11 ms·
No Man’s Sky Is A Huge Procedurally Generated Sci-Fi Exploration Sim
- jaryd 13y agoThe embedded gameplay clip has been removed from YouTube so here's an alternative post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2FXIf9N-yA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2FXIf9N-yA
- vignesh_vs_in 13y agoThe above video has also been removed. Use this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNVgVl6v6YU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNVgVl6v6YU
- dirkk0 13y agoThis looks awesome - Minecraft meets Dune meets Homeland?
- radley 13y agoGametrailers original: http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/3hpqoi/no-man-s-sky-vgx-2013--world-premiere-trailer http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/3hpqoi/no-man-s-sky-vgx-2...
- usernew1817 13y agoThis game came out of nowhere, the VGX show was basically being hyped of AAA titles, but no one was expecting an indie title to get as much hype as it's getting right now. I think the next gen consoles are making it much easier for devs to develop on, though frustratingly its still far more difficult to publish on console then mobile, mainly because you need to first be approved into the developer program before they even consider letting you publish games. Regardless, it seems to be moving in the right direction, although somewhat slow.
- MrBra 13y agoOuch.. that "it has to be funny" stylized graphics everywhere..
- melloclello 13y agoI thought the aesthetic was actually kinda neat!
- ceejayoz 13y agoThe space scenes look a lot like Homeworld.
- MrBra 13y agoYou know in the angry birds era (and generally in mobile games era where all games need to look appealing to everyone, even the most casual gamer ever) a lot of indie devs started to think they had to create cute appealing girlie-awe-insipiring stylized graphics even when that would not be the best fit for a given game genre and would completely compromise player immersion. Another reason for this is that this kind of asset is way easier to implement than full blow realistic 3D models and environment. In the end it's all about that, sacrifying game immersion so to be appealing for casual gamers who are not interested in game immersion and could even be put off by that because it contributes to let them think game is harder to play because it's not 'just a game'.
- mercurial 13y agoBut not all games ask for "full blow realistic 3D models and environments". You have plenty of indie titles (Stealth Bastard, Super Meat Boy, Hotline Miami) for which "stylized graphics" in 2D are essential. Another example is Apotheon [1]: even if I'm not that fond of the gameplay, I wouldn't trade their stunning 2D graphics for any kind of 3D. 1: http://www.apotheongame.com/ http://www.apotheongame.com/
- MrBra 13y agoWhere exactly did I say all games need full blown 3D graphics? I am just saying that for this kind of games, where the hype/fun/immersion is all about how much fine-grained procedurally generated spatial/life details you can get, to make it all look cartonish style it's a bit simplistic and not up to the capability/deepness/complexity of the ecosystem engine they are proud to market. To me it's just a bit of riding the trend because indie devs know very well that nowadays cute looking cartoonish indie games are well praised and boosted by mobile app stores whose ratings are driven by casual gamers looking before everything else for cute bleeps and rainbowish color splashes! Anyway this is just my little opinion and I am sure it is incomplete and does not encompass all the aspects there are to it. Just see it as a starter for a more in-depth conversation, if you wish. Provided you will take a 360 degrees approach to it :)
- wavesounds 13y agoProcedural generation is a widely used term in the production of media; it refers to content generated algorithmically rather than manually. Often, this means creating content on the fly rather than prior to distribution. This is often related to computer graphics applications and video game level design.
- anonymouz 13y agoYou might as well post a link to the Wikipedia article [1], when you copy its blurb. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation
- RyanZAG 13y agoWe've heard this same claim so many times before. Procedurally generating each atom? Come on, this is just a marketing gimmick. These never turn out to be decent games, usually it's just running around a world with randomly appearing enemies who all act the same and you're bored within 10 minutes. I'd be more optimistic if this exact thing hadn't been claimed before every year for the last 20 with no results.
- nacs 13y agoYeah I think it has potential but the abuse of the term procedural for blatant marketing purposes is a bit overboard. Procedural down to the "atom" yet when you watch the trailer, you see the same old trees, rocks, 2-jet engine spaceships and an extremely Earth-like world.. The only thing that looked procedural are the seemingly random colors. Everything else looks like they modeled a bunch of 3D assets. Maybe they're procedurally generating the terrain like Minecraft but they're definitely building the world from pre-modeled assets.
