The “No Man's Sky” Archaeology Project
archaeologydataservice.ac.uk
archaeologydataservice.ac.uk
Fast forward 2 years to the Next update, which by all accounts was a huge improvement in many areas. So I picked it up earlier this year and played putting a fair number of hours into it. It wasn't problem-free but honestly I enjoyed it.
Fast forward again to later this year and the Beyond update comes out. This has been another massive improvement. There are a couple of minor things I don't like but honestly, it's a decent way to aimlessly wander the galaxy. It still has RNG in getting the best ships, which I find annoying and tedious, but it's enjoyable.
One of big problems in Next was that base building had SO many problems. Beyond fixed a bunch but it's still a problem. If Minecraft has taught us anything, it's that people will invest a huge amount of time in building a base. It's an expression of identity. It's a hobby that's an easy time sink. It's something the devs really need to double down on.
But I really respect the fact that the devs have kept updating this game. It's easy to get 100+ hours out of this game now (and I have quite a few more than that).
Still, I feel like there are a bunch of lost opportunities:
- Climate is global on a planet or moon. Why no ecosystems?
- No tidally locked worlds
- Gravity is the same
- No running water
- No geological features (geysers, volcanoes, etc)
I've built a giant glass cube on some random world. I don't know how long the servers for this game will be around but it amuses me that years from now someone may randomly come across what I built.
So archaeology in games like this fascinates me.
Also, I think some worlds could be uninhabitable, just for show. For example: gas giants.
On the bright side, the underground biomes are amazing! I’ve seen very complex sets of caves and tunnels with different fauna and flora. It’s a great game overall!
- Climate is global on a planet or moon. Why no ecosystems?
- No tidally locked worlds
- Gravity is the same
- No running water
- No geological features (geysers, volcanoes, etc)
What would be awesome, though likely totally infeasible would be the universe of no man's sky coupled with the individual world building of dwarf fortress, maybe not the civilizations, but the geological stuff. The way the world gen simulates erosion, and change over time to landforms. With different variations to the types of worlds generated, you could get some pretty cool geologically unique worlds. Have worlds with different primary mineral types and atmospheres form differently than earthlike ones and stuff.
I'm sure something like that is years and years away. Even if it was on a smaller scale, so you could have people actually end up meeting eachother and because different planets would be different geologically there would be different resources and opportunities for trading and stuff....
OK...I'm sorry, i've kind rambled on in a tangent and gotten away from the original premise now...I'll stop here.
Building a NMS GUI+game on top of dwarf fortress seems like a great side project.
More likely than not, it's perfectly feasible in the nms engine, but the devs themselves haven't put much thought towards it.
Also see heredragonsabound; you can get really far with parameter fiddling.
Unfortunately that's all lost now, since you can't select specific updates on the PS4 system.
Wait, what? I don't know if it's insane or groundbreaking to do a PhD Thesis on archaeology in a video game.
I'm unfamiliar with UO, but with Eve, sadly, much of the most innovative and interesting parts of the game are done outside the client.
This is also true for the other examples (Minecraft and No Man's Sky) where the games basically become what the player base uses it for. I think this happens to most freeform games where without the multiplayer aspect, the game basically is nowhere near the same experience as with.
An example is GTAV. Where there are lots of structured things to do yet the players constantly make their own meetups, car shows and other shenanigans.
A notable exception could be Minecraft, where you could have your own single player world and so long as you are interested it can keep evolving.
That is true, and that alone would make the necessary development not economically viable for any game whose life is measured in few years, but what if, along content provided by players, the game creators could insert new environments with NPCs and new stories without ditching the game? In a few years/decades probably AI could also generate characters that develop themselves according to the environment they "grew" into or events happened during their "life". Dreaming too much maybe:)
To those that were involved in the games/events, they're a major part of their life (in a hobby/entertainment aspect), so having this sort of in-depth study is seriously cool to have as a record of it all.
> I was so entranced by it that it took me a few minutes to notice that the spindly structure was not all that there was to see. Both directly above and below the structure (relative to the system’s ecliptic, of course) were two large, swirling maelstroms of energy.
https://evetravel.wordpress.com/2015/11/24/massive-debris-fi...
> As if a giant hand had hand-picked pins out of a pin cushion, the debris field stretched almost as far as the eye could see. The various sticks, originally arranged in circular fashion, now are laid out in a serpentine pattern, as if it were a winding path. Lightning crackles between the various posts: the flashes of light that originally caught my eye.
> Entombed: An archaeological examination of an Atari 2600 game
One type of archaeogaming research is digital excavation, a technical examination of the code and techniques used in old games' implementation. We apply that in a case study of Entombed, an Atari 2600 game released in 1982 by US Games. The player in this game is, appropriately, an archaeologist who must make their way through a zombie-infested maze. Maze generation is a fruitful area for comparative retrogame archaeology, because a number of early games on different platforms featured mazes, and their variety of approaches can be compared. The maze in Entombed is particularly interesting: it is shaped in part by the extensive real-time constraints of the Atari 2600 platform, and also had to be generated efficiently and use next to no memory. We reverse engineered key areas of the game's code to uncover its unusual maze-generation algorithm, which we have also built a reconstruction of, and analyzed the mysterious table that drives it. In addition, we discovered what appears to be a 35-year-old bug in the code, as well as direct evidence of code-reuse practices amongst game developers.
I used to work at Archaeology Data Service and it is a pretty groundbreaking place :)
I once had a large base on a modded Minecraft server, with multiple buildings, lots of machinery, nuclear reactors, power lines running everywhere, etc. Eventually I stopped playing and announced to everyone else my stuff was free for the taking.
A few months later I decided to hop on and see what was left. It was almost like you'd expect to happen in real life.
The buildings were mostly intact but had missing doors and broken windows. All of the most valuable stuff was stripped out. There was some worthless stuff left, like food in vanilla chests. My nuclear reactors had been partially disassembled, the most valuable parts scavenged.
It felt like visiting an abandoned factory in Detroit. It was once glorious and now stood in ruin.
But it's far, far from a track wreck.
What makes you so angry about this? To me it's one of those peculiar, flawed creative works that I'm glad exists. The world would be poorer without it.
Have you played it recently? The Beyond update added VR support which made it worth buying for me by itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8P2CZg3sJQ
Hello Games encountered a lot of hardship during development. Their studio actually flooded towards the end of development so they lost a lot of data. But that doesn't excuse lying.
I wish they would have a toned down version or Mod or something.