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.
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
"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"
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!
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.
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".
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
[+] [-] Derbasti|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Associat0r|12 years ago|reply
http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Elite:_Dangerous_FAQ
http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Procedural_Generation
[+] [-] NoPiece|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] GFischer|12 years ago|reply
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"
[+] [-] MrBra|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xnxn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] namuol|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kayoone|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexanderDhoore|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alkonaut|12 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] networked|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RyanZAG|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] electrograv|12 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] sillysaurus2|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fidotron|12 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] dscrd|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fzltrp|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nacs|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] barbs|12 years ago|reply
Could you please list some examples?
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] deelowe|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeash|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaryd|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vignesh_vs_in|12 years ago|reply
Use this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNVgVl6v6YU
[+] [-] radley|12 years ago|reply
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/3hpqoi/no-man-s-sky-vgx-2...
[+] [-] rralian|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
- 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|12 years ago|reply
http://www.amazon.com/Spacecraft-2000-2100-A-D-Authority-Han...
[+] [-] josteink|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] javajosh|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Houshalter|12 years ago|reply
But looking at the demo that doesn't seem to be true either.
[+] [-] usernew1817|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xioxox|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lavinski|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daredevildave|12 years ago|reply
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-12-08-hello-games-deb...
[+] [-] raingrove|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yconst|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bencoder|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrBra|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] namuol|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Johnwbh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axilmar|12 years ago|reply
There goes my dream.