5 ms·

It's interesting how the level of variety of the assets does not translate directly to the game. I do actually suspect that there might be some sort of prefabri

It's interesting how the level of variety of the assets does not translate directly to the game. I do actually suspect that there might be some sort of prefabrication going on with the creatures, or maybe some bug with the generation code is simply not using all the available asset combinations.

stcredzero 10y ago
I'm willing to bet a small amount that the leader of the "No Man's Sky" project either "lost the battle" with his subordinates or was unable to fully get his vision across to his team. To meaningfully create an interesting procedurally generated world, you need to approach certain things one step removed. For example: Game Balance. If you're not going just bolt a simple hand-crafted game on top of your procedurally generated world, you might want factors that affect game balance to be significantly affected by the procedural generation, which means you can't directly game balance the game anymore. Instead, you have to indirectly balance the game.
- oelmekki 10y ago
  I thought balance was a multiplayer thing (it's the only domain I've heard about it, but I'm a casual gamer). I guess balance in single player is about difficulty? Or are there other aspects of single player games that are considered balance?
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    I thought balance was a multiplayer thing No Man's Sky was supposed to be multiplayer, originally. There can also be a notion of balance in single player games. For example, in a 4X game or an RTS in single player mode, you can still have issues of balance with regards to the relative effectiveness of ECM versus weapons. Missiles vs. beams. Fighters vs. small units.
    - jheriko 10y ago
      It was never meant to be multiplayer in real time afaik... just that you would see the impact of other players in the world... however confused the marketing became
      - stcredzero 10y ago
        My game is just as vast, practically speaking, and it has 70 client multiplayer, worst case. (That is, all directly interacting in the same spot. If 1000 clients were in the same star-system instance, but not interacting, that would be fine.)
      - EpicEng 10y ago
        That is not true. It was said that you could run into other players and interact with them in real time, but that it would be exceedingly rare due to the size of the galaxy. Well, happened on day 1 and, nope, not true. Now it was never supposed to have a large focus on multiplayer, but they also mentioned things like a galactic economy, big space battles, a faction system... all BS.
        xamuel 10y ago
        >you could run into other players ... it would be exceedingly rare This should've tripped everyone's BS detectors. Why would a studio do the huge work to add a multiplayer mode if it would be so rarely seen?
        yankyou 10y ago
        It _did_ trip a lot of BS detectors. The sound was drowned out by the overwhelmingly non-technical consumers of the game's PR. It's the modern day version of selling snake oil. Technology progresses, but human nature doesn't.
        EpicEng 10y ago
        And much of the expectant player base didn't want to hear anything negative. Reddit was a complete echo chamber, praising the devs in every post. I suppose it's still an echo chamber, but the conversation has... drifted the other way.
  - wongarsu 10y ago
    >I guess balance in single player is about difficulty? In a sense balance is always about difficulty. But it's also about not ruining all the depth your game offers. If one of the easiest paths becomes objectively the best to achieve a goal, there's no reason for the player to explore or use any of the other paths. This appears in all kinds of systems: if there's one class that's just the best, your class system is unbalanced and most players will barely play the other classes. If there's this "one simple trick" to earn lots of money (e.g. mine that one very common ore, like in No Man's Sky), an interesting economy becomes a boring timesink due to being unbalanced. If one of the early weapons is the best, everyone will use it and all the time you spent designing other weapons was just a waste.
    - stcredzero 10y ago
      One of the things that I'm going to do in my game, is to make entire categories of items unusable or gimped across entire bands of space. So as you progress (the leaderboards are mainly based on how far in "the direction of difficulty" you can get) you will eventually get to a point where you have to abandon your favorite strategy and come up with a new one. Even without this, due to the rarity of items that have little penalty for benefit, you will often have to improvise, as your required item will likely not be available with exactly the right combination of compatibility and stats.
  - lfowles 10y ago
    Progression rate mainly. Simple Minecraft example (imagine it had more game bolted on, because I can't think of many proc-gen worlds off the top of my head)... Diamond is only available below X depth and at Y rarity. The depth is a hard limit, because it would screw with the intended progression of player crafting if a diamond vein had spawned a block or two under the surface. (Although this example is slightly flawed because you need to craft better equipment to mine diamond, blah blah blah)
    - stcredzero 10y ago
      you need to craft better equipment to mine diamond, blah blah blah More example of balance.
      - lfowles 10y ago
        Hah, yes! Except it's more directly influenced (creating the recipes and what pickaxes can mine which ores) than the indirect influence on the procgen world by defining ore distributions.
    - fenomas 10y ago
