9 ms·

Noctis, the 'No Man's Sky' Forerunner Whose Creator Retreated from the World

235 points by myth_drannon 3y ago

southwesterly 3y ago
Thanks. I always wondered what had happened to him.
steaktartaar_ 3y ago
Noctis was an amazing experience. It had no right being as immersive as it was. If you liked the idea of NMS, give it a go; it nails the alone-on-the-frontier mood a lot better.
- andybak 3y ago
  As NMS "improved" and fleshed out the game world, it lost a certain poetry that it had earlier on. There was something really unsettling about the earlier universes that felt - dare I say? - liminal.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    I hope by liminal you don’t mean “like the back rooms”
    - andybak 3y ago
      Well - kinda? Liminal implies a particular mood or feeling - which is what the Back Rooms stuff was also aiming for. I think some of it succeeds remarkably well and some of it doesn't.
      - ehnto 3y ago
        I have always called this mood lonely exploration, or melancholic curiosity. It has liminal qualities in that you feel between encounters or between spaces of meaning. It sounds bad but indeed, early NMS did feel kind of meaningless, which as you said had a certain poetic quality. Melancholic curiosity, or loneley exploration, are two things I am trying to capture in games I make. There is a game called Infra that I highly recommend if you enjoy that mood, and city infrastructure.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  Taking of immersion I loved how all the ui is integrated into the geometry of the ship. Makes it feel coherent like a real object. Not enough (non-sim) games do this.
ttctciyf 3y ago
The article didn't mention it, as far as I could see, but the source is available[1] at the author's site with an interesting and fairly permissive license. 1: https://80.style/#/hsp/noctis_widgets_and_accessories/noctis_iv_source_code_Jborland_cNNK https://80.style/#/hsp/noctis_widgets_and_accessories/noctis...
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  That site is really entertaining, too. Great style! https://80.style https://80.style
  - bazzargh 3y ago
    it's fascinating me that all of HSP's articles are manually justified monospace text. Pages and pages of it. That's quite hard to do? There's not a lot of double-spaces or unusual punctuation so it's mostly achieved by word choice. I did wonder if there was some subtle css justification going on but apparently not; and you can see in articles from other authors on the site that the style is ragged right, but HSP never writes like that.
    - danielheath 3y ago
      I always found it quite satisfying to do; many codebases I've worked on have mid-length block comments that are manually justified that way.
    - nanna 3y ago
      > That's quite hard to do? Wouldn't that just be done by a text editor? Eg in emacs C-u 70 M-x fill-region. (There's probably a better way)
      - nix0n 3y ago
        There's no spaces at the end of the line. Every thing lines up exactly.
samsquire 3y ago
Noctis was amazing, he also had an assembly compiler called linoluem which is what I used to learn assembly. He had a advanced CMS website and Noctis had an "Inbox" of worlds that people had discovered and I think named that you could download.
- appleflaxen 3y ago
  Linoleum is mentioned in the article.
- throwawee 3y ago
  I think L.in.oleum was the first language I was ever comfortable with. Everything else was abstractions on top of abstractions. Lino was just platform agnostic assembly, and I loved that.
  - dopidopHN 3y ago
    Fascinating, really, but it’s counter intuitive to me: reading the article I pictured linoleum to be a script oriented modding / building tool like Lua provide. But it’s way lower level ?
rspoerri 3y ago
His website is very nice as well: https://80.style/#/about/whatUs_under_the_chromeZ https://80.style/#/about/whatUs_under_the_chromeZ
tempaway42963 3y ago
While he doesn’t have regrets over the job, there is one thing Ghignola does regret: letting fans down. "I do remember promising several times that I would finish Noctis V and, still after all these years, I’ve never gone back. I’m sorry; I wish I had the strength to go back and finish what I started more than ten years ago." Its nice that there was a community around the game and that Alessandro felt part of it. But I'm sad that he felt pressure to finish the next version and that that might have weighed on him. Because its very easy for fans to ask for something, but actually very hard to be the person that has to do all the work to meet their expectations. The fans are free to drift off and find something else to enjoy, but the feeling of unfinished projects and broken promises can stay with the creator for a long time. In short: As a creator its easy to get wrapped up in fans demands but in reality you need to have boundaries. Perhaps you dont want to spent the next four years making something for them. Perhaps you've got other things you want to do with your life.
