No Man's Sky Now on Mac | Hacker News Reader

No Man's Sky Now on Mac

nomanssky.com

98 pointssmoldesu73 comments

The long term productivity of this dev team is insane. They need to write a book on how they sustain it, and sell it to every single AAA studio.

Agreed. I'm surprised they release unpaid updates as opposed to paid DLCs. Wonder how they manage.

The timing and text of this announcement certainly suggest that they've been gearing up to be a launch title on Apple's headset.

Which makes me wonder if Apple's been funding development, perhaps for some time.

Could be...

Great news for the dozens of Mac gamers. If Apple's headset is a success(?) and games want to support their headset, adding Mac support will be very easy to justify.

It would also not be surprising if this was another "Tomb Raider" moment, though. Bringing No Man's Sky to Mac required a Metal rewrite, and Hello Games had probably already finished porting to ARM for the Switch version of the game. It's still a hard sell unless you're a studio with nothing to lose like Sean's team or Capcom.

>I'm surprised they release unpaid updates as opposed to paid DLCs

From what I hear, from someone who knows someone who works at Hello Games, is that they've hired people to work on "the next game project", but NMS keeps selling, so they keep putting out big updates, because every time they do that, more people buy the game.

they keep putting out big updates, because every time they do that, more people buy the game.

Your friend of a friend must be mistaken.

We've been assured hundreds of times over by experts on HN that putting out quality software will lead to bankruptcy.

The only correct way to success is to build a low-grade MVP, then charge a monthly subscription, then sell the user's personal data and "telemetry." Surely, there can't be another way?

Do you remember how No Man's Sky was marketed and launched? I do.

Same as everyone else’s now long defunct app was marketed in the midst of a hype bubble. Marketers gonna market.

Difference is the NMS team appears to have an offering people wanted versus Bear Clone #875 and web UI POC skewed to highlight some banal metric for $99/mo per team member #1,773,958

What's insane is the comeback. I remember them being the most hated people on the planet in the months following launch. I at least don't normally associate people that have a sloppy launch with people who are in it for the long haul. Respect.

Just in the off-chance that anyone hasn't seen this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ

it goes over this entire saga from failure at launch to massive success

Ha, I'm happy to see another Internet Historian connoisseur. Can recommend his other videos as well, highly entertaining and very well researched.

Also, for videos on video-games, he has another, "secret" channel, most don't know about: https://www.youtube.com/@IHstorymode/videos

yep! there is also a third one, Incognito Mode:

https://www.youtube.com/@IHincognitoMode

Thank you!! Watching it over dinner tonight :-)

I never read or saw any of the press regarding NMS, just saw it come up on in the store and thought it looked pretty cool and bought it because i wanted a space game. I was actually pretty happy with it and mentioned it to a friend who then informed me of the drama.

I felt like it did seem rather overblown, i don’t do multiplayer so that wasn’t an issue and from playing elite i was pretty used to rather sparse universes, really like the aesthetic of it and not having read any of the press had no idea i what i was supposed to be expecting.

The game is pretty basic and buggy tho.

Buggy? Sure, no more so than any title. Basic, though? It hasn't been basic in YEARS. After the first couple major updates it got pretty feature rich FAST.

That might have been true at launch five years ago, but the amount of content is pretty insane after all of the updates they've done to the game. Haven't run into really any bugs in 40+ hours of playtime.

I can think of a number of AAA titles from the past few years from larger studios with plenty of pugs as well...

I'm sorry but have you actually played it since it launched? Or ever?

I really feel like we (HN) should be better than just parroting blogs and YouTubers and be better about actually talking about something in an informed manner instead.

This is the type of response I expect on steam or some other gaming site where people are incapable of making their own decisions and instead just parrot someone else.

Nothing has proved more conclusively than crypto threads that you cannot really expect HN to be above that standard of discourse. Maybe it once was, but very few people have been spared by the polarising, indignation-fuelling, engagement maximising tactics of social media influencers.

Indeed. I'll add the proliferation of AI doomers driving actual ML researchers away to that tally. And cookie banner defenders.

I mean i’ve been playing this game since its release date. Once you get past the awe at a sheer number of planets and procedurally generated “wildlife” you start to notice the game is rather empty. I really feel like we shluldnt jump straight to accusations of “parroting” and being “incapable of making their own decisions”. Out of curiosity i made my own game with planets and denser vegetation that run smoother than no mans sky and i have zero game dev experience.

I have almost 70 hours in NMS, and what eventually made me stop playing was having too much to do. While it started out very sparse, it has absolutely become an exploratory sandbox that actually has stuff to do. Like any sandbox it can be repetitive at times (I need to gather X material to make component Y to complete mission/request Z) but I still felt fulfilled by most of the gameplay.

I don't really think they have any secret sauce that AAA studios don't have, the explanation is just that they've continued work on the game after release. For any other AAA game, nearly all the developers pivot to working on the next project after release so you don't see as substantial updates.

Or they get canned

I disagree.

Hello games has ~40 employees, apparently up from ~20 years ago.

