You'd have as much luck "meeting up" in Super Mario Brothers. There is no real-time networking traffic and no player models in NMS. The "whoops, there must be a bug" reaction is a baldfaced lie.
And the claim that it's unrealistic to reach the same place are BS. There are not 2^64 stars in the starting galaxy (Euclid), only a few tens of billions. And everyone starts out roughly the same distance from the center, which means that they're all in a narrow spherical shell containing only a tiny fraction of those stars. It's rare in the game to not come across systems discovered by others, even when you're not trying.
(The 2^64 claim is valid, but only in that there are 2^32 galaxies)
As for day and night, the game is totally inconsistent about that. You can approach the "day" side of a planet and have it turn out to be night, and vice versa. Really it's hard to think of something in the game that's *not* totally glitched. Even keyboard support is glitched - punctuation in naming discoveries gets mixed up. I mean, how the heck do you even manage to mess up something like that? Oh god, let's not get into the naming filter that lets through names like "Cum Mountain" but bans words like "Cousin" and "Can't".
Indeed. While the landscape goes through LOD changes (although way slower than should be necessary, given that they're not doing any physics, no flowing water, nothing of the sort), there's apparently no LOD work with plant and animal models - they're always the same resolution no matter how close or far they are from you. So the game simply can't afford to have too many of them. Not a problem when they're tiny, but when they're big things that should be able to be seen from far away...
1) Players playing has gone down over 90% since then on average. At off peak it's a fraction of even that. It makes no difference.
2) There is no attempt at real-time network traffic whatsoever. Nothing sends out real-time packets. Nothing is designed to receive them.
3) There is no player model in the game's files. There's some comically bad development models, along with weirdness like a monkey in a hat and the Fallout logo. But no actual player model.
There is no multiplayer. It's not a "bug". It is simply not there, and they know it.
Pop-in = things suddenly appear in the landscape (landscape features, plants, animals, etc). Not a problem when they're appearing as tiny dots on a distant horizon. BIG problem when they're appearing right in front of you.
To be fair, the landscapes can often be quite beautiful. The procedural generation algorithm can have its limitations, but it also shows promise. It was just released too soon. It's actually IMHO the best part of the game. The "game" aspects are what are terribly done.
And concerning procedural generation, it was crippled by their lack of optimization, which prevented them from having large plants / animals without making the already bad pop-in unacceptable. So everything is kept small to moderate in size, which eliminates the "epicness" of planetary exploration. The potential can really be seen with things like the Big Things mod (though you can also see why they cut it, they would have gotten endless bug reports about the pop-in).
The sad thing is, even with the game in the state that it's in, if the development house had been at all decent, had at all play tested, they could have turned it into something that'd be at least decent to play. By means of:
1) Instead of all resources densely available on each planet, resources should be rare and sparse, so you have to actually look and survive. 2) Instead of all buildings densely spaced on each planet, each planet should have between "zero" and "a few" things present so that you don't experience basically the entire game on your first planet. 3) Scanning shouldn't tell you exactly where things are, only approximations, so that it's not just a "fly right to the marker, walk for fifteen seconds, then either pick it up in no time at all, or waste a ton of time mining". 4) In return for upping the actual "exploration" elements that the game was sold on, vastly reduce the busywork grind.
Unfortunately, the developers have actually taken every opportunity to increase the grind since it was released.
Indeed. NMS is built around a painful clicky grind. Seriously, you have to land, mine up resources, take off, click dozens of times to craft warp cells, click to load them, click through the slow, awkward starmap, wait through the animation, repeat four more times until you're out of warp cells and ready to repeat... all in order to go a bit over 1000 light years. Out of nearly 180000 that you have to do to reach the center. Where you're told that the game will utterly change, where planets get weirder and the life stranger and all sorts of other things are going on (none of that is true) and to reach the "ending", which turns out to be nothing more than the game actually punishing you for getting there by zooming out and crash landing your ship in the next effectively identical galaxy.
