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No Man's Sky gets released like, soon, I guess ¯\_()_/¯

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In the wild.

e5acc22bba252e3c95f75f479d43645b.jpg


Plans on playing it in an hour, all through Sunday before he goes out of town.

Yikes. So how did this person get hold of it a week and a half before release?
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
Guessing it won't be playable until the servers come up?

Servers are already up supposedly by the early leaked copy. But he has yet to confirm himself, the person he got it from said. However, that person could also be confused, because this could be played completely offline, and he probably assumed it was online only when playing.

But we will know soon enough.

It can be played offline, so I don't think servers have anything to do with it.

That is what I am guessing. Would be uncharacteristic that they are up so far in advance. Unless he is able to connect to some retail copy testing before they relaunch them around the street date?

Yikes. So how did this person get hold of it a week and a half before release?

It went up on eBay and the seller lived 90 miles from me. We met at the halfway mark. He bought it from a guy on Craigslist. He had just started playing when I messaged him that I was ready to meet up. He said the servers are live.
 

Vire

Member
It's become a reflexive response after so many driveby shit-posters over the past few years of NMS threads. I agree though people are reacting way too harshly at anything that isn't effusive praise for the game.

It's fair to like the game and wish there was more. It's also fair to like the "idea" of the game but not necessarily with the direction or execution. Of course if you spent the next 4 pages arguing why NMS is bad because of those reasons, then it would be a problem ;)

I do wish there were more social components to the game at release, but I'm also looking forward to what we are getting. And for me what we're getting is good enough to be there day one. YMMV.
I'm in total agreement, If I wasn't interested in the idea of the game I wouldn't waste my time going into No Man's Sky threads. The soundtrack, the concept of space exploration, beautiful visuals and unlimited vast potential makes it nothing short of my dream game. I think it's hard not to wish for more when it comes so close to fufilling that potential. I feel like that's the part of the reason why so many people say "well, I wish it had this or that", because it's something that people see so much potential in for you just to spend hundreds of hours in this amazing world.

I guess also part of the dissapointment with the social aspect is that when the game was first first initially revealed, the mind ran wild with all the various ideas people had in their head... and almost to their detriment Hello Games just really kept quiet on what the game was going to be for over two years it seems like. I'm sure that's due in part to the fact that they themselves didn't exactly know what it was going to be, but I remember Geoff Keighly asking Sean about the social elements of the game and Sean didnt implicitly deny it and I guess that just gave me a little false hope that that would eventually creep it's way into the final product.
 

Plasmids

Member
I put in over 800 hours in Elite Dangerous, a good portion of that exploring. And you don't even get to see life on planets in that game. You can only land on planets with no atmosphere. What drove me to play that many hours in that game? Getting better ships, getting fancy new upgrades for my ships, exploring outside human occupied space to see beautiful nebulas, massive stars, and unique looking planets, bounty hunting pirates, smuggling contraband into stations before authorities scanned my ship. And that's just what I was interested in doing in that game. Other people formed huge groups to go on long expeditions to areas of space no one has been to, play space trucker by selling and buy goods, become pirates and steal cargo from other ships.This isn't some new genre that no one has played before. People have been playing these types of games since 1984 when the first Elite game came out. While NMS may not have the social elements of Elite Dangerous, the alien life and planets in this game look like something straight out of a sci fi novel. This looks to be one of the first games in the genre that puts a focus on exploring. Not many others have done that. Is this game going to be for everyone? No, the genre is a niche genre for a reason, but people who love these type of games have a pretty good idea what to expect out of this game. If you have doubts considering all the amazing footage hey have shown us, then this game is probably not for you.

Might have to check out Elite Dangerous.
 
