No Man's Sky

[TheMightyEthan]

Well the way procedural generation typically works is deterministic.  You don't have to generate the whole thing, different areas are generated as you explore (that's what minecraft does), and as long as you have the same seed different computers will generate the exact same worlds based off of it.  So I don't take the shared universe thing to mean they have literally generated the whole thing and have it sitting on a server somewhere, just that they have the seed so they can regenerate areas whenever necessary without having to maintain the whole thing all at once.

 

That's why dean's comment surprised/confused me, because if it means the worlds might be different each time then that would imply their procedural generation is not based on a fixed seed and is therefore not deterministic and not the same each time.  If, however, it just means alterations (such as digging) aren't saved then that makes a lot more sense with the shared seed where locations are just generated whenever they're needed and then dumped when they're not, but the results of the generation will be the same each time.

[Hot Heart]

This might offer some more insight?

[TCP]

Y'all wack. Look at that thumbnail. Jesus fucking christ. You guys are going to be sitting here, typing on your message boards, wacking off in the boobs thread, while I'm playing this in PSVR having the time of my life, killing space dinosaurs, blowing up space stations, and finding space minerals. 

[deanb]

My understanding is the planets are procedurally generated on your console. The universe map itself is on server side. Once you've been there and named it and the animals on it that info gets sent to the server. Which is pretty easy to assign a key and a few values for generation.

#10374832492834932492 = "Deanosaur, red, horn,quadped,aggresive" or whatever.

Compared to giant textures and 3D models and such.

Hence a lot of indie titles being rougelikes and the such, less need for individual hand crafting.

[TheMightyEthan]

It's funny, I'm really not much interested in this game at all, but I think if it were confirmed for PSVR that would suddenly transform it into a killer app for that platform.  I think it's just that the idea of random exploration of beautiful environments becomes a lot more appealing when I can feel like I'm actually there.

[Eleven]

Having seen that thumbnail, but not actually watching the video, I wonder if places like that will have an interesting backstory at all, like who wrote those things? What do they mean? What happened to the people here?. Isn't that what's cool about exploring things? That could be cool if the game had it, but someone has to write all of those, so it's not going to be as unlimited as the universe they've built.

 

(Maybe I should watch the video to know, but I'm really not interested in this game right now, just wondering out loud)

[TheMightyEthan]

If I understand correctly there's some kind of overarching story that involves getting to the center of the galaxy, so the ruins could potentially be related to that.

[TCP]

The ruins teach you part of the language of the aliens in that area. So if you find enough of them you can understand the aliens enough to befriend them, so if it's a really tech savvy race, they'll improve your science stat. Understanding them also enables trade with them, I believe. You can also piss off the alien races and they'll hate you, so much. 

[toxicitizen]

If the rumors that Hello Games were struggling to get good performance on PS4 were true, I think PSVR support might not even be possible. I heard the game is going to run at 30 fps but I can't find any source. Has that been confirmed? Cause if that's the case then VR support on PS4 is very unlikely.

[Eleven]

But see, (and again, sorry about not actually doing the research), those things only tell me that the background info is pretty shallow (for lack of a better word), and not terribly interesting. So that alien race is good at science, another might be advanced in agricultural techniques, another might be good at other things... But those are all the same things.

 

I'm thinking of something like that pyramid or sphere you find in one of the planets in ME1. I believe it basically showed that aliens were watching cavemen on earth. That's the thing about having a limited scope, you could write more compelling stuff. Maybe some planet just contains ruins, and you find alien tech that does not seem to belong there. Later on, you can make the connection that "Hey! Those were Reapers!". That makes the planet a lot more interesting (to me), than just finding random stuff/species that doesn't necessarily tell a story.

 

So yeah, we could find planets with little tidbits like that that reference the overarching story. But how much "history" can they write for a game with seemingly unlimited scope? As far as I'm concerned, the universe is only as big as how many unique stories they can write. It's like choosing to "Continue playing" after finishing a game. You can play in the world, but nothing compelling will ever happen again and will eventually feel empty.

 

The game might actually have all of these, but that's not the impression I get from the info I have come across in this game. Or maybe the game isn't really about that and more like a "create your own story" kind of thing. Anyway, those things are what I'm going to look for in a game whose theme is exploration.

[TheMightyEthan]

If the rumors that Hello Games were struggling to get good performance on PS4 were true, I think PSVR support might not even be possible. I heard the game is going to run at 30 fps but I can't find any source. Has that been confirmed? Cause if that's the case then VR support on PS4 is very unlikely.

