Till now, I have seen about 10 different planets, from various trailers and presentations.
Clearly the game doesn't have 18*10^18 unique planets, since this is impossible. The problem this game has is, does it have enough variance in its planet generation, so that the average player will not notice a pattern.
The planets I have seen all looked mostly the same, with slightly different color schemes and animals made from generic pre-built parts. Unless the devs are only showing a couple of percent of the game, getting the 10 random samples from the game, all of which show a very similar planet is almost impossible.
Indeed. Most of the tricks they use come from the holy bible of procedural rendering books (Texturing and Modeling, Musgrave et al) and are relatively superficial (and really not so difficult).
I don't argue there exists a tremendous number of configurations but I don't think they are not substantive enough to make a difference. Look at Spore if you want a case in point.
The hype train is very strong with this game because the media loves a good indie darling. I'm not convinced yet but have high hopes!
I agree - the 2015 e3 demo video was a disappointment to me. The whole "Let's pick a random planet to fly to" sounds awesome, but then it's a big letdown when it looks remarkably similar to the ones in the other videos.
The problem is you can have an unimaginably large number of unique planets but yet they still all end up looking the same. Sure, the coastlines might vary or the colouring may be mildly different, but if the gameplay effect is negligible, then it's not an advantage.
I was (unrealistically) thinking that there would be planets with bustling cities, unique architecture, races, cultures and technologies.
Yeah I was thinking it would be something like Mass Effect with cities generated by overlaying algorithms. Something like:
1. Generate buildings
2. Generate transport links
3. Generate mission objectives
4. Refactor city layout to make objectives harder, and so on until a relatively stable (and fun to play!) environment is created.
They could even import races from nearby planets that have already been generated if it made sense that they would have colonised the new planet also.
Obviously those steps are very high-level and the genius would be in making it all actually work together... but yeh, just seems like the hype machine was in overdrive and really this is just Spore 1.1
There's no better way to spend a half hour online than to look at people's projects that generate cities. If they do a decent write-up along with some videos and demos, it really shows you just how difficult it can be for a simple fly-through 3D video. I can't imagine generating whole cities and cultures that you can interact with.
Yeah it can get complex, I even know someone who got a job because they showed off a city they created with procedural generation in an interview! But that was just layout of buildings and roads, the next part of bringing it to life with people I imagine is even more complicated.
I think that's why people keep on making games like this, but all past attempts have utterly failed at being interesting, except where human construction and ingenuity impinges on the random.
> Clearly the game doesn't have 18*10^15 unique planets, since this is impossible.
I don't think this is impossible, since most of those planets will never be visited and hence will never have to be generated. It's possible to have that many planets in principle with just a handful of parameters, but if no player ever has the time to visit more than a few...
Right; that's what I'm talking about too. They can have that many unique planets in principle which (due to lazy evaluation, you could say) they only need to 'assemble' a small number of them. But they can all be unique. I agree with you that it's a problem of how to make them seem sufficiently different to each other though.
If you are a computer then they are in-fact unique, since every hash has a different value. But that in not what is the definition of unique for humans. Since we are humans talking in English, then we have to agree on some definitions:
Unique - 1.
existing as the only one or as the sole example; single; solitary in type or characteristics:
a unique copy of an ancient manuscript.
2.
having no like or equal; unparalleled; incomparable:
Bach was unique in his handling of counterpoint.
3.
limited in occurrence to a given class, situation, or area:
a species unique to Australia.
4.
limited to a single outcome or result; without alternative possibilities:
Certain types of problems have unique solutions.
5.
not typical; unusual:
She has a very unique smile.
By those definitions, their planets are not unique. If your definition of unique differs from those established by the language we are using, then you have to specify this.
I think both senses of unique are used in common parlance... for example, when people say "every snowflake is unique". Sure, they are similar... but not exactly the same, hence unique.
Your comment has made me realize just how easy it is for people to misunderstand each other, due to attaching different meanings to words. Of course "unique" means "distinctive" to most people. I had just managed to completely forget about it, and assumed that everyone shared the computer science meaning of "unique".
I wonder how many arguments ultimately boil down to this kind of misunderstandings over words. And it doesn't help that marketers will happily use loaded words like "unique" to create hype.
Yeah, I'm a little concerned (from what I've seen) that the focus might be on exploring this planet-generation algorithm and not on making a compelling game experience.
Spore suffered greatly from this: It was conceptually fascinating but really not much fun to actually play. Hopefully team No Man's Land have taken a lesson!
this is the true problem with procedurally generated content in games. portrayed as infinite content, but you end up getting an infinite amount of the mostly-the-same content. would you rather play 10 different levels or one level 10 times?
