No Man’s Sky Is A Huge Procedurally Generated Sci-Fi Exploration Sim

http://indiestatik.com/2013/12/07/mans-sky/

by radley • 13 years ago

280 116 13 years ago

jaryd• 13 years ago

The embedded gameplay clip has been removed from YouTube so here's an alternative post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2FXIf9N-yA

vignesh_vs_in• 13 years ago

The above video has also been removed.

Use this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNVgVl6v6YU

dirkk0• 13 years ago

This looks awesome - Minecraft meets Dune meets Homeland?

radley• 13 years ago

Gametrailers original:

http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/3hpqoi/no-man-s-sky-vgx-2...

usernew1817• 13 years ago

This 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.

MrBra6• 13 years ago

Ouch.. that "it has to be funny" stylized graphics everywhere..

melloclello• 13 years ago

I thought the aesthetic was actually kinda neat!

ceejayoz• 13 years ago

The space scenes look a lot like Homeworld.

MrBra6• 13 years ago

You 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'.

wavesounds• 13 years ago

Procedural 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• 13 years ago

You might as well post a link to the Wikipedia article [1], when you copy its blurb.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation

RyanZAG• 13 years ago

We'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.

nacs2• 13 years ago

Yeah 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.

ronaldx2• 13 years ago

Actual trees are generated procedurally via their cells, and they look like the same old trees. That's how trees work.

sillysaurus2• 13 years ago

It'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

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.

exizt88• 13 years ago

more people should really study how Notch was able to make procedural gen so interesting to look at.

Could you elaborate or link an article on this?

fhars• 13 years ago

Procedural generation along similar lines has been used successfully for most of the vegetation in Pixar's "Brave", see http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2012/Volume-35-Issue-4-J... for some background.

electrograv• 13 years ago

First, I want to say how amazingly cool I think "No Man's Sky" looks -- as an enjoyer of scifi content and indie games, I will certainly be among the first in line to buy/play it when it comes out.

That said, I agree with this criticism of "procedural content" completely. A while ago I created a little toy WebGL tech demo featuring "a vast virtual 3D universe containing billions of unique stars and planets" (it's open-source on github if anyone's interested) -- so I encountered this issue first-hand (and saw it come up many times elsewhere in the past, of course).

IMO, the fundamental problem lies in a subtle distinction between "infinite variation" vs. "infinite novelty". Most procedural generation amounts to not much more than random noise passed through a variety of hand-tuned filters and/or custom code. In most cases it's how you tune that filtering and custom logic that leads to any amount of interesting results, not the underlying random noise generator (from which the too-good-to-be-true claim of "infinite variety" is derived).

I don't think it's completely impossible to derive interesting variation from a combination of mathematics and randomness, but I think the degree to which we find something interesting or "novel" is at least somewhat related to the amount of computational complexity put into its derivation (at least, that's my intuition on the matter).

hyp0• 13 years ago

I think grammars are a way to formalize this intuition of novelty (NB: grammars can be use to generate as well as to parse). Noise is like a stream of random symbols from an alphabet - anything is possible; most all of it boring. A grammar carves out a subset of the possible streams, only those with certain relationships between the symbols.

Regular expressions are a simple kind of grammar (aka "Regular Grammars") - you can see generation as choices made for explicit choice operators ("|"), and choices of whether to loop ("∗") or continue. Although limited, they can be surprisingly expressive. Context Free Grammars allow you to generate things that have the basic structure of xml, json and source code. And you can have Turing Equivalent grammars that, in describing a subset, can compute anything.

Of course, grammars aren't restricted to the Chomsky Hierarchy, but can include any way of describing the subset of streams (or generating an instance of them) - for example, the recent HN travesty/markov generators.

You can search for the right grammar (machine learning), by taking a corpus of instances of what you want to generate, and test out your grammar, by seeing how well it compresses them. This shows whether it is capturing regularities within them and between them - the rules or laws that are the essence of a grammar. In doing this, you should also take into account the size of the grammar itself: consider the extremes of one grammar that factors out deep regularities; versus one that is simply a choice between each instance, verbatim (this compresses real well: it just needs to encode which instance. i.e. log2(1/N) bits, e.g. 8 bits to encode which of 256 different instances, assuming uniform probability). Accounting for the complexity of the grammar avoids this.

This comes down to the length of the description of the instances + the length of the description of the grammar.

( "Model" is probably a better term than "grammar", since it doesn't imply a sequence. )

Re: your last point, there's no theoretical reason that an extremely accurate model must be computationally expensive to execute (e.g. flocking behaviour was simpler than expected; and Occam's Razor gives us hope) - but it might well be computationally expensive to discover in the first place. e.g. require many great leaps of intuition by humans. (Even if it's obvious in hindsight.)