- h2odragon 3y ago
  I think this genre of "space exploration" games, in particular, is likely to have communities containing people who have no other life at all, and who become unreasonably emotional about "their" game that they have instead. Can lead to absolutely toxic communities. Source: steam says i have 2k hr into X4 foundations
  - richardjdare 3y ago
    heh, also at that time, there was little else to scratch that itch, other than going back to Frontier: Elite 2 on an emulator or something. That's how I got into Noctis all those years ago.
  - varelse 3y ago
    [dead]
  - digging 3y ago
    I recently bought X4:F on sale from a small recommendation. I like it so far after about 8 hours. But already I am wondering how deep the galaxy actually is - like, what will I actually do, other than keep getting more money and more ships for their own sake? What goals do you pursue? What drives you to keep going back?
xmcqdpt2 3y ago
I spent so many hours in Noctis! The graphics were amazing when compared with other games I could run on my P133, and it was developed by just one guy.
wishfish 3y ago
I adored Noctis back in the day. There was something very lonely and alien about it. Something No Man's Sky never quite captured. The lofi graphics just helped to make it more haunting and isolated. But the community was nice. I would regularly download the updated encyclopedia. I didn't know about his depression, but I could sort of feel it through his game world. He mentioned, a long time ago, that the game was partially a product of a painful breakup. The game, especially the backstory, reflected that loss.
suprjami 3y ago
I have always found his games fascinating since I first discovered Cryxels probably in the early 00s. There's something about the beautiful chunky graphics and silent exploration which just draws you in for hours.
__void 3y ago
Alex we miss u
skerit 3y ago
Noctis! I loved this game. Up until a few years ago I kept visiting his website, in the hopes something would come up again about Noctis V, lol. He used the term "Home sweet pixel" too back then I believe, but also "The web territory of Fottifoh" or something. It was al very interesting. To me it wasn't really a precursor to NMS, but more to Minecraft. The "infinite" terrain on worlds is what kept me interested.
NelsonMinar 3y ago
Noctis was a big deal to a small audience. The game and this story here remind me of outsider art, the term of respect for paintings and sculptures and the like made by non-traditional artists. It's a whole genre of art, well studied and represented. We have outsider art in software too, like Noctis. Not just games: TempleOS is a well known example. I'd call Dwarf Fortress outsider art too, an unusually successful example that has had a lot of influence on mainstream games.
AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
So what's the best way to run it on a modern system for those curious to try? Does it work in DOSBox? Does Archive.org have it running somewhere?
- jorisd 3y ago
  DOSEMU or FreeDOS in a VM (e.g. Virtualbox) typically gives the best performance with decent ease-of-use. Otherwise, you'll want to run it natively on Windows XP or earlier, or FreeDOS. For running in a VM, you'll need to have an x86 processor with hardware-assisted virtualization enabled. DosBOX might work and is worth trying due to its ease of setup, but you really need a very powerful machine.
varelse 3y ago
[dead]
schmichael 3y ago
Since graduating college I have basically only ever been a commercial software developer. Reading about programmers who, usually but not always through games, treat code as a canvas on which to paint their thoughts, dreams, desires, and struggles is an inspiration even when they themselves feel like they’ve let someone down.
regularfry 3y ago
This is one of those games where I have to wonder why I never knew about it at the time. It looks like the sort of thing I'd just have lost weeks at a time to.
carride 3y ago
Archived without intrusive cookie agreement https://archive.is/196Fk https://archive.is/196Fk
lizardking 3y ago
I love the aesthetic from the footage of the game. I wish 1990's retro futurism would make a comeback!
mherkender 3y ago
It is very much a game influenced by depression, I recall you played a solo alien with a destroyed planet and no knowledge if any of his kind was left or where they would be. It was a really magical game from the pre-iPhone era of the web, so experimental it barely made sense. It's sad to hear of the creator's struggles, I hope he focuses on himself instead of worrying about letting anyone down.