People saw promise and potential in Spore, but EA decided it wasn't in their best interest to make any extensions to core gameplay after the game's release. There were reportedly plans for true underwater exploration and new sets of parts, but none of those things ever came to be. Spore's modeling was fantastic, though, and allowed making unique creatures and vehicles more easily than any other editing program.
"If only," is all anyone ever says about Spore anymore. So if No Man's sky is the product, I don't care. If it's the beginning of some greater thing, however, I'm interested.
I really hope that the tech in this game becomes merely the framework for more and more detailed 4x style games.
I personally would love a game where you choose a role, from tradepost manager to shipping magnate and the universe is large and complete enough to make this kind of role rewarding and interesting.
You're looking for one of the X3 games (Terran Conflict or Albion Prelude), I think. With a bunch of community mods, it's exactly as you've described.
It's hard to say anything for sure given how little actual gameplay info they've provided so far, but it doesn't look like No Man's Sky's going to be that kind of simulation. It's very much a wanderer's game.
While the technical achievements are impressive, I am not convinced how "playable" this game will be in the end.
Almost all the games in existence have at least 2 core elements: story and character purpose.
I have not seen evidence of either in this game (no, "space exploration" is not exactly a purpose).
A great addition to this graphical engine would be a scripting engine that would allow independent writers to create their own quests and method to submit them to the players.
The more I think about it the more impossible it seems that there could be ANY story in this game. Even if they managed to procedurally generate one planet + missions, the next generated planet would have to 'make sense' and fit into the story (if it's close by, then has it been taken over by the nearby planetary race? If they are a warrior race then do they use the planet as an outpost, with bases strategically placed around the planet? What does the planet add to the story mission-wise?)
And after all that, the 3rd generated planet would need to take into account the story of the other other 2 planets and so on and so on.. (even if the planets don't interact, the missions still need variety)
I agree with your scripting idea, to extend upon it: they release the game with an editor, then a designer would go in and use the editor to pre-generate a set of planets to their liking, and then they could layer story, missions, characters etc on top. Sort of like a build your own Mass Effect.
There could even be wormholes joining all the player created universes together! Oh the possibilities...
I hope that at some point they add something like that virtual computer that Notch had added to 0x10c?
No matter what this is the first game that I've been excited about since I was a kid.
EDIT: Damn. The negativity in here is weird. What is it with gamer's that they just want to shit all over things? No gas planets...yeah they are real pricks for that. ??? What? A procedural universe is kind of a big deal. There's nothing that says that this thing can't be extended in the future as well.
The planets look the same? If you look at the screens from the PSX demo there was some really beautiful landscapes there. There is a palette that was chosen to reflect early sci-fi novel covers. That's actually really cool.
Remember, you can always go play another muddy-poo-brown cover based first person shooter. There will be 10 published by the time you finish reading this comment.
> Damn. The negativity in here is weird. What is it with gamer's that they just want to shit all over things?
> Remember, you can always go play another muddy-poo-brown cover based first person shooter. There will be 10 published by the time you finish reading this comment.
> Damn. The negativity in here is weird. What is it with gamer's that they just want to shit all over things?
What is the proper reaction when someone spends years promising things they almost certainly can't deliver? The game that they're describing sounds amazing, but it also sounds beyond the ability of a large team to deliver, let alone a tiny one. As others have mentioned, this isn't the first time that we've been down this road, nor the second, nor the third. So it's hard to get excited when we know what's most likely at the other end.
Maybe someday we'll be able to develop the game that they're advertising, and that they're going to charge people real money for. But 2015 is probably not that year.
"The negativity in here is weird. What is it with gamer's that they just want to shit all over things?"
This is not the first time we've seen this pattern before. Somebody promises The Ubergame, the all-singing, all-dancing Game of Games to End All Other Games, generated by writing down the wishlist of all possible features of a game in some genre and promising at least half of them. The appearance of "procedural content" and the resulting large numbers is not the first time we've seen this, either.
The result, up to this point, is rather uniform... what actually gets delivered is a "meh" game, in some sense because while all the endless list of features were getting checked off nobody took any time to put a game in there.
I rather fully expect that No Man's Sky gets released, gets reviewed well, and then about a month in, people start realizing there isn't much "there" there.