- ronaldx 13y agoActual trees are generated procedurally via their cells, and they look like the same old trees. That's how trees work.
- nacs 13y agoAnd your point is? Are you suggesting that they're 'growing' a tree procedurally from the cellular level?
- ronaldx 13y agoNo, my point is that your complaint above doesn't make sense. Trees are trees: if anything, the fact that you've correctly identified 'the same old trees' shows that the designer has done a good job in this respect.
- sillysaurus2 13y agoIt's true. Speaking as a gamedev, more people should really study how Notch was able to make procedural gen so interesting to look at. It's rather involved, and took a lot of testing to get right. And even that starts to get boring after awhile. Every environment you see in this video will probably look roughly the same: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNVgVl6v6YU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNVgVl6v6YU The reason is because most programmers simply do 'procedural' gen like "if desert, then X. If temperate, than Y. If..." But you can achieve much more interesting results by using weighting instead of special casing.
- yconst 13y agoLooks quite cool and such. But what do you actually do in this game? I mean, in what ways do you interact with your environment?
- kayoone 13y agoToday we are still writing code like 20 years ago and one could think there has been little evolution regarding that. But this imo shows where the evolution has gone. Today a team of 4 is able to build a procedurally generated game of high visual quality with a gigantic scope like that because our tools, libraries, techniques and also hardware have evolved to a point where this is possible. I think thats pretty amazing!
- AlexanderDhoore 13y agoRevolution vs Evolution. People want to think that progress comes from a handful of revolutions that change the world. It's a lot more exciting than what we actually have: evolutions, over long periods of time.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoExcept that actual biological evolution works via punctuated equilibrium, so it is possible to be living in interesting times.
- TulliusCicero 13y agoNeat tech, but the problem with procedurally generated games with large worlds is that the core game mechanics are often bland or shallow, and the content can come across as very samey.
- namuol 13y agoHow can you even begin to judge the gameplay from the teaser video?
- alan_cx 13y agoYou cant. But, the poster didn't do that at all, didn't even mention the video. The post is short, so its not hard to see that. My skeptical question would be: how can you set a mission in a genuinely dynamically generated world? For example, you might not even know that a bit of land will exist where you want the mission to begin. But, maybe I'm missing something obvious.
- PavlovsCat 13y agoProcedurally generated just means you can create lots of variety; not that you can't generate ahead of time, save it to disk, and even put potentially useful features in the database and then just pick from those when putting together a mission.
- teamonkey 13y agoIt was a teaser, but it was reasonably long and a lot of gameplay was shown.
- MrBra 13y ago1) http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshparnell/limit-theory-an-infinite-procedural-space-game http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshparnell/limit-theory... (pledged $187,865 of $50,000 goal) 2) https://www.inovaestudios.com/ https://www.inovaestudios.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6a69dMLb_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6a69dMLb_k (has been in development for years, about to start a campaign on kickstarter) 3) http://pioneerspacesim.net/ http://pioneerspacesim.net/ (free, open source, alreaady playable, alpha stage and actively developed)
- octaveguin 13y agoI like the list. I'm thinking/hoping that sandbox games with generated content will becomes a larger part of the core game market. Mostly, we see success in the indie 2D world: Don't starve - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsWm_gWyk4s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsWm_gWyk4s Binding of Isaac - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5PLC6nmOO4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5PLC6nmOO4 Terraria - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHPX0kR9h7I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHPX0kR9h7I And just released Starbound - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvrmB4tw33Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvrmB4tw33Q Certainly 3D games are quite exciting in this space, too, but the 2D games seem to have a lot more traction with the big exception of minecraft. I suspect it's simply easier to make an engaging sandbox when you don't have to worry about complexities in art assets that a 3D game requires.
- stefan_kendall 13y agoUh, Don't Starve isn't generated. The world is fixed. Pro-tip: You need rocks, and you need them fast. Get all you can in the south, and then move northeast for the large rock pile. From there, you need to figure out how to survive the stronger enemies.
