No Man's Sky

Personaly i'm fully convinced that procedural is the future of art and content creation whether we like it or not. Procedural tools already got their foot in art creation and they are here to stay. Only a question of time that more aspects of the games we play are fundamentally driven by it.

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Quote you'd have to design the constraints to such a degree that you might as well make it in the first place.

And that is not a contradiction. Not long ago i have dismissed using Substance Designer for my materials with a very similar argument. I said the time spent to make a graph i could just aswell keep making it in zbrush/photoshop. I also thought it would hurt me in my integrity as an artist. But the thing is you craft something that is designed to recreate itself into indefinitely variations in the end by putting in a new random seed or moving some slider and that is pretty neat and actualy empowering for various reasons.

No Man's Sky is a perfect example of why we dropped procedural generation for the world in Subnautica. We just could't generate anything particularly interesting to explore, it all came out samey and bland. All credit to them for going with it but it just isn't quite there yet I don't think.

Quote from DrywallDreams

On 11 August 2016 at 6:29 AM, DrywallDreams said: Hello Games has been working on this for over two years, using procedural tech in a way/scale that no one has quite done before. $60 isn't so bad a price for the game, imo. I've paid more for less. Hell, I'm preparing to spend more than that amount on a single copy of a Tetris game, so I may be a bit crazy.

I soooooo don't agree with this "money per hour" logic of purchase. I had so many discussion in the Italian forums.

im happier to play 12-30h of jam packed content at $30 than +100h of run of the mill content at $60.

Also I don't buy games at $60, full stop.

I wonder why stuff like this was never previewed in the demos.

http://imgur.com/gallery/fBXfXAK

Quote from FMPONE

17 hours ago, FMPONE said: I have a feeling that even if procedural games were this huge phenomenon, there would be a separate urge for content that went far in the other direction. All of the art I really like is so personal and narrative driven, if it was so easy to program that I think it would have happened long ago.

Undertale was a great game because it was so _not_ made by a computer. Every second of that game was calculated and designed. To set up constraints which would deliver you content like that, you'd have to design the constraints to such a degree that you might as well make it in the first place.

Not saying procedural generation could never work, but I'm getting the feeling people might be studying this game (No Mans Sky) for a long time as evidence of what not to do.

That sounds cool, but at the same time the graphics are just like 1s and 0s right? What's the point of all that scale of its so out of proportion to what can be presented feasibly. I'm not saying this is a recipe for a bad game or anything, I would just have a million questions as a player like, "why should I care about this iteration of a universe vs the next one the computer generated" or "how can I share this experience with my friends when we're all playing a different game." Or "even if we could share this world, what's the point?"

Minecraft is an interesting example but the core gameplay loop of crafting and building seems to be the most salient part there, at least to me personally.

I probably would argue against making a procedural game, but I'm myself rather biased in favor of tailored experiences for obvious reasons, not sure how much that's blinding me.

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Dwarf Fortress has a different charm than other games (if you can call it a game, it's more of a simulation). The stories all happen in your mind since the graphics are pretty crude. It's not for everyone and has a steep learning curve but once you get in the zone it feels truly magical.

Procedural shouldn't mean a shortcut to make more content imo (because in most cases you will end up spending a lot more time than you would making stuff by hand), but when you have a lot of different sub-systems all interacting and evolving with each other, it creates a kind of experience that a "human designed" game will never be able to provide.

Just imagine if Mass Effect's story could change and adapt organically according to your choices, instead of just branching in and out of pre-defined routes? I'm not talking about a fully procedural story, but an initial backbone designed by humans, with a high degree of chaos introduced by the players actions and interactions. The story would respond to what's happening in the player's world, instead of shaping the world for him.

Another good example is Animal Crossing. When you start a village you are assigned random villagers, all with different personalities and sexes. They then start interacting with each other in the "backstage" and you watch not only relationships between your character and villagers evolving, but also between the villagers themselves. A lot of times I forgot that I was playing a game/simulation and it felt like I was truly interacting with the villagers.

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The new Gal Gun shipped with an E for everyone rating on the back side of the vita version's box a literal fucking week ago. Printing errors happen. but nah sean (i'm on a first name basis) lied to gamer's.

The PC version is apparently pretty rough, if Steam reviews are to be believed (mind you, it's been out for two hours as of now). If that's true, that's a huge shame. TotalBiscuit apparently bailed on his stream because it was hitching so much, so maybe that's contributing to the rage. TB's fans are cool like that.

I'm not joining in on the hate, but I do read Steam reviews for some jolly good time. Like this classic:

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You're severly wrong about the minimum system requirements, replace them with this-

Mimimun- A computer made by jesus christ himself but it'll still struggle to hit 20 fps

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Quote from (HP)

1 hour ago, (HP) said: [Blocked Image: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CpnCA4QXYAANrt9.jpg:large]

As an Orthodox Christian, I must agree! Filthy heretics.

Quote from Vorontsov

18 minutes ago, Vorontsov said: As an Orthodox Christian, I must agree! Filthy heretics.

Do you also burn people at the steak? Rare or medium rare?

If anyone's picking this game up on PC still, it looks like the performance issues are because of drivers. If you install the newer 369 (nice) nvidia driver, it apparently fixes things? https://developer.nvidia.com/opengl-driver

I don't envy Hello Games for releasing an OpenGL 4.5 game as an indie studio!

I've been following this game for some time and I was very eager to play it. I expected that it would be a shallow game but I figured that the pure novelty of cruising from planet to planet would make it fun to goof around in.

It's definitely a flawed game and, moreover, a deeply flawed launch. But there's some... appeal to it. Can't quite put my finger on it. My gut feeling is definitely that it needed more love in the design department. Anyway, here's some screens from my first 4 hours.

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It's quite an interesting situation with this game. On the one hand it's most likely a big financial success for such a small team and their first game, on the other hand with the mediocre reviews and user backlash it's gonna be a tricky situation for whatever their next project is.

I would say the best thing they could do is continue working on the game with some patches that add more gameplay and meaningful content and perhaps release an enhaced edition at some point.

They have a solid base, it'd be silly not to add more to the game.

Played it a bit at lunch today, I really dig it! The inventory management aspect is pretty annoying and could be dropped altogether imo. It also needs a desaturation filter, I got a mild headache after being in a red planet for some time

Quote from dux

2 minutes ago, dux said: They have a solid base, it'd be silly not to add more to the game.

Quote from Steppenwolf

15 minutes ago, Steppenwolf said: I would say the best thing they could do is continue working on the game with some patches that add more gameplay and meaningful content and perhaps release an enhaced edition at some point.

Word

I love Robbaz. His voice is so Swedish it defies my stereotype.

Also wow the steam reviews atm.

Quote from Steppenwolf

1 hour ago, Steppenwolf said: It's quite an interesting situation with this game. On the one hand it's most likely a big financial success for such a small team and their first game, on the other hand with the mediocre reviews and user backlash it's gonna be a tricky situation for whatever their next project is.

I would say the best thing they could do is continue working on the game with some patches that add more gameplay and meaningful content and perhaps release an enhaced edition at some point.

They made the "Joe Danger" games before this, but those were much smaller.

Captain Tush ??????

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