235 points by myth_drannon 3y ago

Thanks. I always wondered what had happened to him.

Noctis was an amazing experience. It had no right being as immersive as it was. If you liked the idea of NMS, give it a go; it nails the alone-on-the-frontier mood a lot better.

andybak 3y ago
As NMS "improved" and fleshed out the game world, it lost a certain poetry that it had earlier on. There was something really unsettling about the earlier universes that felt - dare I say? - liminal.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  I hope by liminal you don’t mean “like the back rooms”
  - andybak 3y ago
    Well - kinda? Liminal implies a particular mood or feeling - which is what the Back Rooms stuff was also aiming for. I think some of it succeeds remarkably well and some of it doesn't.
    - ehnto 3y ago
      I have always called this mood lonely exploration, or melancholic curiosity. It has liminal qualities in that you feel between encounters or between spaces of meaning. It sounds bad but indeed, early NMS did feel kind of meaningless, which as you said had a certain poetic quality. Melancholic curiosity, or loneley exploration, are two things I am trying to capture in games I make. There is a game called Infra that I highly recommend if you enjoy that mood, and city infrastructure.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
Taking of immersion I loved how all the ui is integrated into the geometry of the ship. Makes it feel coherent like a real object. Not enough (non-sim) games do this.

ttctciyf 3y ago

The article didn't mention it, as far as I could see, but the source is available[1] at the author's site with an interesting and fairly permissive license. 1: https://80.style/#/hsp/noctis_widgets_and_accessories/noctis_iv_source_code_Jborland_cNNK https://80.style/#/hsp/noctis_widgets_and_accessories/noctis...

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
That site is really entertaining, too. Great style! https://80.style https://80.style
- bazzargh 3y ago
  it's fascinating me that all of HSP's articles are manually justified monospace text. Pages and pages of it. That's quite hard to do? There's not a lot of double-spaces or unusual punctuation so it's mostly achieved by word choice. I did wonder if there was some subtle css justification going on but apparently not; and you can see in articles from other authors on the site that the style is ragged right, but HSP never writes like that.
  - danielheath 3y ago
    I always found it quite satisfying to do; many codebases I've worked on have mid-length block comments that are manually justified that way.
  - nanna 3y ago
    > That's quite hard to do? Wouldn't that just be done by a text editor? Eg in emacs C-u 70 M-x fill-region. (There's probably a better way)
    - nix0n 3y ago
      There's no spaces at the end of the line. Every thing lines up exactly.

samsquire 3y ago

Noctis was amazing, he also had an assembly compiler called linoluem which is what I used to learn assembly. He had a advanced CMS website and Noctis had an "Inbox" of worlds that people had discovered and I think named that you could download.

appleflaxen 3y ago
Linoleum is mentioned in the article.
throwawee 3y ago
I think L.in.oleum was the first language I was ever comfortable with. Everything else was abstractions on top of abstractions. Lino was just platform agnostic assembly, and I loved that.
- dopidopHN 3y ago
  Fascinating, really, but it’s counter intuitive to me: reading the article I pictured linoleum to be a script oriented modding / building tool like Lua provide. But it’s way lower level ?

rspoerri 3y ago

His website is very nice as well: https://80.style/#/about/whatUs_under_the_chromeZ https://80.style/#/about/whatUs_under_the_chromeZ

tempaway42963 3y ago

While he doesn’t have regrets over the job, there is one thing Ghignola does regret: letting fans down. "I do remember promising several times that I would finish Noctis V and, still after all these years, I’ve never gone back. I’m sorry; I wish I had the strength to go back and finish what I started more than ten years ago." Its nice that there was a community around the game and that Alessandro felt part of it. But I'm sad that he felt pressure to finish the next version and that that might have weighed on him. Because its very easy for fans to ask for something, but actually very hard to be the person that has to do all the work to meet their expectations. The fans are free to drift off and find something else to enjoy, but the feeling of unfinished projects and broken promises can stay with the creator for a long time. In short: As a creator its easy to get wrapped up in fans demands but in reality you need to have boundaries. Perhaps you dont want to spent the next four years making something for them. Perhaps you've got other things you want to do with your life.

