Souldestroyer Reborn
Banned
I'm totally excited for this game and I have absolutely no idea what it's about or what you're supposed to do.
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Polygon: No Man's Sky- the developers built space probes to explore it for them
- Thread starter todahawk
- Start date
Veritigo_X
Member
Not even mentioning the storage space required for 18 quintillion planets. Assuming each planet is 1 byte (ridiculous size, but whatever) that would come out to be 18,000,000 terabytes.
Just the sensationalist claims they've been making. Meaningless stuff like, "It will take X years to explore the whole universe!" or "We made a space probe!!!". While it may be true, it's still a sensationalist headline blown up only made to get attention.
It reminds me of that comic where the scientists say one thing and the reporters completely blow it up. Except, in this case, the developers are the ones generating the exaggerated BS.
Whoops!
Better get those HDD factories running overtime, stat!
Yes, headlines are made to get attention.
News at 11.
A "space probe" is a perfectly acceptable analogy for a test algorithm that samples from a random distribution, especially on a game about exploring space. Writing articles for the general population on technical issues like how to test a procedurally generated game requires simplified analogies. A "space probe" is one of them.
Storm Raider
Banned
Palette Swap
Member
Or maybe they were discussing the scope of their procedure at a developer conference and a website decided to make it news.
Not if it's 5-10 second gifs. Because you would see a snippet ony.
BocoDragon
or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
And I know why you put it that way and good point.. but it's not even an analogy any more than any other game object.
That's not a soldier in CoD, it's a "soldier". Are we incredulous that a game description says we fight 1000s of soldiers? No. So why would a "space probe" sound farfetched?
Because people can actually fathom what the number 1000 means. 18 quintillion is kind of different, and it's important that people understand the scope of the game, because it's integral to the experience they are trying to sell.
Fbh
Member
They have mostly been talking about the size of the world, and in that regard I think it might actually deliver.
If someone is hyping this up it's the people, not the dev. Because apparently for a lot of people "bigger map" = better game. No one wants to hear about level design, just say "our maps is 20X bigger than our last game" and everyone will start hyping up the game for you
Miles Quaritch
Member
Sure, but they knew it would be reported widely, so it seems odd if they don't release those GIFS at some point.
Huh, I've been following the game pretty closely and I don't remember them mentioning the probes or them taking GIFS before.
See above. That's understandable, but it doesn't mean that's a reason not to release those GIFS at some point.
RoadHazard
Gold Member
Yeah, this is very old. But still cool. Can't wait for this damn game!
BocoDragon
or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
I don't see how this is controversial in the slightest.
It's like sending a bot to explore practically infinite minecraft worlds and calling it an explorer.
"It's not really an explorer!!"
..
90% sure Sean Murray says it in the dev video where he's talking about how the algorithm creates new assets out of their base art.
Edit:
Just so I feel like I'm not taking crazy pills - Here's a time-stamped comment from the Polygon article last August about the scope of the game, like I said - I think the probe/bot thing was mentioned in a video:
http://www.polygon.com/2014/8/19/60...o-visit-every-planet-in-no-mans-sky#252068998
Unnecessary analogies are just stupid. It's like how Microsoft is obsessed with the term Cloud.
If they want to say that they are scoping out their planets to tweak their algorithm, then just say it. No need for all of this "space probe" shit.
All minecraft worlds are connected? (I don't actually know, I just assumed that the seed you put in builds ONE minecraft map) No Man's Sky is essentially one universal sized minecraft seed containing all the possible variations in one seamless setting.
Veritigo_X
Member
Eh, it's a debug process. We generally don't get too much insight into what devs go through to debug their game so I'm guessing we won't see much of it. I'd rather they just release a new trailer to show off the planet variety instead.
Except analogies like this are used all the time in software development. Developers often look to the real world to describe a process easily.
Give War A Chance
Member
This post made me lol, a lot. Thanks toda. If for nothing else, the thread was worth it for this quote.
RoadHazard
Gold Member
Then you haven't been following it closely enough, because that has definitely been talked about.
