power and take advantage of it to lessen the "pop-in". And right now we have no idea if they've done that or not, or if it will even be possible to mod that aspect after-the-fact. But where there's a will there's a way, and I'm sure someone WILL find a way eventually even if Hello Games doesn't give us control over the proc gen variables.

So if you're on the fence, I guess....just wait? But know it will NEVER be fully solved on this gen of hardware, even if it is less noticeable on PC.
I don't see how control over the variables would do anything
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-kifCYToAU
You'd have to modify the entire engine
 
Looking at these videos now, just the IQ and general graphical fidelity, makes me think this is the PC version. I also head on a Jimquisition Podcast that Laura K Buzz had hear rumors that the game was being on dev hell to port it to the PS4. What you guys think?

Honestly, having watched hours and hours of streams the last few days. I know what the pre-patch, not-quite-ready-for-prime-time version of NMS looks like in motion and what the general gameplay loop looks like, and I was glued to my screen. If HG is telling me it will be that, but a slightly tighter, more polished experience-- not to mention server wipe and reseed (i.e. galaxy regeneration)-- come Tuesday. I don't care what internet scuttlebutt is filling airtime on podcasts (and I love Sterling, so it's not a slight on him). I can't wait.
 
It don't see how control over the variables would do anything
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-kifCYToAU
You'd have to modify the entire engine

Well assuming their engine properly adjusts to different speed CPUs, it shouldn't really be an issue.

And I say variables making the assumption there might actually be some way to tweak them (either in a game file or modified through memory). If they are tweakable, I could see a scenario where someone forces the game to render a higher LOD sooner (IE farther away), putting a huge strain on a very powerful CPU and filling a large amount of memory, but making LOD transitions less noticeable. But you could be right, we might just be stuck with whatever the engine spits out.

@Landford: almost certainly the PC version. That was fairly early in the project, very unlikely that they had the PS4 version running that well (or even at all).
 
Looking at these videos now, just the IQ and general graphical fidelity, makes me think this is the PC version. I also head on a Jimquisition Podcast that Laura K Buzz had hear rumors that the game was being on dev hell to port it to the PS4. What you guys think?

The thing is though that the draw distance in that video is reaaaaaally short compared to what we've seen. While in space, the draw distance is pretty high(Asteroids for example spawn from a far away ways, whilst in streams we've seen those asteroids spawn alot closer than the distance shown)

The tech definitely changed from 2014 to now..
 
Sony let it through cert with a couple of game-crashing bugs in what are frequently played areas or loops in the game (as opposed to someone doing some outlier activity to cause a crash), so there's something happened there.

I've heard all that cert does is make sure that games don't brick systems, or open up some sort of security issue.
 
Looking at these videos now, just the IQ and general graphical fidelity, makes me think this is the PC version. I also head on a Jimquisition Podcast that Laura K Buzz had hear rumors that the game was being on dev hell to port it to the PS4. What you guys think?

Dan Stapleton from IGN stated quite confidently that their first look in 2015 was PC.

One thing I haven't been able to tell from streams is if planets still rotate and stations end up in different spots if you spend time on a planet. Secondly, if they do rotate is there variance to the day/night cycle? Those are two huge things for me in terms of immersion.
 
Dan Stapleton from IGN stated quite confidently that their first look in 2015 was PC.

One thing I haven't been able to tell from streams is if planets still rotate and stations end up in different spots if you spend time on a planet. Secondly, if they do rotate is there variance to the day/night cycle? Those are two huge things for me in terms of immersion.

There is a day night cycle and the planets do rotate
 
Dan Stapleton from IGN stated quite confidently that their first look in 2015 was PC.

One thing I haven't been able to tell from streams is if planets still rotate and stations end up in different spots if you spend time on a planet. Secondly, if they do rotate is there variance to the day/night cycle? Those are two huge things for me in terms of immersion.
You could clearly see shadows moving as time goes by in the streams which could indicate that planet rotation is still a thing.

Nothing conclusive though, just an observation.
 
Looking at these videos now, just the IQ and general graphical fidelity, makes me think this is the PC version. I also head on a Jimquisition Podcast that Laura K Buzz had hear rumors that the game was being on dev hell to port it to the PS4. What you guys think?

