No Man's Sky - Pre-release thread

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LXjyRdP0CU

It also has first person action on the planets, but seems it will be a bit more focused on space action.

It’d be nice to see someone do what Spore did in the Space stage in a better game. That clip shows what looks like an excellent engine, just as Spore had detail on from the human scale to galaxy scale, but we don’t know much about the game yet.

Wormsign!

/Shut up and take my money gif!

Hmmm

Looks like the video has been removed.

There’s one on gametrailers here

Wow looks amazing!


link there

Those capital ships look like they’re from Space: Above and Beyond. Maybe they’ll let you join the five eight.

Finally someone realized how fucking awesome Debutante from 65daysofstatic is and how fitting it is for use in a game trailer.

Now that’s happened you’ll probably find it in every trailer for the next year ;)

Procedural is not a buzzword for me. Something can be procedural and incredible boring. Notch did procedural right, but almost any other people use it to generate stuff that is boring the 2th minute or 3th creature you see generated from the same algorithm.

This looks fantastic, almost too good to be true… and I am pretty sure the sandworm is photoshoped or something. I am going to consider this a idea, or one of these projects with too big ambition for his own good. It looks incredible. Anyway games have gameplay has a base, look alone means nothing if you don’t have a fun gameplay.

There’s currently a “What’s your dream game?” thread that has cropped up before. I didn’t post in this year’s thread, but my dream game remains best summarized as Brian Rubin put it: a universe I can explore where every planet you can land on is as detailed and rich as Fallout 3 or Skyrim. It seemed like a pipe dream, because it would take too long to generate that much interesting and detailed content.

But this game seems to be attempting that dream game, possibly with the only way possible to actually generate that much content: procedural generation. Even if this developer gets kind of close to that dream game ideal, I want to support it in the hopes that the idea catches on in the industry and when talented world makers at Obsidian or Bioware or Bethesda or Volition or Ubisoft Montreal or Avalanche eventually take a crack at it with their own unique talents brought to the table, we might get some truly amazing universes built in the future for us to explore.

Oh man. That would be a dream come true.

The trailer for No Man’s Sky looks aaaaamazing. I can’t say “I won’t get my hopes up until…” because they’re already totally up, but I think I’ll reserve my purchase decision until we get to see some unedited gameplay footage. As has already been mentioned, it could be very easy for the procedural generation to have a lot of boring or broken parts. But if it works out half as well as this trailer makes it look, I’m there.

Looks fantastic, some more info here:

and this is the main website with no real info just yet, but one to bookmark for sure!

http://www.no-mans-sky.com/index.html

Holy crap. That looks really cool.

From the RPS write-up, “procedurally-generated, Chris Foss-inspired sci-fi”.

Those words, strung together, in that particular way, make me a little faint.

Please be a thing which I may purchase with money.

Please don’t suck please don’t suck please don’t suck.

Well…that certainly was something…

He’s conscious!

Yeah, this approaches my sort of dream game as well. The idea of foot-to-stars is immensely intriguing, and procedural’s about the only way to do it without a lot of railroading of players. (Oh look, this entire planet is represented by this landing pad at a starport where there’s this Key NPC for Quest 7. Everything else doesn’t matter–no sense going there! And by that, I mean we didn’t feel like modeling and texturing millions of square miles of planet for you. . . )

Now, that said, I’d love to see a game (maybe I should just post this in the Dream Game Thread) take advantage of a growing number of content-creation “rules,” so to speak. Have a bunch at launch, add more as time goes on either via DLC, expansions, or hell, even for free.

So, for example: use modern science’s understanding of solar system formation to apply some base assumptions about X% of planets within Y light years of player start point based on their stars (you can randomize the stars’ ages, compositions, and formations early on–even seed the galaxy with some “pre-made” sculpted ones for plot purposes). So, players can make some calls based on the galaxy they see around them. “Oh, red giant, probably an old solar system. If it was inhabited, its inhabitants have strip-mined it, but there might be old tech available. If it’s not inhabited, might not be worthwhile since the inner worlds–the places most likely to have mineral resources–are probably cinders by now.”

From there, set a few seed points for the worlds. Okay, this solar system’s star-type, age, and mineral composition give it, say, 4 randomly generated worlds; 2 gas giants, 2 solid worlds. One’s way too close to the star to be useful till the late game, so don’t worry about generating it. The gas giants can draw from some randomization routines–they each get a 4% chance of getting gaseous life adapted to high-pressure, high-entropy environments. Neither gets the roll, so no life.

The last world, though, being in a certain zone around the planet, randomly rolls up–say–an oxygen based atmosphere. High oxygen, in fact. Big planet, too, again random. Now give it some random tectonics–very few. Give it its composition–largely metal. It grabs a 50% chance of life, and rolls a hit. Now, what sort of life?

Another series of basic checks run at universe generation, or perhaps even sector generation. High-oxygen, flat surface, moderate temperatures. Hmmm. Narrow available traits for the fauna/flora based on those parameters. Volcanic life out, carbon based in. High oxygen content great for insects in particular; alright, this world gets insects. Big ones. Great big ones. The solar system’s old; randomly generate their evolution time. Now, look at the mineral content. Lots of variety, low accessibility (no tectonics throwing up rare minerals)–slow technological development, but it’s alright–the system’s old. Alright then, random gen’s determined that we’ve got great big, advanced insects.

If you do this at sector-gen time, randomly roll to see if this advanced life’s at one of several predetermined eras. They’re at high-tech? Seed the generated creatures around a few nearby systems–they’ve achieved space travel. They’re earlier on? Stuck on their world, but warlike as they try to obtain the few remaining surface resources.


I view it as a series of ever-narrowing tunnels for each world. You’d have to set percentages for “interesting” content reasonably now, I suspect, for this generation to be feasible at all, but then again, that’s appropraite given what we know about the galaxy. You could just restrict navigation to the systems that roll “interesting” for player convenience, even.

A lot of stuff would then get generated at system-entrance or even world-touchdown. In the above, we didn’t talk about political powers, map generation, quests, etc. Just that we’ve got a couple of gas giants, a little cinder of a world, and a big, flat, metallic world with great big bugs on it. The rest gets covered as the player flies in and has a load time–or do it in the background.


Sorry, this is an enormous treatise now, but fuck it, posting anyway. This is my dream game. This is what would make my entire life. Please, someone make this happen.

About the only way I can think of that they won’t get my money is if this turns out to be an MMO. On which I’ll lose interest immediately. :-)

Has anyone here played the studio’s previous game? How was Joe Danger?