The trailer looks a little repetitive to me - esp the yellow underwater plants; and the trees seem to be random blocks of foliage - like minecraft trees or github icons, just rendered nicer. I don't want to criticize, as they probably have some cool innovations hidden away in there.

What I'd like is gameplay-significant procedural generation. e.g. trees you can climb, so their shape affects where you can reach and how. Terrain - mountains, streams - naturally has this effect. Then, developers have to make it work right! So far, only the minecraft/dwarf fortress genres do this. Because generation is fundamental to their concept, their gameplay, and why people like the games, I suspect that that genre is where we'll eventually get the hi-res breakthroughs - whereas for every other genre, including "No Man's Sky", if their gameplay isn't 100% dependent on generation, whenever there's a conflict between the two, generation will lose (crunch time! what must be finished to ship?). Servant of two masters etc.

FWIW I still think FarCry2 (not 3) creates the most immersive world so far. Hopefully something even better will be done for nextgen consoles/PCs, as opposed to just higher resolution and higher gamification.

ajuc• 13 years ago

I've encountered the problem as well (2d side scrolling game with procedurally generated infinite universe, enemies, etc). It was boring.

I think theproblem is with Kolmogorov complexity. No matter how much variation there's in your game if the algorithm to create it is simple people will quickly develop intuition about what to expect, and get bored.

The only game that I've seen doing procedural generation right is Dwarf Fortress, because it's too complex to model it in your brain as you play.

dscrd• 13 years ago

Ever played rogue, nethack or dwarf fortress?

barbs• 13 years ago

We've heard this same claim so many times before.

Could you please list some examples?

mikeash• 13 years ago

Never turn out to be decent games? Some of the most beloved and respected games in history (e.g. Elite) are done this way.

fidotron• 13 years ago

Nonsense.

This lot being Brits of the right age it blatantly follows from the tradition of Elite and Exile, two old 8-bit titles where everything was procedurally generated in order to fit into the machines of the era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_(1988_video_game)

louthy2• 13 years ago

Everybody knows Elite, so I won't say much about that. But Exile really was a spectacular game for the time. Actually, I didn't realise it was procedurally generated - which probably explains why I spent many hours as a teen trying to work out how on earth they made it all fit in ~20k of RAM.

fzltrp• 13 years ago

I don't think that the word atom here refer to the usual physical object (which shouldn't be called that way btw), but rather to indivisible objects (ie. the original meaning of atom) in the game data model, iow every actors (passive or active).

deelowe• 13 years ago

Minecraft, terraria, and starbound seem to contradict your point.

yconst• 13 years ago

Looks quite cool and such. But what do you actually do in this game? I mean, in what ways do you interact with your environment?

kayoone3• 13 years ago

Today 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• 13 years ago

Revolution 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• 13 years ago

Except that actual biological evolution works via punctuated equilibrium, so it is possible to be living in interesting times.

TulliusCicero• 13 years ago

Neat 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.

namuol3• 13 years ago

How can you even begin to judge the gameplay from the teaser video?

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

You 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.

teamonkey2• 13 years ago

It was a teaser, but it was reasonably long and a lot of gameplay was shown.

MrBra6• 13 years ago

1) http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshparnell/limit-theory... (pledged $187,865 of $50,000 goal)

2) https://www.inovaestudios.com/ 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/ (free, open source, alreaady playable, alpha stage and actively developed)

octaveguin• 13 years ago

I 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

Binding of Isaac - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5PLC6nmOO4

Terraria - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHPX0kR9h7I

And just released Starbound - 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• 13 years ago

Uh, 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.

pohl2• 13 years ago

I clicked on the Starbound link and hours of my life vanished. What a beautiful game.

namuol3• 13 years ago

I'm always happy to see more space exploration sims.

xnxn• 13 years ago

I'm a fan of Space Engine, one of the few space simulators I've seen do procedural generation well. http://en.spaceengine.org/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj-VcZY_nwE

bsaul• 13 years ago

The videos are incredible. Unfortunately, no mac os version yet !! Damn...

mladenkovacevic• 13 years ago

Replying so I can come back to this later.. That looks ...incredible

javajosh• 13 years ago

I 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.

Houshalter2• 13 years ago

I 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• 13 years ago

Eh, 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• 13 years ago

Anyone know what engine they are using? The visuals look excellent.

EDIT: Think I found it: http://www.crytek.com/cryengine

Flow• 13 years ago

Oh great, no OS X version then. :-/

booop• 13 years ago

In 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).

teamonkey2• 13 years ago

Where did you find that they were using CryEngine? It seems like a very poor fit for what they demonstrated.

daredevildave• 13 years ago

There's an video interview with one of the developers here:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-12-08-hello-games-deb...

bencoder2• 13 years ago

Reminds me of an old "game" I used to play called Noctis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis

MrBra6• 13 years ago

Too 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.

bencoder2• 13 years ago

Yeah 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• 13 years ago

I see landscapes, animals and ships, but no people.