- javajosh 13y agoI dislike this kind of news coverage very much. It is designed to tease rather than inform. Although, I have to admit I was intrigued less by the claim that the game procedurally generates every atom, and more by the question it begs of how you'd actually generate every atom. Usually, of course, atoms don't matter. The ideal gas law, for example, is essentially a "rule of thumb" which gives you useful ways to predict the behavior of large ensembles of atoms; e.g. to average over the movements of statistically significant (avagadro's number or so) individual particles - indeed, one of the most amazing things in physics is the connection between Newtonian physics and thermodynamics via statistical mechanics. In any event, my naive answer to the question of what should we simulate would be "don't simulate anything you don't have to" which means that unless you have scanning electron microscopes in the game you don't simulate atoms at all. You mostly use approximations. In games, collisions are important so surfaces (and their properties) tend to be important. And so those simple geometries defines the data structure you use to define the world. In essence mass is defined in a computer program to be a volume that behaves a certain way in the presence of acceleration. But there is no need to describe materials as a lattice of much smaller particles. It's almost never relevant to the simulation. So, yeah, I don't think it's reasonable to expect a game to simulate a world such that ad hoc chemical reactions can take place, etc. But it's not unreasonable to expect in-game scanning electron microscopes to be able to realistically resolve the details of any material.
- Houshalter 13y agoI think they mean atom as in, the smallest unit that everything is built out of, not the scientific atom. I.e. not a single polygon is placed by a human artist and the sets aren't pre-designed with just some random variation. But looking at the demo that doesn't seem to be true either.
- jere 13y agoEh, I think the more charitable reading is they meant a physical atom, but in the sense "not a single atom has been designed by hand." It's like if you made some algorithmic music and claimed every nanosecond was generated automatically, even though we tend to think in terms of notes that are orders of magnitude larger. If they really expect anyone in the gaming community to believe they're rendering each blade of grass with a few Octillion points or polygons, they're absolutely insane.
- jroes 13y agoAnyone know what engine they are using? The visuals look excellent. EDIT: Think I found it: http://www.crytek.com/cryengine http://www.crytek.com/cryengine
- Flow 13y agoOh great, no OS X version then. :-/
- booop 13y agoIn my experience if you have an Apple computer and you want to play demanding games it's better to have windows installed in a separate partition. The performance difference for some cross platform games is huge (around 30 - 40% slower on OSX).
- 13y ago
- daredevildave 13y agoThere's an video interview with one of the developers here: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-12-08-hello-games-debuts-first-person-action-adventure-no-mans-sky http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-12-08-hello-games-deb...
- bencoder 13y agoReminds me of an old "game" I used to play called Noctis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis
- MrBra 13y agoToo bad Noctis programmer went through an hard time... Last time I checked his website he had blogged about some kind of depression that arised from always trying to be perfectionist. And you can see this if you consider he was about to write everything from scratch for his next version of noctis. He started coding something like a new assembler language (if I remember correclty) which would have later be used to code the game in.
- bencoder 13y agoYeah I used to hang around the forums waiting for Noctis V. He was developing it in Linoleum, which is his own portable assembly language that he wrote. It's still available and an interesting experiment.
- otikik 13y agoI see landscapes, animals and ships, but no people.
- alan_cx 13y agoWell, people do tend to ruin and scar everything. I'd leave people out completely. Play the game as an animal!!!
- gbog 13y agoHave you seen Burgundy vineyards or Longsheng rice terraces? Would you say these are scars over the landscapes? In the old world at least, humans have created with their hands most of the countryside landscapes and it is not always ugly.
- Derbasti 13y agoThere is an incredible amount of negativity in this thread. They said all the landscapes are procedurally generated. They did not say that there won't be any missions or tech trees or some other kind of hand-crafted progression system. Many games like Minecraft or Terraria do very well with procedurally generated terrain and some kind of progression system. I think that this might have huge potential. This could be an awesome game indeed, and so far I have not seen anything that hints to it being boring or repetitive--just unfinished.
