• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

No Man's Sky previews (03-03-2016)

Is the average consumer aware of this? Sometimes it's easy to lose perspective on GAF how closely we are associated to the art of games.

If the answer is yes or if the average consumer is aware that footage shown won't represent common planet discoveries then I agree, there shouldn't be any sour faces about it.
The average consumer is aware of as much as they see on tv i guess or in a trailer. It is at that point they(if interested) research more on the product they plan to spend money on. The same goes for any game really
 
Did they ever talk about weather patterns like tornadoes or heavy wind storms? I know we have rain, but never saw anything else.
.
There are things like rain, dust storms, snow, blizzards, storms and a bunch of other things possible. There are also more alien weather types, effectively like radioactive and toxic hazards, and atmospheres made from different compositions to ours. This isn’t a simulation or just a tech demo though, we’re not trying to recreate every possible natural disaster!
 

SomTervo

Member
There are things like rain, dust storms, snow, blizzards, storms and a bunch of other things possible. There are also more alien weather types, effectively like radioactive and toxic hazards, and atmospheres made from different compositions to ours. This isn’t a simulation or just a tech demo though, we’re not trying to recreate every possible natural disaster!

Fucking hell. This game

Official Playstation Magazine in the UK just confirmed a HUDless Photo Mode. Also, this choice quote:

[hype intensifies]

I always knew this was the case. There's no way you just make a procedural generated universe full of relatively empty planets and leave it at that.
 

Saven

Banned
I'm happy to see this game getting good looks so far. If the first impressions are that it's an excellent game, I think I will be picking this up sometime shortly after.
 

todahawk

Member
Official Playstation Magazine in the UK just confirmed a HUDless Photo Mode. Also, this choice quote:

Oh hell yes on that photo mode. Hell, I'd even call it an attract mode, I can see myself sitting in a space station and watching the comings and goings of merchants, mercs and pirates (something Sean mentioned he likes to do in an interview).
 

Mathieran

Banned
Hmm that quote is only setting people up for disappointment. I'm super hyped for this game but I am keeping my expectations in check.

Normally I think telling folks you're still holding a lot back is great but I've seen some pretty crazy features people want/heard that it's going to be difficult for some people to feel like this game is living up to the hype.

I think earlier in this thread someone mentioned species evolving which seems unlikely considering Sean himself has said he doesnt want people hunkering down on a planet for too long.

I'm pretty happy with everything we definitely know, so anything else is icing on the cake. I just worry that there are gonna be lots of people complaining that X feature isn't in the game after it releases.
 

Z3M0G

Member
I can't believe the game was $60 CDN on PSN on 3/3 and I didn't scoop it up... before it jumped to $80... I'm really kicking myself for that...
 

bombshell

Member
New PS Blog article.

Surviving a Cold Universe in No Man’s Sky on PS4

24822494853_fa9f884d6b_b.jpg


20123934675_6fc41e9e67_b.jpg


20097650346_5b505790c1_b.jpg
 
Things I'm most interested in discovering:
Subterranean species
Deep sea species (bio-luminescence?)
The super weird and alien species towards the center
A black hole
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
Things I'm most interested in discovering:
Subterranean species
Deep sea species (bio-luminescence?)
The super weird and alien species towards the center
A black hole

There better be something cool about black holes. I mean, if they just mean insta-death it would be pretty boring. Have them be wormholes to entirely different parts of the galaxy. Do it.
 
There better be something cool about black holes. I mean, if they just mean insta-death it would be pretty boring. Have them be wormholes to entirely different parts of the galaxy. Do it.
I don't think they will be insta-death. Another poster here said that Sean had mentioned tweaking some of the algorithms after seeing Interstellar, so, for example, symmetry seen in Mann's planet would be possible in the game
HLZ31eW.jpg

So I'm hoping he took some inspiration from the film for the look and action of black holes
 
There better be something cool about black holes. I mean, if they just mean insta-death it would be pretty boring. Have them be wormholes to entirely different parts of the galaxy. Do it.

Well Sean has confirmed (think in the Giant Bomb interview) that black holes serve a gameplay purpose.

I'm guessing yeah, they'll act like wormholes that get you to the truly weird and wonderful places in the universe.
 
I'm curious to see how robust the animal variation is in the released game. Like what they've shown is that they basically make a bunch of variations on one base skeleton, so you could have a massive number of different types of say, a four-legged ungulate. But no matter how many variations you make, those variations will still be limited to being within the scope of something that is easily identifiable as a four-legged ungulate:


So it seems like a limiting factor in some sense to the variety could be how many "base" models there are (two legged bipedal thing, small four legged creature, large predatory fish, etc).

As flawed a game as it was, Spore's creature generation allowed a massive amount of randomness due to the way it basically created its organisms out of any number of individual components that could be mixed, matched, stretched and skewed in any number of ways which led to a completely bizarre array of strange and alien looking things.
 
