It’s interesting to think about why I never got excited by the X-Rebirth videos but this one got me excited right away. I think with X it had a lot to do with that series’ history. It’s always had poor combat, whacky physics, a complicated and cumbersome interface, and a slow, glacial pace and an uninteresting universe filled with races and politics I don’t care about.
I guess it helps to be a new IP and not have all that baggage associated with your series, for good or ill.
I did. A couple of times.
No Man’s Sky isn’t a multiplayer game, in as much as you’ll never see another player. But the galaxy is the same between everyone and actions of “significance” will be shared. If you kill a single bird, that won’t be shared. If you make an entire species of bird extinct, then those creatures will blink out of existence for everyone.
But generally people are playing together cooperatively to the benefit of everyone. You can be a dick in the game if you want, but it has less point and less value.”
These are the ways in which the game is like Spore, or to a lesser extent Dark Souls. It’s a singleplayer experience, but one enriched by a community playing with shared purpose.
Even other space games don’t necessarily sit well with Murray as direct comparisons. EVE Online is the only one mentioned during the interview, although he’s still as keen to stress the differences as much as the similarities.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but our background is as console developers, and I think everything about the game bears hallmarks of that,”
All sounds like some kind of MMO type game designed for console(s)? I just hope that impression is very wrong. It NEEDS to be a deep, inventive procedural orgy that can only happen on PC, coming from a small independent team calling all the shots on their creativity. That’s what i’m hoping it is.
That doesn’t sound anything like an MMO. There’s no direct interaction, all the interaction with other players is indirect. DC Universe or FF14 Realm Reborn are MMOs designed for consoles, this is not.
Add me to the dream game list. I really, really hope this comes to be, with the level of ambition expressed. THIS is the kind of game my late-teens self thought we’d be seeing by now, after stuff like Starflight and Elite. But then DOOM came along and boom, developer resources shifted to games where a gun is your user interface.
I’m cautiously optimistic. A four-man team is pretty darn minimal for something this big on a modern system.
Right brain says “science fiction fan’s dream game!” Left brain says “Remember the first time you read about Battlecruiser: 3000 AD?”
Haha, yea. I’m cautiously optimistic as well. At the end of the day, I’m much happier seeing a 4-man team try this and fail (and maybe come away with some important lessons and experience) than I am seeing Call of Duty 27.
Holy shit balls. I’d never heard of them before but they’re from Sheffield which is no more than a 20 minute’s drive from me. That tune is incredible too. Thanks for the info Zak! And, uh, yeah, the trailer was damn impressive. Quite a shift from Joe Danger to Noctis-style space exploration!
Not trying to be snarky here (well, maybe a little, but really that’s not the point, I swear), but how is “procedurally generated” different from “randomly generated”? I thought that procedurally generated meant that you pick a random number to feed into your level/world/whatever generation algorithm and go from there… which is exactly what randomly generated means. Clarification?
Procedurally generated means the same input seed always leads to the same output. So if I send you my Minecraft world seed and you start a new game with it, you’ll get exactly the same world I got.
Randomly generated means the world-creation algorithm is rolling “random” numbers (based on something like the system clock*) and using those while generating the world. Meaning once the world is created, it’s very hard to recreate the exact same world, unless you “wrote down” all the random rolls the algorithm used.
So it comes down to ease of replication. For players, the main difference is the ability to share cool worlds with procedural generation. (For devs, the main advantage of procedural generation comes in QA: it’s hard to repro a bug if you can’t repro the world it took place in!)
*And no, those “random” numbers aren’t really random, but they’re close enough for our discussion here.
I’m happy a game like this is in development, but right now I’m considering it science fiction until it is a hell of a lot more substantive.
I’m still not clear on the difference. For a randomly generated world, couldn’t you just specify the seed you have at the beginning and then you’d have a procedurally generated one? Is it common to re-seed random number generators in the middle of a program? (I thought it wasn’t.)
I guess what I’m saying is that it seems to me like the difference is that “procedurally generated” is just code for “we expose the seed to you so you can do it again”, which, to me, is BFD.
I think you’re trying to make a big deal between “procedurally generated” over “randomly generated”, or thinking that the Devs/posters here are trying to do so, but that’s not the case. Just replace every instance of “procedurally” with “randomly” and that’s why people are excited. A massive, randomly generated galaxy to explore. Not just a random galaxy layout, but random climates, material compositions, animals, races, planets, solar systems, galaxies, etc.
The advantage of a randomly generated galaxy like that is it means, if implemented well (which is the key), it offers an amazing amount of content to explore. You never know what you’re going to find in the next star system or under that ocean because no one knows. Not even the developers. There’s no walkthroughs online, there’s no people talking about “Once you hit L10, just head to Herpderp Prime and you can find a derelict battlecruiser to loot”. That is, unless someone this forum finds something absolutely amazing. Then a poster can say “Use seed 38971681627, there is something incredible I found at these coordinates”. Furthermore, after you explore a galaxy for a while, you can put in a new seed and (again, if implemented well) get a new and different experience, which means a lot for longevity for some people (me). On the other hand, Skyrim’s world is basically the same every time I play it.