- Associat0r 13y agoCheck out "Elite: Dangerous" it has a scientifically accurate 1:1 scale, fully Seamless Milky Way galaxy using a mix of procedural generation with artist direction http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Elite:_Dangerous_FAQ http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Elite:_Dangerous_FAQ http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Procedural_Generation http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Procedural_Generation
- amiramir 13y agoI've been a fan of David Braben's since playing Elite and Virus as a kid. I'd never seen him speak and The Procedural Generation video gave me a whole new appreciation of his intellect. I hope he gets a knighthood for his work on Raspberry-Pi. Much greatness in him and I wonder what he would have achieved if he had started off in California rather than Essex and Cambridge.
- xradionut 13y ago"Much greatness in him and I wonder what he would have achieved if he had started off in California rather than Essex and Cambridge." Maybe nothing great? Consider if Linus didn't have Finnish winters?
- objclxt 13y ago> Much greatness in him and I wonder what he would have achieved if he had started off in California rather than Essex and Cambridge. Wow, that's more than a little bit self-important / arrogant. You do realize that Cambridge is home to several huge tech innovators, right (ARM?) And that the UK produces more than its fair share of huge video games (GTA?). Applying your logic, who knows what that Tim Berners-Lee guy might have achieved if he'd started off in the valley rather than CERN...
- Lavinski 13y agoReminds me of infinity (from https://inovaestudios.com/ https://inovaestudios.com/), which I've been watching for the past few years.
- raingrove 13y agoCool Video! By the way, in the video, by "Hydrogen Dioxide", I am pretty sure they actually meant actually meant H2O - "Dihydrogen Monoxide" or simply "Water".
- Johnwbh 13y agoReminds me a bit of Spore, but hopefully not so disappointing.
- Yuioup 13y agoThis game has an incredible potential for broken promises. I predict bad review scores, howls of request for refunds, and the lead developer putting out blogs in the vein of "sorry, we should do better. Expect free updates that will fix everything soon!"
- josteink 13y agoThis looks massively impressive. Wonder if they can deliver as much as the trailer promises? This is the sort teaser which makes me want to try the game just because of the "subtle" Dune-reference. Is there an Arakis anywhere there for us to discover?
- networked 13y agoI like the concept of a procedural space exploration game and No Man’s Sky looks like a promising entry in the genre. There has been a number of attempts so far that approached this concept from different angles (from using space as a setting for fast roguelike gameplay [1] to pure exploration [2]), many of them resulting in good games. That said, if No Man’s Sky really is totally procedural I wonder how the developers will handle the overall structure of the game and avoid the "quicksand box" [3] trap. This is especially pertinent if the game doesn't feature a Minecraft-style combination of building and survival to make the players not mind the "quicksand". I know the game in which I enjoyed exploring space the most is The Ur-Quan Masters (formerly known as "Star Control II") [4]. The star systems and planets there are not procedurally generated and I don't think randomizing them would make much of the difference for the reason I'll explain in a moment. My best guess as to why I liked UQM/SC2 so much beyond its audiovisual style is that a) it has no formal mission structure that limits the player's actions; and b) there's a lot you can do; but c) your exploration still ties into an engaging larger story, which and in turn contributes unique one-time encounters to the exploration. A consequence of c) is that mixing up the layout of the galaxies without changing the overall plot, which at its core is fairly linear and features a time limit (think the original Fallout), wouldn't really change what the game is like. My guess is that the company that figures out how to generate distinct game plots that provide c) along with a) and b) will take over the procedural games business, if not the game industry as a whole. The question is whether c) can be done well enough in some way that doesn't involve an artificial general intelligence or per-player MTurk writers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Adventures_in_Infinite_Space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Adventures_in_Infinite... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis [3] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/QuicksandBox http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/QuicksandBox [4] It's now FOSS and available from http://sc2.sourceforge.net/ http://sc2.sourceforge.net/. Highly recommended if you have an interest in SF space games.
- japaget 13y agoDoes anybody know what platform this game will run on? Xbox One, PS4, Wii, PC, Mac, iOS, Android? None of the promos gave us a clue as far as I could tell.