I think that if we were going to see a clip-reel of drone gifs, it's not going to happen until after release.
What I'd be interested in would be the weird ones or ones they had to fix or something. Like a blooper reel of sorts. Maybe that's what plays at the center of the galaxy.
What I'd be interested in would be the weird ones or ones they had to fix or something. Like a blooper reel of sorts. Maybe that's what plays at the center of the galaxy.
Actually I'm starting to agree that the "hype" for this game will change considerably once they get into the hands of people who can write previews and gameplay impressions. I still think YouTube videos and streams of this game are going to be insane because basically everyone will be showing off completely different planets.
Procedural generation means all those planets don't really "exist" until you get near them. It's all based on an algorithm that pops out those planets as "solutions," popping out the same "solutions" every time. They confirmed it's 18 quintillion because the algorithm is set to generate 2 to the 64th power planets.
Sean Murray already said the file size of the game is probably going to be somewhere around 5GB.
Procedural generation means all those planets don't really "exist" until you get near them. It's all based on an algorithm that pops out those planets as "solutions," popping out the same "solutions" every time. They confirmed it's 18 quintillion because the algorithm is set to generate 2 to the 64th power planets.
Sean Murray already said the file size of the game is probably going to be somewhere around 5GB.
Veritigo_X
Member
I know, there was a poster earlier that thought each individual planet was being tweaked. I was using file size as an example why that would be impossible.
So does this algorithm that spits out the planets the same limit the level of draw distance and speed at which you can travel?
One of my main concerns with this game has been the absolutely abysmal draw distance on these planets. Whatever their going for in terms of immersion is broken for me because of it.
I've been saying to myself I'll wait for the pc version but if it's just something intrinsically tied to the way the game is developed I probably will pass on the game unless the gameplay reviews phenomenally which I'm not expecting.
One of my main concerns with this game has been the absolutely abysmal draw distance on these planets. Whatever their going for in terms of immersion is broken for me because of it.
I've been saying to myself I'll wait for the pc version but if it's just something intrinsically tied to the way the game is developed I probably will pass on the game unless the gameplay reviews phenomenally which I'm not expecting.
Uncle Rupee
Banned
That's an incredibly grandiose description for what amounts to prototyping their game.
CassidyIzABeast
Member
Did the bot make gifs of gameplay that wasn't just panning the camera like a E3 demo?
silvermember
Banned
People buy into the BS and when someone questions their the BS, the people who bought the BS form a cocoon-like shell around the game defending it. Either by focusing on the useless procedural generation tech; by talking about all those mindless statistics which would be cool but doesn't say much about the game part of the game. Finally, they will show a video of the developer playing a polish version of the game.
Best part is most of the people who bought the BS will spend more complaining how they got burned by the BS.
Shining Sunshine
Banned
Someone tell Polygon that it's just a QA testing tool.
It's possible that the proximity to something you have to be to fully generate it might be adjustable on a future PC version. I think I saw such a thing in the dev tools on screen in one of the videos. (I really did learn quite a bit from the video interviews)
Their hyping of the game is a bit much. Nobody is sure what you really do in the game, and even if the mechanics are more formally shown I don't know if they will ever jive with the "epicness" of the universe. Like, this thing has been hyped up for it's big, super open universe with procedural generation, and it feels like they want us to do all sorts of things with it. The game's already big in size, all the hyping does is make me want to think in scale. Build cities! Construct economies! Wage wars in space!
Instead, what's probably going to end up happening is "you can mine for resources and trade stuff" and get "street cred" for exploring the most planets in a week or something like that, something small and doable for a team of their size. Big, epic worlds demand big, epic mechanics, you know? That's my main worry about this game, at least.
outunderthestars
Banned
This. I'm also ready for the game to come out. I feel like the expectations for this game are getting to be a bit much. I fear that alot of people are going to be underwhelmed when it releases.
This is more or less (in general terms) what they've been saying the game is since day one. It's an exploration game, man.