I'm curious to see how robust the animal variation is in the released game. Like what they've shown is that they basically make a bunch of variations on one base skeleton, so you could have a massive number of different types of say, a four-legged ungulate. But no matter how many variations you make, those variations will still be limited to being within the scope of something that is easily identifiable as a four-legged ungulate:



So it seems like a limiting factor in some sense to the variety could be how many "base" models there are (two legged bipedal thing, small four legged creature, large predatory fish, etc).

As flawed a game as it was, Spore's creature generation allowed a massive amount of randomness due to the way it basically created its organisms out of any number of individual components that could be mixed, matched, stretched and skewed in any number of ways which led to a completely bizarre array of strange and alien looking things.
Sean said "there will be hundreds of creature types", meaning hundreds of those base models for the game to mutate

And they've only been showing stuff that looks like earth species

 

BigDug13

Member
I'm curious to see how robust the animal variation is in the released game. Like what they've shown is that they basically make a bunch of variations on one base skeleton, so you could have a massive number of different types of say, a four-legged ungulate. But no matter how many variations you make, those variations will still be limited to being within the scope of something that is easily identifiable as a four-legged ungulate:



So it seems like a limiting factor in some sense to the variety could be how many "base" models there are (two legged bipedal thing, small four legged creature, large predatory fish, etc).

As flawed a game as it was, Spore's creature generation allowed a massive amount of randomness due to the way it basically created its organisms out of any number of individual components that could be mixed, matched, stretched and skewed in any number of ways which led to a completely bizarre array of strange and alien looking things.

Those were shown a long time ago, yes? I'm sure they're aiming for plenty of variety. That also doesn't factor in overall size of the creature. Environment found in. Animal behavior itself. Then there's the creature sounds which are all procedurally generated through an emulated vocal cord system.
 

Calabi

Member
I'm curious to see how robust the animal variation is in the released game. Like what they've shown is that they basically make a bunch of variations on one base skeleton, so you could have a massive number of different types of say, a four-legged ungulate. But no matter how many variations you make, those variations will still be limited to being within the scope of something that is easily identifiable as a four-legged ungulate:



So it seems like a limiting factor in some sense to the variety could be how many "base" models there are (two legged bipedal thing, small four legged creature, large predatory fish, etc).

As flawed a game as it was, Spore's creature generation allowed a massive amount of randomness due to the way it basically created its organisms out of any number of individual components that could be mixed, matched, stretched and skewed in any number of ways which led to a completely bizarre array of strange and alien looking things.

But most of the creatures in Spore looked like shit. Most of them had no basis in reality I mean the physics wouldn't have worked for them. They were just weird for weird's sake.

We have enough variety on our own planet to extrapolate interesting forms from that if they went deep enough.
 

SomTervo

Member
Hmm that quote is only setting people up for disappointment. I'm super hyped for this game but I am keeping my expectations in check.

Normally I think telling folks you're still holding a lot back is great but I've seen some pretty crazy features people want/heard that it's going to be difficult for some people to feel like this game is living up to the hype.

I think earlier in this thread someone mentioned species evolving which seems unlikely considering Sean himself has said he doesnt want people hunkering down on a planet for too long.

I'm pretty happy with everything we definitely know, so anything else is icing on the cake. I just worry that there are gonna be lots of people complaining that X feature isn't in the game after it releases.

Of course I'm not letting my hype become a runaway train - even if everything we've seen is what's in the game, I'm OK with that.

But it completely figures that there's more to the game than we've seen. I mean, to be pendantic, we literally know that's true because we don't know what's there in the galactic centre.
 

SomTervo

Member
Well Sean has confirmed (think in the Giant Bomb interview) that black holes serve a gameplay purpose.

I'm guessing yeah, they'll act like wormholes that get you to the truly weird and wonderful places in the universe.

It's confirmed that there are portals of some sort which take you temporarily closer to the centre of the universe (you cant take your ship), where you can get better stuff but if's more dangerous. Somebody quoted it at me a few months back.

Perhaps black holes are like a similar fast travel device.
 

RedSwirl

Junior Member
Oh I have general idea of the scale of the game.

One thing I wondered though is how planets will scaled proportionally to each other or at least comparatively to even Stars and other massive objects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n--RMK06S4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBZkyXMQwGw

Like for example I'd find it highly interesting to have a planet on the scale of our Earth and it's parent Star being a billion miles away but is scaled to something like Rigel or even Antares...or possibly even UY Scuti.

It's probably not something likely to be implemented in No Man's Sky simply due the huge sizes involved but it is an interesting thought.

It's certainly something to think about, and an advantage of the game not being based on real science.

In Elite Dangerous and Space Engine you get supergiant stars, but Earth-size planets almost never orbit them. In fact most of the time when a star is that big nothing is orbiting it. Sometimes maybe a gas giant or a smaller star. The only scale of reference you usually have is how big the object looks compare to distance. Take these pictures of Betelgeuse in Elite for example. In that last photo the player is about 4AU away from the star, but his ship is already overheating. A large gas giant at that distance should be a dot on the screen.
 