      I recently dusted off Minecraft for the first time in a few years and was surprised, in retrospect, at how little effort the game makes at any semblance of balance or progression. One world might start you right next to a village with a chest full of diamonds, while another might start you in a vast desert - with no trees, meaning no wood, tools, or torches, meaning a long walk (and probably many deaths) before progression per-se can begin. MC is best considered as a sandbox simulation rather than a game. (Not that that's a criticism of course - it's just something I'd forgotten after a few years of not playing.)
      - zimpenfish 10y ago
        My favourite start was on MCPE - island of about 9 blocks, no trees, no other land in sight. Took 15+ minutes of swimming to find land.
  - s_m_t 10y ago
    I don't really view balance in single player games any differently than I do a multiplayer game. A well balanced game has a wealth of options open that promotes dynamic gameplay. A poorly balanced game degenerates into stagnant gameplay because one or two options are much more powerful than the rest. A good example of a well balanced single player game is tetris. All the pieces are useful. It may be easier to complete a line with the straight piece, and in a tight pinch a less skilled player might hold out for it while placing down other pieces willy nilly, but if every piece was as easy to use as the straight piece then the game would have less variety and tension! At certain points in the game you may not want a straight piece because of the way you have laid down your previous pieces, the game is dynamic because the optimal strategy is changing all the time because of how you played the game, this adds even more strategy because you can also influence how the optimal strategy will change. A good example of a poorly balanced single player game is... well in my opinion most single player games are poorly balanced. Either the game is so easy that it really doesn't require you to strategize at all or the game is easily cheesed by using one overpowered technique. This is especially evident in many RPG's, although they try to hide it with a huge skill tree (of which almost invariably a large number of skills are useless and a couple are ridiculously overpowered) or by having you learn a whole bunch of enemy weaknesses and resistances (IMO this is cheating, the challenge isn't dynamic as these stats are unchanging and typically only serve as an overwrought color matching exercise). Pokemon is a good example of this, although you have hundreds of pokemon to collect and train and it seems a variety of enemy types should force you to have a varied party yourself, the easiest way to beat the game is to overlevel your starting pokemon by giving them all the experience points and grab one or two other pokemon along the way to cover your weaknesses in the end stages of the game and load up with necessary non-combat moves.
    - stcredzero 10y ago
      I don't really view balance in single player games any differently than I do a multiplayer game This is a great approach to take. When you let the computer "cheat" it tends to result in less intellectually satisfying enemies. The computer should pretty much be playing by the same rules as the player.
- threeseed 10y ago
  I don't believe this. Far more likely is that like almost every software project in history they underestimated the time to finish and finish well. And a small team means far fewer testers so that exacerbates the problem.
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    Given what I've seen from them in the press and online, it looks like they bolted a simple hand crafted game on top of their procedurally generated world. The only question is why they thought they were doing that.
    - coldpie 10y ago
      I suspect Sony paid them a boatload of money, then took a look at the $20 tech demo toy they had on their hands and said "we can't sell this for $60," so they had to tack on the resource grind minigame in order to call it a "game." Hence the delays and lackluster final game.
GauntletWizard 10y ago
I suspect it's actually more about pattern recognition and how humans compress data in our memories. People will recognized and remember the major components of objects, and see that they're being repeated. If you've were to spend a few minutes looking around each of the ships (for example), then shown a bunch of ships from a mixture of NMS's possible designs and all other ships designed or designable in other space videogames, you're nearly instantly recognize the style and get 90+% accuracy if asked to say if it came from within NMS or without. But here's the real kicker: I don't think you'd have any luck telling if there's one that you'd already seen before or not. The distinct features merge together, and you see one ship with a bunch of possible parts - much like how the article says it's stored! Humans are great at pattern recognition and those groupings are intuitive. If you take a dozen variations on one part, a dozen variations on another part, and show only a small smattering of the possible combinations to someone, they'll be able to deduce the existence of the rest of the square, pretty much as soon as they see three combos making an L on the two axis.
taneq 10y ago
I don't think it's that the variety doesn't translate to the game, I think it's more just that this kind of mix-and-match approach doesn't generate anything that creates a strong perception of variety. Once you see one stegosaurus-headed thing, anything else with a stegosaurus head looks familiar even if this time it's got painted toenails or a floppy tail. The result invariably looks about as exciting as one of those mix-and-match flipbooks: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/de/a7/7d/dea77dbbf70b40ef6286faeaa93ac50e.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/de/a7/7d/dea77dbbf...