Indeed, at least PC users have mods, like "Low Flight" (takes off the game's annoying "training wheels" that take any semblance of fun out of flying over a planet) and "Big Things" (so that trees and rocks can be bigger than the tiny default ~7 meter maximum)
The developers weren't just intentionally vague, they outright lied, straight yes-or-no answers to straight yes-or-no questions about what was in the game, just days before the release. Then even after release they continued to lie about it. When two players went to the same place at the same time to see each other (something the developers had continually insisted was possible), the developers pretended it was a bug - even though they knew damn well that it was physically impossible. The game has no real-time net traffic needed to support multiplayer and there is no serious player model included in the game files (there's a couple comical temporary development models in there, along with a monkey in a hat, the Fallout logo, and a bunch of other amusing stuff, mind you).
The reason that so many people played for so long before seeking refunds was because the developers kept insisting that things were in the game that most definitely weren't. And they put in this huge "grind" to try to slow everyone down, to drag out how long it would take for them to find this out. When a player playing nonstop for 20 hours managed to reach the center of the galaxy (the goal) on the same day as release, going through the relentless over-and-over clicking to do so, the developer's "solution" to the "problem" was to cut the distance you travel per warp by a third, tripling the clicky busywork. And they introduced a bug at the exact same time they did so.
And BTW, after being told that everything's at the center of the galaxy - that the creatures get weirder, there's more going on there, that there's a big exciting ending there, you know what's actually there? Absolutely nothing. You go to the center and the game actually punishes you. There's no ending, just an animation of you flying out of the center and it crash lands you in the next galaxy, which is no different from the current one.
Comparing a non-smartphone to a smartphone will obviously bias the case. But the key issue is that smartphone battery capacities have gone dramatically up while their sizes have gone down over the past decade.
Seriously, we need people actively looking into making those new type of batteries instead of just researching them and never do anything with the research, like we've seen for the past 5 to 10 years.
That's right! That's why my cell phone which uses more power than my cell phone of 10 years ago with a battery less than a third the size lasts significantly longer - because everyone's been "never doing anything with the research", right?
Good research results make news. Their employment in commercial products generally doesn't.
I don't "misunderstand" anything, that is exactly what the device did. It didn't precool anything, it didn't ramp anything down, it just randomly shut off when too many people had their AC on (aka, when it was hottest). And in Iowa in July, even if you did know when it was about to go off and tried to "precool" (which I assure you, does not work well), you'd be burning up long before the AC kicks back in.
Not a clue. My power could have been free for all I cared, I still would have had it removed. I would have rathered live in an air-conditioned tent than a house with no AC during the hottest part of the day.
If you're willing to lose your AC during the hottest part of the day, then you might as well not have AC at all. So there's no reason to get such a device, you might as well just sell your AC.
"Pre-cooling" a house does not work. In the hottest part of the day it was enough of a challenge for the AC to just keep up.
I once lived in Iowa when I lived in the US, and my then-spouse signed us up for one of those programs without consulting me first. I just came home one day and the AC was no longer operating when it was hottest. Utterly, utterly miserable, and I had to wait weeks to get the thing disconnected. Why would anyone willingly choose to have one of those things in their home?
Hmm, actually from rewatching it, maybe it was still in its descent phase. It's common to point downwards and power the craft down to the ground, and then level out when you near the ground. Maybe they had unexpected momentum or loss of low speed maneuvering ability...
Regardless of how much ground crew (an expense, by the way, that Airlander is designed to minimize) you have, blimps are not supposed to land nose down. This is a Problem(TM) that needs to be investigated and fixed.
A design like Airlander 10 is fundamentally a lot more resistant to the common problems that plague blimps during landing, such as susceptability to winds. It has less inherent lift, a smaller cross section, and more ability to anchor itself down with its fans. However, something clearly did not function correctly here. A blimp should never nose down like that. Either lift or thrust was for some reason configured wrong.
Indeed. I saw in some of the pictures from earlier a big gash in the envelope that they were putting a temporary patch on. And the crash ripped open the compartment that contains a lot of electronic equipment.
That would have been an unpleasant day with hydrogen. :
Slashdot Mirror
You'd have as much luck "meeting up" in Super Mario Brothers. There is no real-time networking traffic and no player models in NMS. The "whoops, there must be a bug" reaction is a baldfaced lie.