Hmm that quote is only setting people up for disappointment. I'm super hyped for this game but I am keeping my expectations in check.

Normally I think telling folks you're still holding a lot back is great but I've seen some pretty crazy features people want/heard that it's going to be difficult for some people to feel like this game is living up to the hype.

I think earlier in this thread someone mentioned species evolving which seems unlikely considering Sean himself has said he doesnt want people hunkering down on a planet for too long.

I'm pretty happy with everything we definitely know, so anything else is icing on the cake. I just worry that there are gonna be lots of people complaining that X feature isn't in the game after it releases.
As you approach the speed of light, time passes slower for you than the rest of the universe. So you are technically traveling ahead in time. If time travel is included in the game, you could see species evolve.
 

CJVaughn

Banned
So I've been watching more and more videos just brushing up on game mechanics and some questions do come to mind. Do we know if the universe is persistent (as in housed on a server somewhere), or local to the console/PC it's being played on? I ask because it seems that may have fluctuated a time or two during development.

This also opens up another question. Being that planets are randomly generated, is every single detail about the planet saved, or only certain values such as type/weather/life/etc.? So if someone, somehow, manages to visit a planet I've been too, will they see the same mountain range I did? Or mountainous terrain that re-generated randomly upon them landing?

And finally, if every aspect of the planet isn't saved and only things like location/type/etc. are, then are there really going to be 18 quintillion *unique* planets, or just 18 quintillion possible *combinations* of planets?
 
So I've been watching more and more videos just brushing up on game mechanics. One questions does come to mind. Do we know if the universe is persistent (as in housed on a server somewhere), or local to the console/PC it's being played on? I ask because it seems that may have fluctuated a time or two during development.

This also opens up another question, being that planets are randomly generated, is every single detail about the planet saved, or only certain values such as type/weather/life/etc.? So if someone, somehow, manages to visit a planet I've been too, will they see the same mountain range I did? Or mountainous terrain that re-generated upon them landing?

And finally, if every aspect of the planet isn't saved and only things like location/type/etc. are, then are there really going to be 18 quintillion *unique* planets, or just 18 quintillion possible *combinations* of planets?
The planets are generated as you walk. Nothing is saved on the disk or cloud
https://youtu.be/h-kifCYToAU?t=768
 
It's confirmed that there are portals of some sort which take you temporarily closer to the centre of the universe (you cant take your ship), where you can get better stuff but if's more dangerous. Somebody quoted it at me a few months back.

Perhaps black holes are like a similar fast travel device.

Maybe you can use them for gravity assists much like we now use the gravity of planets to slingshot all over our solar system.
 

SomTervo

Member
The planets are generated as you walk. Nothing is saved on the disk or cloud
https://youtu.be/h-kifCYToAU?t=768

Wait, this isn't right. Only in reference to planet surfaces, right? Not their positions or the whole universe? I'm 99% certain there's a database of all planets and systems on the cloud that get updated as info comes in. Is it just that the planet's seeds are unactioned until you visit the planets?

Maybe you can use them for gravity assists much like we now use the gravity of planets and to slingshot all over our solar system.

Awesome idea.
 
Wait, this isn't right. Only in reference to planet surfaces, right? Not their positions or the whole universe? I'm 99% certain there's a database of all planets and systems on the cloud that get updated as info comes in. Is it just that the planet's seeds are unactioned until you visit the planets?



Awesome idea.
Not hundred percent sure. I think it might be just for the planets. In the video, you can see the behind-the-scenes tech and the planet is literally generated as he's walking and flying around the map. And then when he zooms up into the space, the game throws that ground-level data away, and then re-generates it when you go back to ground level.
 

SomTervo

Member
Not hundred percent sure. I think it might be just for the planets. In the video, you can see the behind-the-scenes tech and the planet is literally generated as he's walking and flying around the map. And then when he zooms up into the space, the game throws that ground-level data away, and then re-generates it when you go back to ground level.

Yeah must be - i think how it works is in my response to CJ below.

This also opens up another question. Being that planets are randomly generated, is every single detail about the planet saved, or only certain values such as type/weather/life/etc.? So if someone, somehow, manages to visit a planet I've been too, will they see the same mountain range I did? Or mountainous terrain that re-generated randomly upon them landing?

You need to remind yourself how seeds work in randomly generated algorithms. This has been answered for you. Check back a few pages.

Planets are BUILT in front of you from a SEED which is always the same. The blueprint's outcome will always be the same, but that blueprint wont be executed until you arrive at the planet. If you and one other person arrive at the same planet, you'll see the same thing, as you're both seeing the same seed/blueprint's outcome. We don't know for sure, but i'd assume that seed includes weather, size, rotation, etc.

What ISN'T saved online is what you do to the planet. If you blow up the mountain range, that isn't saved online, and when the other person arrives, they will still see it there.

IIRC planets being totally destroyed IS saved, though? Like when they are 100% gone that is saved to the server database and nobody else will find it.
 
Top Bottom