I put in over 800 hours in Elite Dangerous, a good portion of that exploring. And you don't even get to see life on planets in that game. You can only land on planets with no atmosphere. What drove me to play that many hours in that game? Getting better ships, getting fancy new upgrades for my ships, exploring outside human occupied space to see beautiful nebulas, massive stars, and unique looking planets, bounty hunting pirates, smuggling contraband into stations before authorities scanned my ship. And that's just what I was interested in doing in that game. Other people formed huge groups to go on long expeditions to areas of space no one has been to, play space trucker by selling and buy goods, become pirates and steal cargo from other ships.This isn't some new genre that no one has played before. People have been playing these types of games since 1984 when the first Elite game came out. While NMS may not have the social elements of Elite Dangerous, the alien life and planets in this game look like something straight out of a sci fi novel. This looks to be one of the first games in the genre that puts a focus on exploring. Not many others have done that. Is this game going to be for everyone? No, the genre is a niche genre for a reason, but people who love these type of games have a pretty good idea what to expect out of this game. If you have doubts considering all the amazing footage hey have shown us, then this game is probably not for you.

Exactly. I could see myself wandering around a single interesting planet for days.
 

Ihyll

Junior Member
Don't know if this has been answered before, but how big are the planets? How big is the area on planets that you can explore? Could you explore a whole planet?
 

Danlord

Member
Don't know if this has been answered before, but how big are the planets? How big is the area on planets that you can explore? Could you explore a whole planet?

You can explore the entire planets, and many are planet-sized planets so they are going to take weeks to explore just a single one.

:)
 

Vire

Member
Don't know if this has been answered before, but how big are the planets? How big is the area on planets that you can explore? Could you explore a whole planet?

Ridiculously large.

In one video I saw, Sean spent 10 or 20 minutes in a singular area of the planet and then when he went back into space and he showed the area that they were walking around in was represented by size of the crosshair on the screen. It could literally takes days and days, if not weeks to see every corner of a planet. Dont think you would want to do that though since I haven't really seen the geography of a planet differ from one side to the other.
 

mokeyjoe

Member
Ridiculously large.

In one video I saw, Sean spent 10 or 20 minutes in a singular area of the planet and then when he went back into space and he showed the area that they were walking around in was represented by size of the crosshair on the screen. It could literally takes days and days, if not weeks to see every corner of a planet. Dont think you would want to do that though since I haven't really seen the geography of a planet differ from one side to the other.

Yeah, the planets are all one biome and largely the same across their surface, aside from 'areas of interest' which need investigating. The impetus is to keep moving on, by design.
 
Ridiculously large.

In one video I saw, Sean spent 10 or 20 minutes in a singular area of the planet and then when he went back into space and he showed the area that they were walking around in was represented by size of the crosshair on the screen. It could literally takes days and days, if not weeks to see every corner of a planet. Dont think you would want to do that though since I haven't really seen the geography of a planet differ from one side to the other.
Correct other than one side being night and the other being day exploring a whole planet would be entirely up to the the player but it'll essentially be the same planet all around. Which is understandable i suppose because of the formula
 

Raiden

Banned
Since everything is randomly generated, does that mean when i go too long in one direction when i turn backwards the terrain i came from will be different again? Or basically can i visit the same planet again after leaving it? Or will it be random terrain again?
 

Unicorn

Member
fuck streams may be my only way to experience this game as I'm now going to be broke for a month or more - until I get a new job.
 

Danlord

Member
Since everything is randomly generated, does that mean when i go too long in one direction when i turn backwards the terrain i came from will be different again? Or basically can i visit the same planet again after leaving it? Or will it be random terrain again?

It's procedurally generated, not randomly. There is a difference but I won't get into it, but basically the planet will generate the exact same as you first entered it, albeit due to the rotation around its star and its own rotation it will be slightly different axis :)

Yes, it doesn't have "day/night" cycle as in the traditional sense based on a timer, it has day and night based on its actual rotation around its star. That is how amazing this game is :)
 

muteki

Member
Since everything is randomly generated, does that mean when i go too long in one direction when i turn backwards the terrain i came from will be different again? Or basically can i visit the same planet again after leaving it? Or will it be random terrain again?

It isn't random, it is procedural.
 

