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Exploring No Man’s Sky, A Computer Game Forged by Algorithms

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Re: Exploring No Man’s Sky, A Computer Game Forged by Algorithms

#71

Post by abroz »

jimmcslim wrote: post #62

"The tens of millions of planets that comprise the universe are all unique." We will probably never know, but I wonder if the reality of our own universe is that any life on other habitable planets will look remarkably similar to that here on Earth; given the parameters within which a sustainable biosphere are possible quite narrow. There might be some local variation but nothing that would be particularly mind-boggl…

There are several kinds of infinite. The kind where assuming the universe can be arbitrarily large would eventually allow you to encounter a parallel or subtly divergent Earth, with a historic Napoleon and where people speak Hindi, probably isn't the kind of universe we inhabit.

Re: Exploring No Man’s Sky, A Computer Game Forged by Algorithms

#72

Post by newobj »

lmkg wrote: post #50
DanAndersen wrote: post #11

The issue with a lot of procedurally-generated content is that overall things become same-y. Lots of breadth, little depth. When you have a set number of variable sliders, you don't have to see all the possible worlds to get a sense of how many sliders there are and what their ranges are. The problem only gets worse when moving away from planet/landscape generation (dumb matter) and getting into simulations of histor…

A totally different type of procedurally-generated content: The physical card game, Dominion. It is a deck-building game, where players play cards to generate cash to buy cards that go into the deck that they are playing out of (which cycles endlessly). There are 6 boring and fundamental cards that are present in every game, and 10 'kingdom' cards which do interesting and clever things. The 10 kingdom cards that are…

I wouldn't say that's procedural content, I would say that it's emergent, or even less impressively, combinatorial.

I would probably call it emergent, in that the designers likely could not test the entire state space of all strategies.

What's impressive, in light of that, is that the game ends up balanced, or at least not fundamentally broken.

To your point though, is that the "content" (cards) introduces mechanics. Most procedural gameplay content doesn't necessarily introduce mechanics. That's why it's easy to feel "boring".

Re: Exploring No Man’s Sky, A Computer Game Forged by Algorithms

#73

Post by greendestiny »

lmkg wrote: post #50
DanAndersen wrote: post #11

The issue with a lot of procedurally-generated content is that overall things become same-y. Lots of breadth, little depth. When you have a set number of variable sliders, you don't have to see all the possible worlds to get a sense of how many sliders there are and what their ranges are. The problem only gets worse when moving away from planet/landscape generation (dumb matter) and getting into simulations of histor…

A totally different type of procedurally-generated content: The physical card game, Dominion. It is a deck-building game, where players play cards to generate cash to buy cards that go into the deck that they are playing out of (which cycles endlessly). There are 6 boring and fundamental cards that are present in every game, and 10 'kingdom' cards which do interesting and clever things. The 10 kingdom cards that are…

Games are played and any amount of variation that isn't reflected in the game play is quickly filtered out. It isn't a problem of better sliders or more sliders or more realistic ranges of results, it's about the variation in gameplay they produce. The variation in game play is all down to the rules of the system and how the generated world influences that.

Re: Exploring No Man’s Sky, A Computer Game Forged by Algorithms

#74

Post by anigbrowl »

mladenkovacevic wrote: post #36
anigbrowl wrote: post #25

I was impressed by the demo until I saw the very flat explosions that just faded out quickly, which took me out of the illusion immediately. Perhaps that's just a pre-production thing. Impressive product even if the article is sort of gushy and breathless...when I was playing Elite back in the 1980s the planets were just a circle with a smaller circle rotating on it for perspective XD

Did you know Elite is going to have a sequel end of this year? Planets looks a little better this time around: http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140618220148/elite-dang... http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140618220220/elite-dang... http://i1242.photobucket.com/albums/gg522/frobitz/ed-rings-8...

I have been trying to resist the temptation to purchase the beta edition :)

Re: Exploring No Man’s Sky, A Computer Game Forged by Algorithms

#75

Post by teamonkey »

gabemart wrote: post #33
DanAndersen wrote: post #11

The issue with a lot of procedurally-generated content is that overall things become same-y. Lots of breadth, little depth. When you have a set number of variable sliders, you don't have to see all the possible worlds to get a sense of how many sliders there are and what their ranges are. The problem only gets worse when moving away from planet/landscape generation (dumb matter) and getting into simulations of histor…

> The issue with a lot of procedurally-generated content is that overall things become same-y Yes. It's easy for a developer to say "trillions of possible combinations" or "every x is unique with a high degree of certainty" but those statements mean very little without seeing the end product. Creating vast numbers of combinations is completely trivial. E.g. http://jsfiddle.net/JpZ7s/3/ which has ~10 million possible…

The No Man's Sky approach to curation is interesting. Bots that roam around and create animated gifs of the universe so the developers can get an at-a-glance cross-section of the universe.