stcredzero 10y ago

I'm willing to bet a small amount that the leader of the "No Man's Sky" project either "lost the battle" with his subordinates or was unable to fully get his vision across to his team. To meaningfully create an interesting procedurally generated world, you need to approach certain things one step removed. For example: Game Balance. If you're not going just bolt a simple hand-crafted game on top of your procedurally generated world, you might want factors that affect game balance to be significantly affected by the procedural generation, which means you can't directly game balance the game anymore. Instead, you have to indirectly balance the game.

oelmekki 10y ago
I thought balance was a multiplayer thing (it's the only domain I've heard about it, but I'm a casual gamer). I guess balance in single player is about difficulty? Or are there other aspects of single player games that are considered balance?
- stcredzero 10y ago
  I thought balance was a multiplayer thing No Man's Sky was supposed to be multiplayer, originally. There can also be a notion of balance in single player games. For example, in a 4X game or an RTS in single player mode, you can still have issues of balance with regards to the relative effectiveness of ECM versus weapons. Missiles vs. beams. Fighters vs. small units.
  - jheriko 10y ago
    It was never meant to be multiplayer in real time afaik... just that you would see the impact of other players in the world... however confused the marketing became
    - stcredzero 10y ago
      My game is just as vast, practically speaking, and it has 70 client multiplayer, worst case. (That is, all directly interacting in the same spot. If 1000 clients were in the same star-system instance, but not interacting, that would be fine.)
    - EpicEng 10y ago
      That is not true. It was said that you could run into other players and interact with them in real time, but that it would be exceedingly rare due to the size of the galaxy. Well, happened on day 1 and, nope, not true. Now it was never supposed to have a large focus on multiplayer, but they also mentioned things like a galactic economy, big space battles, a faction system... all BS.
      - xamuel 10y ago
        >you could run into other players ... it would be exceedingly rare This should've tripped everyone's BS detectors. Why would a studio do the huge work to add a multiplayer mode if it would be so rarely seen?
        yankyou 10y ago
        It _did_ trip a lot of BS detectors. The sound was drowned out by the overwhelmingly non-technical consumers of the game's PR. It's the modern day version of selling snake oil. Technology progresses, but human nature doesn't.
        EpicEng 10y ago
        And much of the expectant player base didn't want to hear anything negative. Reddit was a complete echo chamber, praising the devs in every post. I suppose it's still an echo chamber, but the conversation has... drifted the other way.
- wongarsu 10y ago
  >I guess balance in single player is about difficulty? In a sense balance is always about difficulty. But it's also about not ruining all the depth your game offers. If one of the easiest paths becomes objectively the best to achieve a goal, there's no reason for the player to explore or use any of the other paths. This appears in all kinds of systems: if there's one class that's just the best, your class system is unbalanced and most players will barely play the other classes. If there's this "one simple trick" to earn lots of money (e.g. mine that one very common ore, like in No Man's Sky), an interesting economy becomes a boring timesink due to being unbalanced. If one of the early weapons is the best, everyone will use it and all the time you spent designing other weapons was just a waste.
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    One of the things that I'm going to do in my game, is to make entire categories of items unusable or gimped across entire bands of space. So as you progress (the leaderboards are mainly based on how far in "the direction of difficulty" you can get) you will eventually get to a point where you have to abandon your favorite strategy and come up with a new one. Even without this, due to the rarity of items that have little penalty for benefit, you will often have to improvise, as your required item will likely not be available with exactly the right combination of compatibility and stats.
- lfowles 10y ago
  Progression rate mainly. Simple Minecraft example (imagine it had more game bolted on, because I can't think of many proc-gen worlds off the top of my head)... Diamond is only available below X depth and at Y rarity. The depth is a hard limit, because it would screw with the intended progression of player crafting if a diamond vein had spawned a block or two under the surface. (Although this example is slightly flawed because you need to craft better equipment to mine diamond, blah blah blah)
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    you need to craft better equipment to mine diamond, blah blah blah More example of balance.
    - lfowles 10y ago
      Hah, yes! Except it's more directly influenced (creating the recipes and what pickaxes can mine which ores) than the indirect influence on the procgen world by defining ore distributions.
  - fenomas 10y ago
    I recently dusted off Minecraft for the first time in a few years and was surprised, in retrospect, at how little effort the game makes at any semblance of balance or progression. One world might start you right next to a village with a chest full of diamonds, while another might start you in a vast desert - with no trees, meaning no wood, tools, or torches, meaning a long walk (and probably many deaths) before progression per-se can begin. MC is best considered as a sandbox simulation rather than a game. (Not that that's a criticism of course - it's just something I'd forgotten after a few years of not playing.)
    - zimpenfish 10y ago
      My favourite start was on MCPE - island of about 9 blocks, no trees, no other land in sight. Took 15+ minutes of swimming to find land.
- s_m_t 10y ago
  I don't really view balance in single player games any differently than I do a multiplayer game. A well balanced game has a wealth of options open that promotes dynamic gameplay. A poorly balanced game degenerates into stagnant gameplay because one or two options are much more powerful than the rest. A good example of a well balanced single player game is tetris. All the pieces are useful. It may be easier to complete a line with the straight piece, and in a tight pinch a less skilled player might hold out for it while placing down other pieces willy nilly, but if every piece was as easy to use as the straight piece then the game would have less variety and tension! At certain points in the game you may not want a straight piece because of the way you have laid down your previous pieces, the game is dynamic because the optimal strategy is changing all the time because of how you played the game, this adds even more strategy because you can also influence how the optimal strategy will change. A good example of a poorly balanced single player game is... well in my opinion most single player games are poorly balanced. Either the game is so easy that it really doesn't require you to strategize at all or the game is easily cheesed by using one overpowered technique. This is especially evident in many RPG's, although they try to hide it with a huge skill tree (of which almost invariably a large number of skills are useless and a couple are ridiculously overpowered) or by having you learn a whole bunch of enemy weaknesses and resistances (IMO this is cheating, the challenge isn't dynamic as these stats are unchanging and typically only serve as an overwrought color matching exercise). Pokemon is a good example of this, although you have hundreds of pokemon to collect and train and it seems a variety of enemy types should force you to have a varied party yourself, the easiest way to beat the game is to overlevel your starting pokemon by giving them all the experience points and grab one or two other pokemon along the way to cover your weaknesses in the end stages of the game and load up with necessary non-combat moves.
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    I don't really view balance in single player games any differently than I do a multiplayer game This is a great approach to take. When you let the computer "cheat" it tends to result in less intellectually satisfying enemies. The computer should pretty much be playing by the same rules as the player.
threeseed 10y ago
I don't believe this. Far more likely is that like almost every software project in history they underestimated the time to finish and finish well. And a small team means far fewer testers so that exacerbates the problem.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  Given what I've seen from them in the press and online, it looks like they bolted a simple hand crafted game on top of their procedurally generated world. The only question is why they thought they were doing that.
  - coldpie 10y ago
    I suspect Sony paid them a boatload of money, then took a look at the $20 tech demo toy they had on their hands and said "we can't sell this for $60," so they had to tack on the resource grind minigame in order to call it a "game." Hence the delays and lackluster final game.