Nokterian

Member
I put in over 800 hours in Elite Dangerous, a good portion of that exploring. And you don't even get to see life on planets in that game. You can only land on planets with no atmosphere. What drove me to play that many hours in that game? Getting better ships, getting fancy new upgrades for my ships, exploring outside human occupied space to see beautiful nebulas, massive stars, and unique looking planets, bounty hunting pirates, smuggling contraband into stations before authorities scanned my ship. And that's just what I was interested in doing in that game. Other people formed huge groups to go on long expeditions to areas of space no one has been to, play space trucker by selling and buy goods, become pirates and steal cargo from other ships.This isn't some new genre that no one has played before. People have been playing these types of games since 1984 when the first Elite game came out. While NMS may not have the social elements of Elite Dangerous, the alien life and planets in this game look like something straight out of a sci fi novel. This looks to be one of the first games in the genre that puts a focus on exploring. Not many others have done that. Is this game going to be for everyone? No, the genre is a niche genre for a reason, but people who love these type of games have a pretty good idea what to expect out of this game. If you have doubts considering all the amazing footage hey have shown us, then this game is probably not for you.

Great post..a reason why i am so excited for it..explore planets,solar systems etc. Said it in my own thread this why i love astronomy it drives my curiosity to explore more or just wander around for days on a planet.
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
I put in over 800 hours in Elite Dangerous, a good portion of that exploring. And you don't even get to see life on planets in that game. You can only land on planets with no atmosphere. What drove me to play that many hours in that game? Getting better ships, getting fancy new upgrades for my ships, exploring outside human occupied space to see beautiful nebulas, massive stars, and unique looking planets, bounty hunting pirates, smuggling contraband into stations before authorities scanned my ship. And that's just what I was interested in doing in that game. Other people formed huge groups to go on long expeditions to areas of space no one has been to, play space trucker by selling and buy goods, become pirates and steal cargo from other ships.This isn't some new genre that no one has played before. People have been playing these types of games since 1984 when the first Elite game came out. While NMS may not have the social elements of Elite Dangerous, the alien life and planets in this game look like something straight out of a sci fi novel. This looks to be one of the first games in the genre that puts a focus on exploring. Not many others have done that. Is this game going to be for everyone? No, the genre is a niche genre for a reason, but people who love these type of games have a pretty good idea what to expect out of this game. If you have doubts considering all the amazing footage hey have shown us, then this game is probably not for you.

Agreed. Great post. Looking forward to trying Elite Dangerous when it makes it's way to the PS4 eventually. Which I am kind of glad with my backlog and this coming, lol.

It isn't random, it is procedural.

Yes, there is a method to the madness!
 

Vire

Member
It's procedurally generated, not randomly. There is a difference but I won't get into it, but basically the planet will generate the exact same as you first entered it, albeit due to the rotation around its star and its own rotation it will be slightly different axis :)

Yes, it doesn't have "day/night" cycle as in the traditional sense based on a timer, it has day and night based on its actual rotation around its star. That is how amazing this game is :)
Do you know how long it typically takes to go from day to night? Is it accelerated? It is dependent how far you are away from a sun?
 
Since everything is randomly generated, does that mean when i go too long in one direction when i turn backwards the terrain i came from will be different again? Or basically can i visit the same planet again after leaving it? Or will it be random terrain again?
If you turn around and head in the right direction you'll be going back where you came from lil landmarks are how you'll be finding your ship if you stray to far away.

Lil craters that you create will remain until you leave,when you come back that hole wont be there tho

There's an galactic map and a galactic mini map that Sean said you could use to visit planets you've already been too in an interview.

Hope this helps
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
If you turn around and head in the right direction you'll be going back where you came from lil landmarks are how you'll be finding your ship if you stray to far away.

Lil craters that you create will remain until you leave,when you come back that hole wont be there tho

There's an galactic map and a galactic mini map that Sean said you could use to visit planets you've already been too in an interview.

Hope this helps

Takes about 24 hours of real time for them to disappear though, correct? Kinda like a 'server refresh'?
 

daveo42

Banned
Since everything is randomly generated, does that mean when i go too long in one direction when i turn backwards the terrain i came from will be different again? Or basically can i visit the same planet again after leaving it? Or will it be random terrain again?

It'll still exist as you remembered it. The way it works is that each x, y, z coordinate in the universe is generated by maths and is streamed into the world only when you approach it. There was a video from over a year ago showing off how it was working and where it was generating the world around your view.

