No Man's Sky

[Steppenwolf 1,360]

6 hours ago, FMPONE said:

When you know that a code just randomly generated the world you're in, it's going to feel very meaningless and shallow.

Didn't seem to bother all the Minecraft players out there. Probably still gonna take 10-20 years before AI or some neural networks can create a narrative that's difficult to distinguish from something man made. But once it's there i don't think it will take anything away from the experience. It's all a question of quality and depth not how it came to be. Also procedural games being virtualy infinite is just a recent trend. I could imagine there is lot of untapped potential for shorter and more focussed adventures.

[Minos 5,426]

9 hours ago, FMPONE said:

I think the bottom line is that people will either 1) want stories or 2) want to create stories. Either way, there has to be a story somewhere. 

When you know that a code just randomly generated the world you're in, it's going to feel very meaningless and shallow.

Have you ever played Dwarf Fortress?

What a lot of these randomly generated games lack is what Dwarf Fortress does really well: When you start a new game, the first thing the game system does is to generate a world. It then applies several rules and checks to see if that world is valid and moves on to the next step: Populating the world with characters, biomes, nations etc... The simulation then runs for decades and this is where the real magic happens. Wars are fought, climates are changed, civilizations rise and fall, legends are born etc... When you start a new game you have a huge amount of backstory of past events that happened in that newly generated world, which you can then continue and evolve. This is something that I hope games take more advantage in the future.

No Man's Sky from what I've seen falls only in the realm of randomly generated content. The generated content doesn't interact with older content and doesn't evolve. It's an infinite but static game. The most the player can influence the game is by naming things.

I really want to check it out but I think I'll wait until it's cheaper. No point in paying 59 bucks for a game that might get old in a matter of hours.

[DrywallDreams 700]

1 hour ago, Steppenwolf said:

Didn't seem to bother all the Minecraft players out there. Probably still gonna take 10-20 years before AI or some neural networks can create a narrative that's difficult to distinguish from something man made. But once it's there i don't think it will take anything away from the experience. It's all a question of quality and depth not how it came to be. Also procedural games being virtualy infinite is just a recent trend. I could imagine there is lot of untapped potential for shorter and more focussed adventures.

we already have the technology for procedural stories: http://objectdreams.tumblr.com/post/147401575664/batman-the-animated-series-synopsis-written 

but really, I might even say we're maybe even 5 years off of something like this, looking at stuff like Dwarf Fortress, there's some really interesting stuff in the realm of procgen when it's allowed to go a little crazy, which seems like the huge point against NMS (though there's some good shit out there: https://twitter.com/tha_rami/status/763616163511341056), NMS just seems to ground itself in reality just a bit too much (also while I was typing this Minos also made a great point about the universe being forced to be static), making it seem a bit bland.

Also it's worth noting that with Minecraft, there's actually a huge community for custom maps, Minecraft does well as a simple level editor for whatever the players may want.

I think the procgen magic is going to start to wear off, though, particularly in the realm of Rogue-likes and other arcade-style games, as the people who grew up with developers like Amusement Vision start making games

Edited August 12, 2016 by DrywallDreams

[Steppenwolf 1,360]

Guess we are just waiting for some smart guy to put all the puzzle pieces together. A game that combines elements from Minecraft, the world history thing from Dwarf Fortress and some quests and npc interactions that go beyond simple fetch and grind missions would be pretty awesome.

As for proceduraly generated stories, i think we are still in the uncanny valley with that looking at the different chat bots and things that already exist. For games it's more complex then a simple story on a page aswell, since it all has to branch out and still make sense.

 

Edited August 12, 2016 by Steppenwolf

[FMPONE 5,979]

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.

35 minutes ago, Minos said:

Have you ever played Dwarf Fortress?

What a lot of these randomly generated games lack is what Dwarf Fortress does really well: When you start a new game, the first thing the game system does is to generate a world. It then applies several rules and checks to see if that world is valid and moves on to the next step: Populating the world with characters, biomes, nations etc... The simulation then runs for decades and this is where the real magic happens. Wars are fought, climates are changed, civilizations rise and fall, legends are born etc... When you start a new game you have a huge amount of backstory of past events that happened in that newly generated world, which you can then continue and evolve. This is something that I hope games take more advantage in the future.

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.

[Steppenwolf 1,360]

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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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.

[dux 4,263]

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.

[blackdog 4,401]

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.

[dux 4,263]

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

http://imgur.com/gallery/fBXfXAK

 

[Minos 5,426]

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.

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.

[Lizard 1,349]

 

[DrywallDreams 700]

Just now, LizardPL said:

 

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.

[Sprony 8]

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

 

 

[┌HP┘ 9,745]

[Vorontsov 1,125]

1 hour ago, (HP) said:

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