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Building the Infinite Digital Universe of No Man's Sky
An anonymous reader writes: Hello Games is a small development studio, only employing 10 people. But they're building a game, No Man's Sky, that's enormous — effectively infinite. Its universe is procedurally generated, from the star systems down to individual species of plant and animal life. The engine running the game is impressively optimized. A planet's characteristics are not computed ahead of time — terrain and lifeforms are randomly generated on the fly as a player explores it. But, of course, that created a problem for the developers — how do they know their procedural generation algorithms don't create ridiculous life forms or geological formations? They solved that by writing AI bot software that explores the universe and captures brief videos, which are then converted to GIF format and posted on a feed the developers can review. The article goes into a bit more detail on how the procedural generation works, and how such a small studio can build such a big game.
Definitely feel a Peter Molyneaux coming on - before you know it the hype will go so mad, you won't even notice that the game's actually been released, and then we'll find out it's as dull as hell as a game.
But aside from that, a team of 10 isn't exactly tiny. A lot better games have been written with a lot less people.
And front-page of Slashdot before release? I'm guessing at least one of those people works in marketing...
Jesus Christ, it's terrible when somebody advocates "downvoting" as something of value.
Just look at reddit or Hacker News today, or even Slashdot, for example. The discussion there is horribly sterile, all thanks to their flawed moderation systems that encourage rampant censorship of any ideas that are unique or worthwhile. Comments expressing such ideas are near-instantly downvoted out of view.
That kind of a system fails even worse when the audience consists of people who are commonly labeled as "hipsters". These people have a very skewed perception of reality. They pretend to embrace "tolerance" and "acceptance", but they're often among the most strident crusaders against any sort of free thought and free expression.
We see the same with academic peer review, where the theory behind it is sound enough, but in practice it's just the entrenched players demonizing and shitting upon any challengers. Hell, we see the same with democratic political systems.
I don't see why your system would be any different. Unique game content would be quenched by the stupidity of those who seek to enforce total and unrelenting conformance with what they like.
...and I'm generally not interested in games. But this could turn me into a convert - the concept seems really awesome, and the sample video looked very cool.
Just now I've slipped off my armour of techno-jadedness, and I'm amazed at the wonders we humans are capable of creating when we're not busy engaging in pillaging, war, and petty bickering. Off-topic perhaps, but what the hell.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Frontier Elite 2, for instance. Ken Musgrave literally wrote the book on procedural generation and is the brains behind MojoWorld, a procedural world generator that's great fun. If you liked Bryce back in the day, MojoWorld is Bryce on steroids.
Not knocking these guys at all, btw, it looks great. Just giving some background.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
God, Starflight was a thing of beauty. Alien Legacy (1994) had a pretty gorgeous mix of procedural and hand-tweaked, too. If you want a procedural FPS, I think what you're looking for is Tower of Guns--I haven't played it but it definitely fits the bill.
Reminds me of Elite of old past. While fun for a while, the similarities got boring and tedious pretty fast.
Thing is, although Elite used procedural generation, the game was about space combat, trading, piracy and smuggling with cutting edge (for the time - kids today won't understand) graphics. Things like the planet names and descriptions, and the fact there were a gazillion systems, were part of the atmosphere, not the Unique Selling Point.
Same with Minecraft - when you get fed up of exploring your effectively infinite world, there's building stuff, playing with redstone circuitry, fighting, potions, railways, breeding horses... The procedural generation is part of an ensemble. So the jury's out until we here what No Man's Sky's gameplay is like.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
As an Age of Empires / Empire Earth fan, I respectfully assert that I prefer random maps. If I'm going to sink a few hundred hours into getting good at a game, I prefer to win by skillful improvising instead of by optimizing my build orders around map travel routes that are known to-the-second and careful memorization of tile counts where I know I can block off a passage most efficiently every game. If your asymmetrical armies are well defined (and admittedly, that means they are not very asymmetrical), no map will give such an extreme advantage that it can't be overcome by spotting it early and adapting your strategy to force an engagement somewhere else. Or, hell, 'when he sees this advantageous narrow passage he's sure to build a lot of scissors units, so I'll build a bunch of rocks in anticipation and take bigger advantage than he will'.
It seems like random-map RTSes and hand-built-map RTSes are really different subgenres altogether, and they draw different crowds.
Like Elite Dangerous? :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
It does initially feel like Spore, but when Giantbomb were talking/hanging out with a some of the developers (E3 Day 1 GiantBombcast, at around 30min in or so), they pushed the devs about what the hell you do besides exploring and they didn't go too far and promise too much. They did mention some ideas that haven't been completely fleshed out yet: combat - space and planet-level, exploring (sharing? ugh), resource mining, ship upgrading. I would personally like it if they created some giant ship-design tree that would possibly be based on what your planet(s) had. But as they mentioned, these either weren't showable, or were just ideas they had, so it's probably best to wait it out and see if they can find some good gameplay mechanics and game goals. Otherwise it'll be "201X's Spore". (although I personally didn't mind Spore at the smaller kens; it's just that I remember my last hours of Spore were playing a frustrating planetary micromanagement sim. )
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
You save the initial values that created it then any changes to it must be saved separate and appended after its creation each time.