And the claim that it's unrealistic to reach the same place are BS. There are not 2^64 stars in the starting galaxy (Euclid), only a few tens of billions. And everyone starts out roughly the same distance from the center, which means that they're all in a narrow spherical shell containing only a tiny fraction of those stars. It's rare in the game to not come across systems discovered by others, even when you're not trying.
(The 2^64 claim is valid, but only in that there are 2^32 galaxies)
As for day and night, the game is totally inconsistent about that. You can approach the "day" side of a planet and have it turn out to be night, and vice versa. Really it's hard to think of something in the game that's *not* totally glitched. Even keyboard support is glitched - punctuation in naming discoveries gets mixed up. I mean, how the heck do you even manage to mess up something like that? Oh god, let's not get into the naming filter that lets through names like "Cum Mountain" but bans words like "Cousin" and "Can't".
Indeed. While the landscape goes through LOD changes (although way slower than should be necessary, given that they're not doing any physics, no flowing water, nothing of the sort), there's apparently no LOD work with plant and animal models - they're always the same resolution no matter how close or far they are from you. So the game simply can't afford to have too many of them. Not a problem when they're tiny, but when they're big things that should be able to be seen from far away...
Well yes, he was the one taking point on everything. Who knows what other people in the company thought.
If I was a programmer for HG, I'd be pretty mad about how he's managed this whole thing.
Which was yet another lie.
1) Players playing has gone down over 90% since then on average. At off peak it's a fraction of even that. It makes no difference.
2) There is no attempt at real-time network traffic whatsoever. Nothing sends out real-time packets. Nothing is designed to receive them.
3) There is no player model in the game's files. There's some comically bad development models, along with weirdness like a monkey in a hat and the Fallout logo. But no actual player model.
There is no multiplayer. It's not a "bug". It is simply not there, and they know it.
Pop-in = things suddenly appear in the landscape (landscape features, plants, animals, etc). Not a problem when they're appearing as tiny dots on a distant horizon. BIG problem when they're appearing right in front of you.
Because the "flying around the galaxy" aspect is pretty limited, and deliberately slowed to a crawl.
To be fair, the landscapes can often be quite beautiful. The procedural generation algorithm can have its limitations, but it also shows promise. It was just released too soon. It's actually IMHO the best part of the game. The "game" aspects are what are terribly done.
And concerning procedural generation, it was crippled by their lack of optimization, which prevented them from having large plants / animals without making the already bad pop-in unacceptable. So everything is kept small to moderate in size, which eliminates the "epicness" of planetary exploration. The potential can really be seen with things like the Big Things mod (though you can also see why they cut it, they would have gotten endless bug reports about the pop-in).
The sad thing is, even with the game in the state that it's in, if the development house had been at all decent, had at all play tested, they could have turned it into something that'd be at least decent to play. By means of:
1) Instead of all resources densely available on each planet, resources should be rare and sparse, so you have to actually look and survive.
2) Instead of all buildings densely spaced on each planet, each planet should have between "zero" and "a few" things present so that you don't experience basically the entire game on your first planet.
3) Scanning shouldn't tell you exactly where things are, only approximations, so that it's not just a "fly right to the marker, walk for fifteen seconds, then either pick it up in no time at all, or waste a ton of time mining".
4) In return for upping the actual "exploration" elements that the game was sold on, vastly reduce the busywork grind.
Unfortunately, the developers have actually taken every opportunity to increase the grind since it was released.
Indeed. NMS is built around a painful clicky grind. Seriously, you have to land, mine up resources, take off, click dozens of times to craft warp cells, click to load them, click through the slow, awkward starmap, wait through the animation, repeat four more times until you're out of warp cells and ready to repeat... all in order to go a bit over 1000 light years. Out of nearly 180000 that you have to do to reach the center. Where you're told that the game will utterly change, where planets get weirder and the life stranger and all sorts of other things are going on (none of that is true) and to reach the "ending", which turns out to be nothing more than the game actually punishing you for getting there by zooming out and crash landing your ship in the next effectively identical galaxy.