Well the PSVR thing is based on comments from the creator, and you would think he would know if it's technically feasible.

 

But yeah, a game needs to be able to sustain 60 fps to work with PSVR.

[toxicitizen]

Well the PSVR thing is based on comments from the creator, and you would think he would know if it's technically feasible.

 

But yeah, a game needs to be able to sustain 60 fps to work with PSVR.

Oh ok, I didn't know they were the ones to actually mention it. Well, I'm sure they could make it work by significantly dropping the graphical fidelity or something.

Edited March 4, 2016 by FLD

[TCP]

Don't forget the PSVR has a box that connects to the console and expands POWER!!!!!! OR something, I don't know, I've never been clear on it. 

[TheMightyEthan]

What the box does is handle the positional tracking for the headset so that doesn't take processing power from the main console, and updates frames already rendered the console with the newest head tracking data 120 times per second so there's as little perceptible latency as possible.  What that means is that even though the console is rendering 60 fps, the box takes each frame and distorts it slightly to approximate what would have been rendered with the most up-to-date head tracking information.  It's similar to the motion smoothing tech that some HDTVs have, but way more advanced.  It allows the motion on the screen to more closely track the motion of your head without the console having to actually render at 90 or 120 fps.

[TCP]

But how much something's worth isn't just determined by amount of content either.

 

*Edit - Although honestly I think the main problem was messaging. They have to have known for a long time what the price range was going to be, and they have to have known that people would be expecting it to be let, and so they should have made that clear a long time ago so people would have had time to adjust to it before you're trying to get them to actually preordered it.

 

The messaging?? What? Honestly, this really confuses me. This game's been getting some serious stage time at E3, PSX, Gamescom, etc. It even got an appearance on The Late Show. All of that's never been done for a budget game before, not to this degree. Never mind the fact that it was on Amazon as a full priced retail game in the summer. Anyone surprised by this hasn't been paying attention. Minecraft was a 30 dollar game when it came out 5 years ago so this completely different (and bigger) game needs to be a budget title as well?? Ok then. 

[TheMightyEthan]

Regardless of the reasonableness of people's belief (I personally would have guessed $40), there's no way they didn't anticipate it, and so they should have addressed it sooner.

 

An Amazon listing means nothing, because when in doubt Amazon always lists things at the highest plausible price until the actual price is announced.

[TCP]

Well, I guess time will tell. If pre-orders are really low they'll have to adjust the price, similar to what happened with Ground Zeroes. But judging off the amount of people online I see online pre-ordering, I doubt it'll be an issue.

Also, to those feeling Firewatch was over priced, it was the top downloaded PS4 game in February.... so I bet you they're pretty pleased with the price. 

Games are only overpriced if there isn't a demand there. 

Edited March 4, 2016 by The Cowboy Poet

[TheMightyEthan]

Well and to be clear, I'm not trying to say it is overpriced, just that I think they would have been better served by communicating the price more explicitly.

[Mr. GOH!]

Have people realized that this will just be Spore 2 yet?

[TCP]

I never played it because PC gaming is for babies especially in 2008, but wasn't Spore relatively well received? 

[TheMightyEthan]

It was a massive disappointment, but was fun enough once you accepted it for what it was.

 

But yeah, I have no hype for NMS. Basically I'm hoping it's awesome because I like awesome things, but have no expectation that it will be.

[TCP]

For all of you being babies about an indie game costing $60, please watch this.

 

WTF I can't timestamp?? Skip to 1:42.  Edited March 7, 2016 by The Cowboy Poet

[TheMightyEthan]

For all of you being babies about an indie game costing $60

I'm pretty sure that that category is limited to Mister Jack, at least on this forum.

[TCP]

No man, I don't throw shade at just one person, I ain't that much of a dick, that was directed to you, Jack, FLD, Dean, Duke, TornadoCreator, Johnny, Nexus, FDS, etc etc.

Looks like it's the top selling game on Amazon and Game Stop, so clearly people think it's a fair value:

 

 

Anyways, I'm pretty happy, last week, for about 30 minutes, Sony mistakingly posted this on the Canadian PSN for 59.99, so I managed to pre-ordered it for that price just in time, now it's up to 79.99. That's what you call #winning 

Edited March 7, 2016 by The Cowboy Poet

[TheMightyEthan]

If you're lumping me in there then you missed the part where I said I don't actually take issue with the price, I just think Sony could have done better with messaging it ahead of time.