It technically doesn't exist until you see it, then disappears again when you leave, but what you saw will still come up when you come back.

Now I wonder if they have planetary movment included in their calculations as they travel around their star and the universe traveling around it's 'center'.
 

OmegaDL50

Member
If you turn around and head in the right direction you'll be going back where you came from lil landmarks are how you'll be finding your ship if you stray to far away.

Lil craters that you create will remain until you leave,when you come back that hole wont be there tho

There's an galactic map and a galactic mini map that Sean said you could use to visit planets you've already been too in an interview.

Hope this helps

Sanji, it's confirmed that any changes a player makes to a planet such as blowing holes in the ground and whatnot are saved locally for that specific player.

http://www.pcgamer.com/no-mans-sky-10-burning-questions-answered/

Scroll down to the "Can I leave my mark on the planet"
 
Ridiculously large.

In one video I saw, Sean spent 10 or 20 minutes in a singular area of the planet and then when he went back into space and he showed the area that they were walking around in was represented by size of the crosshair on the screen. It could literally takes days and days, if not weeks to see every corner of a planet.

That was the video from which I did the math calculations I've posted before:
Let's say the world is roughly about 1300 pixels in diameter in this image. So assuming my math is right, the surface area of the world (A = 4 π r^2) would be 5,309,292 pixels. If we say the reticle dot that represents the land demo has an area of about 6 pixels, then the demo area we saw is only about 0.00011% of this world's surface.

lTkcw6K.jpg

More fun math. Based on my calculation that the demo area comprised about 0.00011% of the world's surface area, and going by the video that it took Sean 15 minutes until he left for space, how long would it take Sean to explore every bit of the world? Surely exploration time will vary from area to area, but let's use that as a very simple estimate.

Well Sean explored an area of 6 pixels in 15 minutes, so that gives us an exploration rate of 2.5 minutes per pixel. It seems crazy, but since that world's surface area has 5,309,292 pixels, it would take Sean roughly 13,273,230 minutes to explore the entirety of that world.

Or 221,221 hours.
Or 9,218 days.
Or about 25 years.
To explore one world.

25 years to explore that planet. One planet in one star system, of which there are 18 quintillion.

Takes about 24 hours of real time for them to disappear though, correct? Kinda like a 'server refresh'?

No, those craters will stay forever on your local save file. They never get uploaded to the server. If you went back to the planet two years later they'd still be there. But only you would see them, of course.
 

diaspora

Member
I'd imagine if they ever make a successor game to this they'll ideally diversify the biomes and even add stuff like polar climates.
 

GribbleGrunger

Dreams in Digital
Takes about 24 hours of real time for them to disappear though, correct? Kinda like a 'server refresh'?

Any changes to the planet you're on that isn't considered significant (like digging a hole) will only be saved to your HDD but anything significant (like blowing up a spacestation) will be saved to the server.

That might have changed though.
 
That was the video from which I did the math calculations I've posted before:




25 years to explore that planet. One planet in one star system, of which there are 18 quintillion.



No, those craters will stay forever on your local save file. They never get uploaded to the server. If you went back to the planet two years later they'd still be there. But only you would see them, of course.

8pTSVjV.gif
 

GribbleGrunger

Dreams in Digital
That was the video from which I did the math calculations I've posted before:

25 years to explore that planet. One planet in one star system, of which there are 18 quintillion.

No, those craters will stay forever on your local save file. They never get uploaded to the server. If you went back to the planet two years later they'd still be there. But only you would see them, of course.

It wasn't meant to be taken literally lol. It was just an expression of how big the planet was.
 

OmegaDL50

Member
I'd imagine if they ever make a successor game to this they'll ideally diversify the biomes and even add stuff like polar climates.

They could probably do that with what they have now.

Minecraft for example when it first came out had only like 6 or 7 different Biome types.

New stuff was continuously added such as new Biome types and features over time.

Hello Games and Sean Murray has gone on to state they plan to do post release support of the game and add updates to it over time. So Biome variance is a possibility.

I mean even Starbound while it IS a 2D game is based on procedural generation and it's planets have multiple biomes in the release version, when originally each planet had a single biome type, they added multiple biomes for a single planet later on.
 