One problem is that people don't understand how to think about procedural generation. Quadrillions of planets nothing... why not octillions? The number of possible outcomes of the procedural system is irrelevant. The sum total of all possible Minecraft seeds and all possible spaces within those seeds is within spitting distance of the number of orders of magnitude of what you'd need to pave over the entire Milky Way galaxy, but nevertheless one can pretty much explore Minecraft and see just about everything there is to offer from the landscape generator in a month... and I'm being generous. The proper measure of procedural generation is not the raw number of combinations, but how many truly distinct things can be generated, and whether or not the parameters can interact to produce unexpected things. For instance, my favorite thing I've seen in Minecraft was an island with a cave that happened to cut right through the outside of the island, producing a space within it where the ocean was basically one of the walls of the cave. Unrealistic, but cool, and a credit to the ways things interacted with each other.
Anyways, to sum up, if this isn't your first time around the hype cycle on a game like this, it's hard not to see similarities to things we've already seen before, draw comparisons, and want to deflate the hype bubble. The end result of this may be a good game, it probably won't be a great game, it has a decent chance of still being a bad game to play even if sometimes pretty to look at, and odds are extremely high that it won't actually match the expectations that anybody has for it.
If those predictions are wrong, I won't have problems saying so. Maybe this is the one. No sarcasm. It's possible. But don't, you know, pour thousands of dollars into preordered goods on it or anything, like apparently some have for Star Citizen, one of the other Everything Games currently out there. http://www.reaxxion.com/10195/why-star-citizen-is-likely-goi... (Kickstarting an Everything Game is unfortunately quite simple... even approximately finishing it is quite another.)
See also: Spore, Fable and most of the latter half of Peter Molyneux's career (Black and White too), all of the iterations of Elite past the first one. Some of these turned out OK (at best), none so much as resembled their hype.
Actually the devs have promised no such thing. In fact they have stated they designed it to be a niche game that will only appeal to a certain demographic.
> In fact they have stated they designed it to be a niche game that will only appeal to a certain demographic.
I believe them if they say it'll only appeal to a certain demographic, but so far the game they've been advertising seems designed to appeal to as large a demographic as possible. From their interviews, if you like space exploration or combat or walking with dinosaurs or any number of other things, then this game has them. So what do they know, that they're not saying, that will lead this game not to appeal to all of these groups of people they've been advertising to?
It's a procedural game. By its pedigree, it's bound to attract realistic commentary -- and realistic commentary on proposed procedural games will inevitably be negative.
I'm excited for No Man's Sky, but I'm equally excited for Star Citizen and Dean Hall's new space sim. I think that exploring/colonizing/living in space is the perfect setting for new games on massive servers run with massive video cards. But I am skeptical that procedural generation is (for this genre) any better than a huge team churning out really expensive environments day after day.
I always love the technology behind procedural games, but I still ultimately prefer an environment and story crafted by human beings. Perhaps No Man's Sky will have sufficiently advanced algorithms as to give me the same variety and intensity of experience that hand-crafted game environments do, but as I said I remain skeptical.
In another interview they asked the developer if there would be gas planets in the game. He said no, every planet will be solid because otherwise players would be confused as to why they can't land on some planets.
So there you go, the target audience for this revolutionary game is people who are confused by the existence of gas planets.
You could argue the same thing about having stars - I mean you can't land, so meh - why bother emulating reality and not just have something evenly lit?
Or space between planets, that's a bit meh and needed in a model of reality, how about just a drop-down menu to select where to teleport your ship to next?
I suspect the target audience is people who want to play an infinite universe space game, to whom little details like "An approximation of real life" tends to kind of be important. See: People in this thread, interested in the game, criticising it for the above.
It may not be "no gameplay," but it adheres to a very loose interpretation of "gaming." Whatever rules exist in the game basically only serve to aid the sense of progression as people continue to explore. Losing happens only if you explore in a manner that isn't careful, and winning happens when you've explored (carefully) to the center of the universe. [1]
The game isn't supposed to be a game for game's sake, in other words; it's intended to just be an adventure. "Winning" and "losing" are a means towards that end.
Same as it ever was. Anyone who's been paying attention since the beginning of video games knows that game play is what you make of it .. "It's not a very good game" has been said of many stellar successes in this realm, where the position usually changes after people have actually, you know .. played .. with something.
I wish this was being developed in a more open manner, with a beta program. I want a game with a community, and ecosystem rather than one persons singular vision.
Clearly the game doesn't have 18*10^18 unique planets, since this is impossible. The problem this game has is, does it have enough variance in its planet generation, so that the average player will not notice a pattern.
The planets I have seen all looked mostly the same, with slightly different color schemes and animals made from generic pre-built parts. Unless the devs are only showing a couple of percent of the game, getting the 10 random samples from the game, all of which show a very similar planet is almost impossible.