h2odragon 3y ago
I think this genre of "space exploration" games, in particular, is likely to have communities containing people who have no other life at all, and who become unreasonably emotional about "their" game that they have instead. Can lead to absolutely toxic communities. Source: steam says i have 2k hr into X4 foundations
- richardjdare 3y ago
  heh, also at that time, there was little else to scratch that itch, other than going back to Frontier: Elite 2 on an emulator or something. That's how I got into Noctis all those years ago.
- varelse 3y ago
  [dead]
- digging 3y ago
  I recently bought X4:F on sale from a small recommendation. I like it so far after about 8 hours. But already I am wondering how deep the galaxy actually is - like, what will I actually do, other than keep getting more money and more ships for their own sake? What goals do you pursue? What drives you to keep going back?

xmcqdpt2 3y ago

I spent so many hours in Noctis! The graphics were amazing when compared with other games I could run on my P133, and it was developed by just one guy.

wishfish 3y ago

I adored Noctis back in the day. There was something very lonely and alien about it. Something No Man's Sky never quite captured. The lofi graphics just helped to make it more haunting and isolated. But the community was nice. I would regularly download the updated encyclopedia. I didn't know about his depression, but I could sort of feel it through his game world. He mentioned, a long time ago, that the game was partially a product of a painful breakup. The game, especially the backstory, reflected that loss.

suprjami 3y ago

I have always found his games fascinating since I first discovered Cryxels probably in the early 00s. There's something about the beautiful chunky graphics and silent exploration which just draws you in for hours.

__void 3y ago

Alex we miss u

skerit 3y ago

Noctis! I loved this game. Up until a few years ago I kept visiting his website, in the hopes something would come up again about Noctis V, lol. He used the term "Home sweet pixel" too back then I believe, but also "The web territory of Fottifoh" or something. It was al very interesting. To me it wasn't really a precursor to NMS, but more to Minecraft. The "infinite" terrain on worlds is what kept me interested.

NelsonMinar 3y ago

Noctis was a big deal to a small audience. The game and this story here remind me of outsider art, the term of respect for paintings and sculptures and the like made by non-traditional artists. It's a whole genre of art, well studied and represented. We have outsider art in software too, like Noctis. Not just games: TempleOS is a well known example. I'd call Dwarf Fortress outsider art too, an unusually successful example that has had a lot of influence on mainstream games.

AdmiralAsshat 3y ago

So what's the best way to run it on a modern system for those curious to try? Does it work in DOSBox? Does Archive.org have it running somewhere?

jorisd 3y ago
DOSEMU or FreeDOS in a VM (e.g. Virtualbox) typically gives the best performance with decent ease-of-use. Otherwise, you'll want to run it natively on Windows XP or earlier, or FreeDOS. For running in a VM, you'll need to have an x86 processor with hardware-assisted virtualization enabled. DosBOX might work and is worth trying due to its ease of setup, but you really need a very powerful machine.

varelse 3y ago

[dead]

schmichael 3y ago

Since graduating college I have basically only ever been a commercial software developer. Reading about programmers who, usually but not always through games, treat code as a canvas on which to paint their thoughts, dreams, desires, and struggles is an inspiration even when they themselves feel like they’ve let someone down.

regularfry 3y ago

This is one of those games where I have to wonder why I never knew about it at the time. It looks like the sort of thing I'd just have lost weeks at a time to.

carride 3y ago

Archived without intrusive cookie agreement https://archive.is/196Fk https://archive.is/196Fk

lizardking 3y ago

I love the aesthetic from the footage of the game. I wish 1990's retro futurism would make a comeback!

mherkender 3y ago

It is very much a game influenced by depression, I recall you played a solo alien with a destroyed planet and no knowledge if any of his kind was left or where they would be. It was a really magical game from the pre-iPhone era of the web, so experimental it barely made sense. It's sad to hear of the creator's struggles, I hope he focuses on himself instead of worrying about letting anyone down.