343 has over 500 employees... maybe 750? I am not sure. But they spent at least an order of magnitude more manhours on Halo Infinite (not even counting help from other Microsoft branches and carryover work from 3 previous Halo games), and just look at how Infinite ended up compared to NMS.

Seems about right. Software dev scales very poorly with number of devs. Optimum team size is like 3-4.

Definitely, you can bring the stars down with 4 well-managed and motivated full time-devs.

I guess this is true.

Seems like the game dev sweetspot is "AA" sized, like Hello Games, Coffee Stain, maybe Obsidian... its where economies of scale really kick in, but beyond that studios quickly hit all sorts of scaling issues.

I worked in the games industry for a short amount of time and have a few friends still in it (less and less as the years go by) so that's what I'm basing this opinion on.

Anyway, a big part of the efficiency issues with AAA studios is they generally get fully or close to fully underway on a design that mostly goes into the trash before launch. So they aren't really developing one game, they're developing several with varying amounts of overlap and completeness. The development of Doom Eternal is a high-profile (and very successful) example of this.

This is also why the industry is unfortunately fueled on crunch: sure it took 4+ years to deliver the final product but much of the final game shaped up in the last 6-12 months. It's a miracle more games don't need year+ delays.

From what I've seen, indie studios tend to spend a much larger percentage of the development cycle prototyping and iterating before going into full production. They do this because they can (less overhead from idle staff) and because have to (they can't afford to spend years spinning their wheels). It's much more efficient but it also limits scope (which has some big downsides).

Interesting. I have read this happens and doesn't always work out (like with Mass Effect Andromeda), but I didn't know it was so common.

I think many "AA" studios and larger indies are getting around this conundrum with early access. They commit to a working skeleton but still get to prototype features, they get a revenue stream from their own testers to sustain them, and they get a "free" relaunch from a full launch on their own time.

Good code which you don’t just want to throw away?

It’s a stereotype that game developers don’t usually write good code. I’m not sure how accurate this really is, but I bet a lot of games get released and then the devs are like “nope, not touching that again” (except for easy bugfixes)

Rumored to be a flagship release for the AR headset that’s also rumored to be announced next week. Things like these really show the huge competitive advantage of the M series chip from Apple. There’s no other production chip with the same performance vs power consumption which is so important for AR.

It depends. Yes, M Series leads in perf/watt, by far.

But if they put an M2/3 in there, it won't be powerful enough. PS5 VR hooks into the PS5, which has a 10 tflops GPU. The VR device would need at least an M2/3 Pro SoC to be competitive.

Rumor has it that it’s double stacked M2

I heard that it's triple stacked

The M2 Max’s GPU is ~13 TFLOPS (bit more)

Also that ignores that they could do a M2-based spin off die/config, with additional grunt. Call it M2 XR or something

And remember: don’t discount the difference having the chip dedicated to the headset makes. The PS5 treats it as an addon, quite different characteristics.

My point is that if they put the base M SoC in there, it really isn't that powerful. They'd need to put at least an M2 Pro in there.

> We’ve got another surprise in the VERY near future, but today is all about Mac…

Sure sounds like NMS will be on the rumored Apple VR headset.

BTW the VR version of NMS is implemented very well. It has bespoke interface for VR, unlike Elite that just treats VR headset as a regular screen with a gamepad.

Would this game run properly on an M1 Macbook Pro? Does a trackpad and keyboard cut it as in interface for a game like this?

I'm so out of the loop with gaming and gaming hardware, but I've been half watching this one for ages and have to admit that I'm tantalized.

Based on NMS performance on my 2010 era i7 and middling graphics card back in ~2017, I'm guessing that it will look and run great on the M1. I'm installing on my M1 mini, I can report back in about 6 hours on performance.

I imagine you could have fun with the trackpad, it definitely works with the KBD/mouse combo.

When they announced it at WWDC last year part of the developer context was talking about their new "MetalFX" upscaling system, which NMS is using. I imagine any ARM Mac will handle it pretty well with that up their sleeve.

And the Mac Mini has a fan (unlike the Macbook Air) which should be a big help in sustained workloads like gaming.

>Does a trackpad and keyboard cut it as in interface for a game like this?

It should, you don't need twitchy mouse speed like fast-paced shooting games, even though it's an FPS/vehicle game.

Always good to see mac ports of games. I don't understand why Apple doesn't lean more into the gaming market. They have great hardware and it's a huge pool of people

I literally just switched to Windows from Mac full-time so that I could feel like I can game more often. I have a dual-boot Hackintosh, and booting into Windows simply to game was always a chore because I'd lose all my open windows/tabs on Mac. So much of a chore that I essentially gave up gaming.

(Not to mention that when I did boot into Windows, the next few hours were spent downloading OS and game updates.)

I do wish that AAA games on Mac were more common. But WSL2 is super nice, so w/e.

That was what I did until moving to Linux full-time. WSL is awesome, but really just a gateway drug to running a full-fat Linux system. One day I just switched and never looked back. Valve's Proton is truly a game-changer worth trying, if you haven't already.