Any other hype for civilization building and etc. is supplied by you, not the devs. There is no Molyneuxing happening here, except in people's own heads.
jediyoshi
Member
Okay? Follow the links in this thread then? Bunch of old articles citing this exact information. They're not even generated as a means for them to be visually inspected. They're looked at in aggregate to get a general look at the color palettes being produced. They likely just have hundreds of them up at a much smaller resolution than the avatars here. Why even be hung up on the fact that they're gifs? There's no inherent quality about the format that makes them any more digestible than if they took a bunch of screenshots of model wireframes or specular maps.
We know this because this is pretty much exactly what you do in Elite. Toss in some of the typical Grand Theft Auto open-world gameplay and you pretty much have the basic gameplay loop of these kinds of space games.
What's messing up people's perceptions of NMS is that open-world space "simulators" pretty much don't exist on consoles outside the European NES version of Elite 1. Being the first procedurally-generated space sim on a console in 25 years is probably the main achievement of NMS. Honestly, what I'm hoping this game turns out to be is a slightly easier, more accessible version of Frontier: Elite II. That game achieved a scale that feels similar to NMS but with actual 1:1 scale, and one guy made that game 20 years ago.
If I can just get a space game like that with easy controls, terrain exploration, and not too much of a grind in terms of acquiring wealth, then NMS will have fulfilled its promise as far as I'm concerned. Seeing what much older games achieved, I don't think that's out of reach at all.
My biggest concerns with NMS (outside the possible grind) are:
1) The planet variety isn't what we hope it is and you start seeing repeating patterns too soon.
2) The mainstream audience might be unable to cope with the game's general absence of a linear series of predetermined goals and hand-crafted scenarios. Minecraft is big now and I hope people's familiarity with it can help inform them of how games like NMS are supposed to be played. The same goes for DayZ, which is also coming to PS4.
Icyflamez96
Member
Nah I wouldn't want to be too spoiled of the types of landscapes we could find. I mean of course some new pics/gifs would be nice I suppose, but I wouldn't want access to the whole gif database lol
It's not really "code" in the traditional way of thinking though. Nobody at Hello has "coded" the game. They made a math algorithm that (in the most basic terms) they feed parts and general rules to, and it spits out a galaxy.
That's probably exactly what they're doing. They said space probe to make it sound more exciting and interesting than it actually is. In reality, all they are probably doing is hitting "rebuild", storing the numbers, and repeating all over again. But instead, "Hey guys, we made a SPACE PROBE!!!!"
Veritigo_X
Member
It's a procedural algorithm like Minecraft. What planet it spits out is based on the seed. There's really no good way to determine what kind of planet will be produced without the algorithm creating the planet and having a person actually look at it.
Heyoooo! No one's made this joke before.
Once the planet is made you can find it in the algorithm though.
the way they are talking about this stuff now is starting crawl up its own ass.
Veritigo_X
Member
That's not how procedural algorithms work though. They are made with randoms bits of "noise" to create the planets that have the same output for the same given input. Sure you can find the "planet creation algorithm" but there would really be no way to tell what it would produce with a given seed without actually trying it. The way they are talking about this stuff is actually how it works.
What?
You are misunderstanding.
The way to check, troubleshoot, and polish code that generates data procedurally is to look at a representative sample of the output.
If I create code that samples randomly from a normal distribution, I don't need to laboriously look through my code and see how every single output for every single random number looks like. I can just draw 1000 times from it and look at this:
That's all there is to it. That Polygon called it space probes or however they are making the analogy is irrelevant -- you are wrong that the best way to look at the code is to just "find the planets". We discussed this back in page 2.
GribbleGrunger
Dreams in Digital
How could they look at something that doesn't exist until they visit the planet? Every step you take on that planet is a step towards building a planet unique to you.
"To boldly go where no algorithm has gone before"
I still think that at the centre of the universe is a supercomputer called GOD spitting out algorithms to generate and populate planets.
It's not unique to you though. It's just a part of the galactic seed. If anyone else finds that planet, it's the same planet you found, not a different planet.
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