Raiden

Banned
It's procedurally generated, not randomly. There is a difference but I won't get into it, but basically the planet will generate the exact same as you first entered it, albeit due to the rotation around its star and its own rotation it will be slightly different axis :)

Yes, it doesn't have "day/night" cycle as in the traditional sense based on a timer, it has day and night based on its actual rotation around its star. That is how amazing this game is :)

It isn't random, it is procedural.

If you turn around and head in the right direction you'll be going back where you came from lil landmarks are how you'll be finding your ship if you stray to far away.

Lil craters that you create will remain until you leave,when you come back that hole wont be there tho

There's an galactic map and a galactic mini map that Sean said you could use to visit planets you've already been too in an interview.

Hope this helps

It'll still exist as you remembered it. The way it works is that each x, y, z coordinate in the universe is generated by maths and is streamed into the world only when you approach it. There was a video from over a year ago showing off how it was working and where it was generating the world around your view.

It technically doesn't exist until you see it, then disappears again when you leave, but what you saw will still come up when you come back.

Now I wonder if they have planetary movment included in their calculations as they travel around their star and the universe traveling around it's 'center'.
Great! Thanks for the responses, this makes sense in the way i want it to be!
 
I hope the dude from Operation Sports either streams or records some gameplay. For all the videos, we haven't seen a lot of someone just playing it playing it.
 
It wasn't meant to be taken literally lol. It was just an expression of how big the planet was.

What wasn't? The crosshair size representing the demo area? I'm pretty sure it's pretty close to that. Even as a rough estimate, it would take years to fully explore every bit of a planet, not days or weeks. That's not even counting the cave systems. These are planet-sized planets. Imagine trying to explore every bit of the Earth's land areas. Just covering the United States would probably take a few years.
 

GribbleGrunger

Dreams in Digital
They could probably do that with what they have now.

Minecraft for example when it first came out had only like 6 or 7 different Biome types.

New stuff was continuously added such as new Biome types and features over time.

Hello Games and Sean Murray has gone on to state they plan to do post release support of the game and add updates to it over time. So Biome variance is a possibility.

I mean even Starbound while it IS a 2D game is based on procedural generation and it's planets have multiple biomes in the release version, when originally each planet had a single biome type, they added multiple biomes for a single planet later on.

Yes, and because there are so many planets, they'll be able to populate only those planets that haven't been discovered yet, avoiding any possible anomalies.
 

MikeyB

Member
The boxes are all over my local game store and footage from an earlier trailer is on a loop on a giant screen. I thought it was new footage for a second because it looked so much nicer on a larger screen (normally watching trailers on a phone).

So close.

When I asked how preorders worked, the employee said, "No bonuses, I think, cause what are they gonna gove you? Extra planets?" She snorted. The bonus there is a ship, credits, and upgraded multitool. I mumbled something to that effect and left.

FIN 8)
 

GribbleGrunger

Dreams in Digital
What wasn't? The crosshair size representing the demo area? I'm pretty sure it's pretty close to that. Even as a rough estimate, it would take years to fully explore every bit of a planet, not days or weeks. That's not even counting the cave systems. These are planet-sized planets. Imagine trying to explore every bit of the Earth's land areas. Just covering the United States would probably take a few years.

It was just Sean Murray's way of conveying just how big the planet was. Measuring the crosshair won't give you any where near the right size of the actual planet. In fact, I'd say the area they played in was much SMALLER than that crosshair.

I think you've misinterpreted the intention of my post ;)
 

diaspora

Member
They could probably do that with what they have now.

Minecraft for example when it first came out had only like 6 or 7 different Biome types.

New stuff was continuously added such as new Biome types and features over time.

Hello Games and Sean Murray has gone on to state they plan to do post release support of the game and add updates to it over time. So Biome variance is a possibility.

I mean even Starbound while it IS a 2D game is based on procedural generation and it's planets have multiple biomes in the release version, when originally each planet had a single biome type, they added multiple biomes for a single planet later on.
That would mean modifying existing biomes though. It might be cleaner to do a full break in a new title. Not impossible but easier to QA imo.
 
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