How is performance with Proton? I typically play shooters and I need my 144+ FPS.

Totally usable. Performance degradation differs from game-to-game, but even the worst-case-scenario titles rarely lose more than 20% performance. On my old GTX 1050ti, I was able to play Overwatch through Wine at 120fps (albeit barely). My 3070ti drives the same 1440p@144hz display pretty comfortably, the only thing you'll really be missing on Linux is HDR support.

Getting Linux to work right, on the other hand, is a bit of a different story. It's a painless process on Intel and AMD-based GPUs, but Nvidia drivers are still not as good as they could be. Phoronix actually did a really interesting comparison recently that examines the performance you lose: https://www.phoronix.com/review/wayland-nv-amd-2023

So, overall I recommend it. Use Wayland if you want to take your frame timings seriously, and you probably won't be super disappointed. You might not instantly delete Windows, but it's nice to have options.

Performance is fine, the problem is that most multiplayer shooters won't support running on Linux due to their anticheat implementations.

I just did the opposite. Bought a low end Mac Mini M2 since I mostly use my main computer to remote into work and I'm mostly just in a Browser, Slack and Remote desktop all day. I figured that I'd might as well get something that uses less power since summer was coming and it's made a huge difference in my electricity usage (windows workstation/game machine power idles at about 250W) and heat generation in my small home office. Now if I want to play a game that's not on my mac I just turn on the Windows machine that's now in another room and then log into it with Parsec. Once I'm done I shut down the machine and I'm back to low power with just the Mac mini.

I think Steve Jobs was largely opposed to addictive, non-social stuff. There may be some institutional inertia continuing that path.

Also, this is a good indicator of Apple's VR horsepower. NMS VR would chug on the Quest snapdragon.

It'll be interesting to see how it compares to other similarly-priced, tethered experiences like PSVR or Valve Index.

The index is twice the price of the VR2 headset I thought, not really similar.

As a side note, NMS runs really great on the VR2.

> NMS runs really great on the VR2

I see this in many places but that's not my experience at all.

Very low-res graphics, colours are overly bright, controls are interesting but can be fiddly, and the frame rate drops are really bad for my motion sickness.

This from someone with about 250h on flat-screen NMS, and many hours on VR2 games like Synth Riders, Pistol Whip, Beat Saber, GT7, Humanity and the Poker one.

Cross platform saving and playing & free for players who already own the game on Steam. Nice!

This is for sure the best part!

Last time I played (a few years ago), the planets were really boring. The landscape was mostly the same everywhere, with different colors and mobs. There are no great canyons, for example. No water planets. Nothing like that.

Has this changed?

There have always been planets that are mostly water with just some archipelagos, they're just kind of rare. Check the coordinate exchange[1]. There's also pirates, settlements, derelict freighters, new sentinels, and exo-suit, new ship types, genetically editable pets, and expanded base building now. Depending on when "a few years ago" was precisely the proc gen is a little better.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/NMSCoordinateExchange/search?q=wate...

Yes, this is far from the game it was years ago. Just scan any of the recent update notes to see how far this game has progressed:

Interceptor Update: https://www.nomanssky.com/interceptor-update/ Fractal Update: https://www.nomanssky.com/fractal-update/

Etc.

Their website is amazing! At least on mobile. Does anyone know the name of the "effect" that makes the entire page seem "closer" to the screen? As in, with no depth and... I don't know to describe it... but the general feel of the pages makes it feel a lot snappier. It's like the entire page is a single pane.

I see the specs on the Steam page only mention Intel model Macs which is interesting.

I assume (which I hate to do) this is also Apple Silicon native and not running in Rosetta??

Edit: oops it says in the article but the page did not fully load as I blocked the cookie. My bad.

Yes, it says so in the article.

> No Man’s Sky has been built from the ground up with a new rendering pipeline to take full advantage of Metal and Apple silicon. In addition to the Apple silicon Mac lineup, it also runs on select Intel-based Macs.

This is for the Apple VR headset. They already support VR for a while in other platforms.

No, this is for the Mac.

They seem to be teasing the Apple VR as well for later, but this is "all about the Mac"

This is for Mac, you can download and play it /today/.

Cool, might get it if it’s 50% off again, which seems to be the case roughly every 2 months: https://steamdb.info/app/275850/

Would be nice to play this on iOS. Just probably not worth the hassle for the relatively small number of iPad M1/M2 owners.

I keep hearing about this game, and it seemed cool before launch, until you realize they lied to everyone about the state of the game at that point in time.

It turned me off from ever considering it in the future. Turns out it didn't matter because the game still doesn't seem much more interesting than how broken it was on release.

I just don't care that games have turned into one-time purchase services. I want people to stop lying about their products.

If you lie before going gold, I will never buy it.

I think the guy got out over his skiis and over promised and had to strip out a ton to actually ship it. Who among us hasn't worked on a software project like that? I think his behavior since has been super admirable.

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