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

Well, people do tend to ruin and scar everything. I'd leave people out completely. Play the game as an animal!!!

gbog• 13 years ago

Have 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• 13 years ago

There 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.

Associat0r4• 13 years ago

Check 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/Procedural_Generation

amiramir• 13 years ago

I'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.

jheriko4• 13 years ago

yeah, but lets be honest... that's never going to get finished. its not like they've already had 10-15 years of working on it and millions of pounds of investment that have already been wasted... long before the recent kickstart.

notastartup2• 13 years ago

I saw the 1984, 1991, 1995 games on youtube and I am blown away how ahead of the pack it was. Pushing the envelope of hardware in those times and the amount of gameplay depth seems absolutely incredible.

I have my reservations about the new game however because if anything, there's plenty of space shooters out there. No Man's Sky is appealing because of the procedural nature, but the new gameplay videos looked quite good.

I'd want a game to feel like it's new everytime I play it online. I hate seeing the same corridor or encountering same situations. I agree that gameplay here will be the final gamebreaker for me.

I don't buy that procedural = sandbox effect = bored in 10 minutes. If anything I could never play GTA series entirely, I'd get distracted, pick up hookers, shoot a rival gang member in a drive by shooting, and commit suicide by jumping off the building while firing RPG launchers. This also tends to get old.

NoPiece• 13 years ago

I so much like the positive response of Kris Piotrowski of Capy Gmaes (SUPERBROTHERS: SWORD & SWORCERY EP)

kris piotrowski:

No Man's Sky is the video game everyone on Earth wanted to make ever since they first hear the word "video game".

Downside: No Man's Sky just made every game maker feel inadequate and suicidal. Upside: We don't have to try to make No Man's Sky anymore.

The question "Will I ever get to make my Exploration Sim/Space Battle Magnum Opus?" can now be replaced with "When can I play No Man's Sky?"

One important takeaway from No Man's Sky: If you have a dream video game you want to make, you should probably go try to actually make it.

#Below is one of my dream video games.

https://twitter.com/krispiotrowski

GuiA2• 13 years ago

The indie game dev community is incredibly hard to break into (you basically have to work on your game eating ramen for 18 months, and even then you're not sure you'll even succeed), but it's one of the industries with the most pleasant people I've ever met.

I'm not an indie dev, but a few friends from college are, and I get to meet a few of those guys here and there at GDC etc.- they're just delightful. Nerdy friendly guys who are incredibly smart, hard working, with an incredibly diverse set of talents (the skills needed to make a game are immense- programming, visual arts, music composing, game design, marketing- and a lot of those guys do all of it by themselves or with just 1 or 2 other people) and know to have fun.

Paradoxically, the gaming community is one of the most negative one ever (hordes of disappointed gamers will flood your blog and insult your whole family if you don't give them exactly what they want). That contrast is super weird.

Names you should check out if you're interested in knowing more: Kris Piotrowski, Derek Yu, Andy Hull, Phil Fish, Jon Blow, Richard Flannigan, Matthew Davis, Alec Holowka.

GFischer• 13 years ago

I had a LOT of fun with a game with procedurally generated settings:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight

"The group designed what they called a "fractal generator", which took six man-years to develop and allowed them to increase the number of planets in the game from 50 to 800"

Lavinski• 13 years ago

Reminds me of infinity (from https://inovaestudios.com/), which I've been watching for the past few years.

raingrove• 13 years ago

Cool 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• 13 years ago

Reminds me a bit of Spore, but hopefully not so disappointing.

Yuioup• 13 years ago

This 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• 13 years ago

This 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• 13 years ago

I 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...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis

[3] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/QuicksandBox

[4] It's now FOSS and available from http://sc2.sourceforge.net/. Highly recommended if you have an interest in SF space games.

japaget• 13 years ago

Does 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• 13 years ago

It 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.

rralian2• 13 years ago

When 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• 13 years ago

Oh 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://stuffwecollect.com/galactic-aliens-alan-daniels-origi... (This was for sure one of the ones I'd read)

redler• 13 years ago

Maybe 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-Han...

rralian2• 13 years ago

Thanks 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/) 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

I'll have to see if I can pick up the whole series. Thanks again!

gpjt• 13 years ago

Wow, 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.

jheriko4• 13 years ago

good 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• 13 years ago

Edit: 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• 13 years ago

The music

artist : 65 days of static

album : we were exploding anyway

song : debutante

notastartup2• 13 years ago

I 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• 13 years ago

Hopefully 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• 13 years 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.

No Man’s Sky Is A Huge Procedurally Generated Sci-Fi Exploration Sim

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