GauntletWizard 10y ago

I suspect it's actually more about pattern recognition and how humans compress data in our memories. People will recognized and remember the major components of objects, and see that they're being repeated. If you've were to spend a few minutes looking around each of the ships (for example), then shown a bunch of ships from a mixture of NMS's possible designs and all other ships designed or designable in other space videogames, you're nearly instantly recognize the style and get 90+% accuracy if asked to say if it came from within NMS or without. But here's the real kicker: I don't think you'd have any luck telling if there's one that you'd already seen before or not. The distinct features merge together, and you see one ship with a bunch of possible parts - much like how the article says it's stored! Humans are great at pattern recognition and those groupings are intuitive. If you take a dozen variations on one part, a dozen variations on another part, and show only a small smattering of the possible combinations to someone, they'll be able to deduce the existence of the rest of the square, pretty much as soon as they see three combos making an L on the two axis.

taneq 10y ago

I don't think it's that the variety doesn't translate to the game, I think it's more just that this kind of mix-and-match approach doesn't generate anything that creates a strong perception of variety. Once you see one stegosaurus-headed thing, anything else with a stegosaurus head looks familiar even if this time it's got painted toenails or a floppy tail. The result invariably looks about as exciting as one of those mix-and-match flipbooks: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/de/a7/7d/dea77dbbf70b40ef6286faeaa93ac50e.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/de/a7/7d/dea77dbbf...