Re: Exploring No Man’s Sky, A Computer Game Forged by Algorithms

#76

Post by aetherson »

newobj wrote: post #72
lmkg wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A totally different type of procedurally-generated content: The physical card game, Dominion. It is a deck-building game, where players play cards to generate cash to buy cards that go into the deck that they are playing out of (which cycles endlessly). There are 6 boring and fundamental cards that are present in every game, and 10 'kingdom' cards which do interesting and clever things. The 10 kingdom cards that are…

I wouldn't say that's procedural content, I would say that it's emergent, or even less impressively, combinatorial. I would probably call it emergent, in that the designers likely could not test the entire state space of all strategies. What's impressive, in light of that, is that the game ends up balanced, or at least not fundamentally broken. To your point though, is that the "content" (cards) introduces mechanics.…

Dominion is balanced largely through the fact that it's symmetrical. No matter how good or bad the kingdom cards, both players are interacting with them in the same way, so, barring things like writing cards that give additional advantage to the first player, it's hard to unbalance it.

If you played "a game like Dominion, except each player had their own independent set of Kingdom cards," it would be big-time not balanced. Like, kingdom sets aren't balanced against each other.

Or perhaps you meant that it's balanced like "a given card tends to be about as good as a given other card." But that's just... not very true. In any Kingdom, there are typically a few must-buys and a few must-not-buys, and there are cards that are almost never good buys and cards that are almost always good buys.

Source: played a few thousand games of Dominion on isotropic back when that was a thing.

Disclaimer: Haven't played Dominion since Hinterlands, so this may not still be accurate.

Re: Exploring No Man’s Sky, A Computer Game Forged by Algorithms

#77

Post by millstone »

DanAndersen wrote: post #11

The issue with a lot of procedurally-generated content is that overall things become same-y. Lots of breadth, little depth. When you have a set number of variable sliders, you don't have to see all the possible worlds to get a sense of how many sliders there are and what their ranges are. The problem only gets worse when moving away from planet/landscape generation (dumb matter) and getting into simulations of histor…

There's a possibility for hybrid approaches, where interesting content is generated procedurally from a corpus of real-world content. For example, lichess generates chess puzzles by [procedurally analyzing real-world games](http://en.lichess.org/blog/U4sjakQAAEAAhH9d/how-training-puz...).

Imagine a tactical warfare game that drew from actual military upsets. I think this would avoid the same-yness problem.

Re: Exploring No Man’s Sky, A Computer Game Forged by Algorithms

#78

Post by InclinedPlane »

fisher-lebo wrote: post #2

I get the gist of how Minecraft is constructed: just a bunch of blocks with algorithms which hide certain blocks when they aren't in the player's view. Are there any articles about how an engine like this is built? It is an extreme level of procedural generation (apparently), but the graphics aren't blocky and as abstract, but rather pretty impressive. In a similar vein is Eskil Steenberg's Love [1], but this is on a…

Remember that Minecraft is a very different sort of game than No Man's Sky. Minecraft is a completely destructable/constructable world. You can demolish the entire world down to the bedrock and build whatever you want in addition to or in replacement of what existed previously. That's why some sort of segmentation system is necessary, there needs to be some sort of unit of interactability/construction/destruction, and for Minecraft that unit is a 1m block. No Man's Sky isn't like that, it's not filled with world's you change, just world's you visit and explore. Because you don't need that fundamental unit of interactability you can use more traditional world modeling that looks more like what we've come to expect 3D worlds to look like.

Re: Exploring No Man’s Sky, A Computer Game Forged by Algorithms

#79

Post by scarygliders »

anigbrowl wrote: post #74
mladenkovacevic wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know Elite is going to have a sequel end of this year? Planets looks a little better this time around: http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140618220148/elite-dang... http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140618220220/elite-dang... http://i1242.photobucket.com/albums/gg522/frobitz/ed-rings-8...

I have been trying to resist the temptation to purchase the beta edition :)

I bought the Premium Beta a couple of weeks ago and have not regretted it one bit ;)

Only about a week to go till the next update to the Beta and I'm looking forward to it - oh and premium beta entitles me to lifetime expansions so I reckon it's good value for money.

Go for it - you won't regret it ;)

Re: Exploring No Man’s Sky, A Computer Game Forged by Algorithms

#80

Post by scarmig »

JetSpiegel wrote: post #56
mbenjaminsmith wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, what would be interesting is everything that you said with the addition of relativistic-speed travel. Take round trips near (or over, depending on your reference) the speed of light and watch how things evolve.

My god, the Loading times would be unbearable.

Easy solution to that. Build a computer in-game that runs the game, and then do your relativistic flight while it calculates the time evolution of the game.
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