Indeed, at least PC users have mods, like "Low Flight" (takes off the game's annoying "training wheels" that take any semblance of fun out of flying over a planet) and "Big Things" (so that trees and rocks can be bigger than the tiny default ~7 meter maximum)
(Some of the videos taking on the subject are really quite brutal / amusing )
The developers weren't just intentionally vague, they outright lied, straight yes-or-no answers to straight yes-or-no questions about what was in the game, just days before the release. Then even after release they continued to lie about it. When two players went to the same place at the same time to see each other (something the developers had continually insisted was possible), the developers pretended it was a bug - even though they knew damn well that it was physically impossible. The game has no real-time net traffic needed to support multiplayer and there is no serious player model included in the game files (there's a couple comical temporary development models in there, along with a monkey in a hat, the Fallout logo, and a bunch of other amusing stuff, mind you).
The reason that so many people played for so long before seeking refunds was because the developers kept insisting that things were in the game that most definitely weren't. And they put in this huge "grind" to try to slow everyone down, to drag out how long it would take for them to find this out. When a player playing nonstop for 20 hours managed to reach the center of the galaxy (the goal) on the same day as release, going through the relentless over-and-over clicking to do so, the developer's "solution" to the "problem" was to cut the distance you travel per warp by a third, tripling the clicky busywork. And they introduced a bug at the exact same time they did so.
And BTW, after being told that everything's at the center of the galaxy - that the creatures get weirder, there's more going on there, that there's a big exciting ending there, you know what's actually there? Absolutely nothing. You go to the center and the game actually punishes you. There's no ending, just an animation of you flying out of the center and it crash lands you in the next galaxy, which is no different from the current one.
Comparing a non-smartphone to a smartphone will obviously bias the case. But the key issue is that smartphone battery capacities have gone dramatically up while their sizes have gone down over the past decade.
That's right! That's why my cell phone which uses more power than my cell phone of 10 years ago with a battery less than a third the size lasts significantly longer - because everyone's been "never doing anything with the research", right?
Good research results make news. Their employment in commercial products generally doesn't.
I don't "misunderstand" anything, that is exactly what the device did. It didn't precool anything, it didn't ramp anything down, it just randomly shut off when too many people had their AC on (aka, when it was hottest). And in Iowa in July, even if you did know when it was about to go off and tried to "precool" (which I assure you, does not work well), you'd be burning up long before the AC kicks back in.
Right. I should have redone my entire house in order to get a device to shut my AC off during the hottest point in the day. Got it.
Not a clue. My power could have been free for all I cared, I still would have had it removed. I would have rathered live in an air-conditioned tent than a house with no AC during the hottest part of the day.
If you're willing to lose your AC during the hottest part of the day, then you might as well not have AC at all. So there's no reason to get such a device, you might as well just sell your AC.
"Pre-cooling" a house does not work. In the hottest part of the day it was enough of a challenge for the AC to just keep up.
The program was to connect it to the thermostat.
Furthermore, I'm not sure how your average clothes or dish washer would take to having the power just randomly going off on it.
I once lived in Iowa when I lived in the US, and my then-spouse signed us up for one of those programs without consulting me first. I just came home one day and the AC was no longer operating when it was hottest. Utterly, utterly miserable, and I had to wait weeks to get the thing disconnected. Why would anyone willingly choose to have one of those things in their home?
Hmm, actually from rewatching it, maybe it was still in its descent phase. It's common to point downwards and power the craft down to the ground, and then level out when you near the ground. Maybe they had unexpected momentum or loss of low speed maneuvering ability...
Regardless of how much ground crew (an expense, by the way, that Airlander is designed to minimize) you have, blimps are not supposed to land nose down. This is a Problem(TM) that needs to be investigated and fixed.
Sigh, not this "blimps causing a critical helium shortage" meme yet again....
A design like Airlander 10 is fundamentally a lot more resistant to the common problems that plague blimps during landing, such as susceptability to winds. It has less inherent lift, a smaller cross section, and more ability to anchor itself down with its fans. However, something clearly did not function correctly here. A blimp should never nose down like that. Either lift or thrust was for some reason configured wrong.
Indeed. I saw in some of the pictures from earlier a big gash in the envelope that they were putting a temporary patch on. And the crash ripped open the compartment that contains a lot of electronic equipment.
That would have been an unpleasant day with hydrogen. :