- xioxox 13y agoIt reminds me a lot of Starglider 2. That was a great game from the 80s, which let you fly between several different planets to complete a set of missions. The graphics and gameplay were pretty amazing at the time on the Atari ST and the Amiga. One minute you'd be navigating around a set of tunnels deep inside a planet, and the next you'd be chasing whales in the outer envelope of a gas giant. It was some stunning game design and coding. I've not seen anything quite like it since.
- rralian 13y agoWhen I was a kid, my parents got me a couple sci-fi encyclopedias, which were big books of beautiful sci fi illustrations with some made-up history explaining each painting encyclopedia-style. I loved them. This video reminds me of those illustrations very much, which I mean to be high praise. I just looked through my books and called my mom to see if she had them, but no dice. They were large hardcover books with a blue cover. Anyone else remember them? I'd love to track them down for my own kids.
- patcon 13y agoOh man, you got me going on a mission to find a similar book, so I thought I'd drop the things I found back in here: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedition_(book) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedition_(book) - http://stuffwecollect.com/galactic-aliens-alan-daniels-original-artwork-and-his-connection-to-blade-runner http://stuffwecollect.com/galactic-aliens-alan-daniels-origi... (This was for sure one of the ones I'd read)
- redler 13y agoMaybe this one? I got it when I was a kid, and it's still right there on my shelf: http://www.amazon.com/Spacecraft-2000-2100-A-D-Authority-Handbook/dp/0890092117 http://www.amazon.com/Spacecraft-2000-2100-A-D-Authority-Han...
- rralian 13y agoThanks so much redler! That's totally it! I found a number of photos of the book on flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/erice/sets/72157625355578461/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/erice/sets/72157625355578461/) and they really brought me back to my childhood. I had the first two as listed here: http://www.khantazi.org/Rec/TTABooks/TTABooks.html http://www.khantazi.org/Rec/TTABooks/TTABooks.html I'll have to see if I can pick up the whole series. Thanks again!
- gpjt 13y agoWow, that takes me back. I was at school with the kids of the guy who wrote that, his study was full of awesome designs and tons of similar stuff.
- jheriko 13y agogood stuff. i've been waiting for a small team to do something like this for a while... and have been planning something similar myself for when i can break free from the shackles of full-time work. knowing some of these guys personally - i'm quite pleased its them who are doing it. :)
- alkonaut 13y agoEdit: I agree this thread contains a lot of negativity and I agree it's too early to make any calls on this particular game, which does look fantastic. Since so little can be said of this game the discussion is more "why have so many tried to do this, and failed"? So I'll try: Why is "procedural" used as a sales pitch? The only thing cool about procedural is that you can make something extremely vast. But then "vast" should be the sales pitch! I'd much rather buy a game that promised "ten thousand planets carefully modeled by artists", than a game that contains millions of random ones. I fact, I'd probably prefer a sim with a designed world much smaller than that. The thing with procedural environments is that they leave everything to game mechanics. A well designed world can support a basic or boring mechanic (such as a linear shooter). Procedural worlds need a game mechanic so deep and brilliant that only very few games have managed it (minecraft and a few of its inspirations, for example). There isn't much that can be said about mechanics from the trailer, so we'll see. I think (sadly) it will be the prettiest in a long line of "let's make an elite style universe sim where the game mechanic will probably/hopefully emerge from the sheer awesomeness that is an enormous space sim".
- swayvil 13y agoThe music artist : 65 days of static album : we were exploding anyway song : debutante
- notastartup 13y agoI don't get why there's so many negative comments here. This game looks absolutely amazing. If anything, efforts where previous attempts have been unsuccessful, should be lauded, and there's a lot of academic talk for a 2 minute video. Let's wait and see but I have a good feeling about this one.
- yarou 13y agoHopefully this game will be good. I've been looking for a decent spacey game like Freelancer, but so far nothing seems remotely close to it. The Discovery mod in particular added a dimension that most modern games lack.
- axilmar 13y ago“If you see the stars, those are real stars. They have their own planets around them, and you can go there” There goes my dream.