Procedurally/randomly generated content might not be everyone’s cup of tea. Some prefer a smaller, hand-crafted experience, but that’s another issue entirely.
If this turned out to be a game like Starflight, where you could discover stories like I’ve read about people playing Dwarf Fortress, that would be something.
I was just wondering if there is actually a difference between “procedurally” and “randomly” or if it was essentially a marketing term. It seems there is no difference, which is what I suspected. I totally get the appeal of procedurally generated content, I just think we should call it randomly generated because that’s what it is, and I’m a stick in the mud.
Or there is a difference and you just aren’t interested in learning what it is. ; )
There’s not an important functional difference. I think it’s mostly a matter of connotations.
It’s sort of like the difference between saying “humans arose randomly” versus “humans arose through the process of evolution (which includes randomness)”.
That sounds really awesome to me. Execution will be everything of course, but I love the simple idea of a big giant sandbox galaxy where I’m given the vague and open-ended goal of adventuring my way towards the galactic core. I always kind of wished there was some direction to exploration in Minecraft (with progressive challenges and wonders as you advanced). At first I assumed it would be down, like Dwarf Fortress, but interdimensional travel was cool too I guess.
If you kill a single bird, that won’t be shared. If you make an entire species of bird extinct, then those creatures will blink out of existence for everyone.
This, however, sounds terrible. I don’t even get it. If the bird species blinks out of existence for everyone, then:
I won’t read too much into a little quote in a little preview, but does that concept sound appealing to anybody? …Because I don’t get it…
It’s actually the difference between “humans arose randomly” and “humans arose through a completely deterministic process, which happens to look random to someone who doesn’t look into it very carefully.”
Using a seeded RNG is still randomness. What you’re describing is purely the difference between deterministic and non-deterministic, which is a minor implementation detail. It’s true that when people say “procedural” they normally mean deterministic, but I don’t think the reverse is true. In common usage, “random” is more like a superset of “procedural”.
To everyone else: apologies for derailing the thread. But I’m honestly trying to figure out if there is a difference, HumanTon, and I really can’t see the difference between what you describe as random and what you describe as procedural. For “procedurally generated” I think we agree that the player provides a seed to the RNG (or one is chosen for her) and the world that comes out thereafter is completely determined. What I understand “randomly generated” to be is that the seed for the RNG is taken from e.g. the system clock and the world that comes out thereafter is completely determined–barring details such as re-seeding the RNG and the player causing numbers to be pulled from the RNG by her actions, thereby altering the later sequence.
If we want to say that “procedural” means minding those details such that the world can be recreated through use of a seed (a separate RNG for world generation, and so on), that’s fine. And it belies a different emphasis on world creation than if the devs were just going for “random”. But it’s not like there’s any new technology or anything, which is what I was trying to get at.
I guess we were interpreting the quote in different ways. The quote says that the birds ‘blink’ out of existence, so in my view that means there’s nothing interesting to see; no evidence of another player acting malevolently or, indeed, acting at all.
For example, if the bird were a sandpiper it’d probably be found on a beach, in a coastal environment. So, post extinction, what happens when I visit my own beach planet? If the sandpipers had all been eradicated, blinked out of existence without a trace, then my beach exploration experience would be sterile and less interesting as a result. If, alternatively, the game simply deletes the ‘white’ sandpiper and creates a new ‘slightly off white’ sandpiper to take its place, well then the mechanic seems pointless.
I can understand the idea of using a player base to create content (like Spore’s shared pool of creature models and vehicles), but I can’t understand the benefit of allowing one player to diminish/delete the content available in another player’s game. It sounds like you’re envisioning a system where other players create content by perturbing the planet’s environment. However, the only system I can imagine there would be other players building structures. Otherwise, I’m not quite sure how that would unfold (should I be finding animal corpses and footprints from other players? Since I can’t actually find and interact with that player, there’s no real mystery to be solved. So I think I’d find that artificial and unsatisfying). Maybe I just lack the imagination to see how that would work.
[edit: About “random” vs “procedural”. The definitions of the words tell us all we’d need to know:
random: Having no specific pattern, purpose, or objective:
procedure: A series of steps taken to accomplish an end
Randomness denotes a lack of pattern, procedure indicates a pattern. Procedural generation means that something will be generated according to a set of rules and systems, i.e., it has an element of design as its basis and its product will have a pattern. The geography of Minecraft was wild, but those caves were far from random. The neat element of (what seems like) randomness in procedural generation is that some systems can be so complex that their products can be unexpected and unpredictable. I think this idea is captured by the term ‘emergent complexity’, but I can’t find a good link for you other than this.]