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No Man's Sky Cosmos

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Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#81

Post by rcxdude »

vablings wrote: post #58
jackmott42 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best proc gen experience I have had is with minecraft modpack called hexxit. The world is procedural generated, but then there is a library of ~200+ hand built structures/features that are scattered throughout the generated terrain. So you wander through a forest and find a cave into a volcano full of diamongs but guarded by angry dwarves, then head over into the desert and find a castle with a witch king, etc et…

This reminds me of a mod for Rimworld that adds in other people's failed colonies and decays the structure making a real ruins from other people's playthroughs of the game. Awesome concept

Reminds me of bones files in nethack.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#83

Post by gambiting »

Avicebron wrote: post #17
helle253 wrote: post #5

It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing. It's a very cool and ambitious project, but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. It still feels to me, a decade later, more like a very very impressive tech demo than a video game

I feel exactly the same. There has to be a way to do procedural generation in a way that doesn't feel "sparse". A thought that comes to me as I type this is what if you try to co-evolve the ecosystems so it doesn't feel like it's just a mix of the same base components in different quantities.

I think it has to be hand crafted with some mix of procedural generation. I worked on the Division Underground DLC, and the way we did it is we had artists create dozens of various room variations, describing how they could connect each other, then I wrote an algorithm to populate the map with these "dungeons" and their rooms in a semi-random order. In the end I think the map had about ~200 unique dungeons, but rooms could repeat between them, so you'd sometimes go "oh hang on I've seen this metro station before" but the entire dungeon would be different almost every time, unless you played hundreds of hours of it(the game kept track and wouldn't give you the same dungeon again until you played them all, iirc)

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#85

Post by OkayPhysicist »

nemomarx wrote: post #50
meowface wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing this article lacks is any tips on how to still do procedural generation while partly mitigating the oatmeal issue. In other words, define a more sophisticated generation procedure that can add character and identity. It probably won't be as good as an artful human designer hand-crafting a world, but it can be better than something overly random and blandly uniform in distribution.

You want to look at dwarf fortress talks for that, I think?

IMO, Dwarf Fortress benefits greatly from the player seeing relatively few samples of the world gen, and the geography actually mattering to gameplay.

The actual geography doesn't vary that wildly most of the time ( if you've seen one lightly forested river valley, you've seen them all), but players generate a relatively low number of worlds, and in each world probably only see a handful of sites, where dwarf-scale world gen actually matters. Unlike NMS, though, the details of world gen matter to gameplay a lot. Trade caravans and invading armies can't traverse mountain ranges and ocean, so a mountainous peninsula can be extremely isolated. At the site level, you'll probably want to design your fortress to take advantage of local geography to help fortify your fortress and provide resources, so terrain and features like rivers, volcanoes, etc. placement matters a lot.

In contrast, No Man's Sky world gen feels pretty tangent to the actual gameplay. The game does a good enough job incentivizing you to explore lots of planets, but in terms of the survival/base-building aspects, there's a pretty short list of resources that matter to deciding where to setup, and geography hardly matters in terms of how you build.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#86

Post by trashb »

raincole wrote: post #39
helle253 wrote: post #5

It's amazing how, every time i come back to NMS, the whole thing feels like... nothing. It's a very cool and ambitious project, but there's fundamentally nothing substantial to it in terms of gameplay. It still feels to me, a decade later, more like a very very impressive tech demo than a video game

It more or less reminds me of that Rick and Morty episode. They were playing an asteroid shooting. > Morty: it's boring. crank up the realism slider to max > Rick: why does it get even more empty? Wait, I got it... because the universe is empty. At the end, I think there is little point in simulating the vastness of the universe in a video game (even just a fraction of it).

  "I have never thought to myself that realism is fun" - Gabe Newell

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#87

Post by [deleted] »

uzish wrote: post #63

I think facts would be helpful for this discussion: 1. Total Revenue - ~$500m-$700m 2. Copies Sold - ~15-20m 3. Steam Review Score: 84.36% 4. 40 Free Major Updates I don't know where the negative comments are coming from. Maybe players who played early. NMS is a great example of a developer who was devoted to their customer base, kept updating the game for free, and saw great market success in return. This is a story…

[deleted]

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#88

Post by gambiting »

vablings wrote: post #58
jackmott42 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best proc gen experience I have had is with minecraft modpack called hexxit. The world is procedural generated, but then there is a library of ~200+ hand built structures/features that are scattered throughout the generated terrain. So you wander through a forest and find a cave into a volcano full of diamongs but guarded by angry dwarves, then head over into the desert and find a castle with a witch king, etc et…

This reminds me of a mod for Rimworld that adds in other people's failed colonies and decays the structure making a real ruins from other people's playthroughs of the game. Awesome concept

I don't know why but it made me think of the original premise of Drivatars in Forza games - Microsoft selling it as an "AI" learning how you drive, then your individual driveatar would be submitted to Xbox Live and would randomly appear for other players in their offline games, but it would drive just like you drive. Really cool concept, of that "footprint" of your play appearing in other people's games.

Shame that it just languished to a point where I think Microsoft completely lost both interest and control over that feature, where in Horizon 6 it just gives you the exact same few driveatars every race, and somehow no one at Playground Games is interested in fixing this. At this point I strongly suspect that they literally don't know how to, the knowledge is lost in the depths of the netcode.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#89

Post by omoikane »

rcxdude wrote: post #81
vablings wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a mod for Rimworld that adds in other people's failed colonies and decays the structure making a real ruins from other people's playthroughs of the game. Awesome concept

Reminds me of bones files in nethack.

I was going to say, NetHack doesn't feel sparse to me, but maybe I just have not played enough NetHack.

I think it's due to the fact that there is a fair bit of content, but the interface drip-feeds them very slowly, combined with the difficulty of the game itself that prevents users from finding all possible ways to interact with all content.

Re: No Man's Sky Cosmos

#90

Post by godshatter »

I like playing the game in abandoned mode in single player, just me, my ship, a lot of dead space stations and planets and some fauna here and there. I explore every planet (except aggressive sentinel ones) and make short hops to nearby systems. If I run across too many systems that have already been explored I made a large hop in a random direction and try there. There's something about playing this way that keeps bringing me back. I tend to nope out of the main game as soon as I get a freighter, I'm not that into a lot of game mechanics, but I love exploring planets, even if they are ultimately not that different from one another. I like going on hikes even though it's just the same trees with some variety in real life.
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