Looking at some of the better quality streams it looks nice. It's just that all the PS4 streams thus far have been really terrible quality.
 
It's possible they've disabled a bunch of features from the disc version for various reasons. Performance, bugs etc and the day 1 patch puts them back in together with a host of rebalances and bug fixes and some minor actually new features. Highly speculative of course but I could see it being the case.

Currently, Planets from streams at least, unless that's been debunked seem to be on a fixed 24 minute day/night cycle. On the PS4 that could make sense since having actual rotating planets deciding the day/night cycle is more cpu intensive then a fixed one.

I'm curious of the final version will have proper rotating or if that's for example only a PC features, and maybe only activated through file editing. (I'm confident it's at least still in the code :P)
 
Looking at these videos now, just the IQ and general graphical fidelity, makes me think this is the PC version. I also head on a Jimquisition Podcast that Laura K Buzz had hear rumors that the game was being on dev hell to port it to the PS4. What you guys think?

That makes a lot of sense.

Looking at some of the better quality streams it looks nice. It's just that all the PS4 streams thus far have been really terrible quality.

It's more than that though. If I read this thread correctly, the PS4 version is running at 720p; the video of Sean demoing the game on this page is clearly in a higher resolution, with a higher framerate and a farther "draw distance."
 
That makes a lot of sense.



It's more than that though. If I read this thread correctly, the PS4 version is running at 720p; the video of Sean demoing the game on this page is clearly in a higher resolution, with a higher framerate and a farther "draw distance."

A few people in this thread said they pixel counted some direct feed screen captures and that it's 1080p.

It's also strange that it would be 720p considering the game runs at 60 fps. Wouldn't they just up the resolution and decrease the framerate to 30 fps if that was a problem.
 
A few people in this thread said they pixel counted some direct feed screen captures and that it's 1080p.

It's also strange that it would be 720p considering the game runs at 60 fps. Wouldn't they just up the resolution and decrease the framerate to 30 fps if that was a problem.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'll take your word for it. I hope PS4 users can enjoy the game at that fidelity on Tuesday.
 
Am I the only one who doesn't think they'll reseed? IMO it's basically the usual "this save date is not compatible with the present game version": 1.0 saves won't work with 1.1 and above, 1.1+ saves won't work on 1.0 (unpatched).
 
Am I the only one who doesn't think they'll reseed? IMO it's basically the usual "this save date is not compatible with the present game version": 1.0 saves won't work with 1.1 and above, 1.1+ saves won't work on 1.0 (unpatched).
They'll reseed. One of the tweats mentioned they had added new colours, so they'll have to.
I imagine they've done the process thousands of times so it won't be a big deal at this stage.

If they need to do it again later it'll be harder of course! Maybe they could stick a portal on every planet that takes you to a new galaxy or something.
 
So I'm going PS4 for the main, but I've borrowed an HP Z-machine 'laptop' (who are they kidding, the thing is huge), with an i7 & K4100M gfx card...reckon I could get this running decently on it?
 
They'll reseed. One of the tweats mentioned they had added new colours, so they'll have to.
I imagine they've done the process thousands of times so it won't be a big deal at this stage.

If they need to do it again later it'll be harder of course! Maybe they could stick a portal on every planet that takes you to a new galaxy or something.


Wait, weren't they being sarcastic?
But yeah, if they did add colors it makes sense. I really know nothing about PG.
 
So the last 10 minutes of that stream involved him walking around a ravine with such low texture quality it looked like pea soup. The vegetation was floating about 3ft from the ground. He then ran into a sea monster that was head first in the dirt going through its swimming animation. He then shot it to death, collected Iron Ore from it for some reason, then travelled down to interact with a monolith in the lake and the game bugged and he couldnt move or do anything.

Facing defeat he then ended the stream.
 
So the last 10 minutes of that stream involved him walking around a ravine with such low texture quality it looked like pea soup. The vegetation was floating about 3ft from the ground. He then ran into a sea monster that was head first in the dirt going through its swimming animation. He then shot it to death, collected Iron Ore from it for some reason, then travelled down to interact with a monolith in the lake and the game bugged and he couldnt move or do anything.

Day 1 patch is gonna fix all of that
 
Top Bottom