No Man’s Sky Is A Huge Procedurally Generated Sci-Fi Exploration Sim

I have my reservations about the new game however because if anything, there's plenty of space shooters out there. No Man's Sky is appealing because of the procedural nature, but the new gameplay videos looked quite good.

I'd want a game to feel like it's new everytime I play it online. I hate seeing the same corridor or encountering same situations. I agree that gameplay here will be the final gamebreaker for me.

I don't buy that procedural = sandbox effect = bored in 10 minutes. If anything I could never play GTA series entirely, I'd get distracted, pick up hookers, shoot a rival gang member in a drive by shooting, and commit suicide by jumping off the building while firing RPG launchers. This also tends to get old.

I'm not an indie dev, but a few friends from college are, and I get to meet a few of those guys here and there at GDC etc.- they're just delightful. Nerdy friendly guys who are incredibly smart, hard working, with an incredibly diverse set of talents (the skills needed to make a game are immense- programming, visual arts, music composing, game design, marketing- and a lot of those guys do all of it by themselves or with just 1 or 2 other people) and know to have fun.

Paradoxically, the gaming community is one of the most negative one ever (hordes of disappointed gamers will flood your blog and insult your whole family if you don't give them exactly what they want). That contrast is super weird.

Names you should check out if you're interested in knowing more: Kris Piotrowski, Derek Yu, Andy Hull, Phil Fish, Jon Blow, Richard Flannigan, Matthew Davis, Alec Holowka.

Pro-tip: You need rocks, and you need them fast. Get all you can in the south, and then move northeast for the large rock pile. From there, you need to figure out how to survive the stronger enemies.

Could you elaborate or link an article on this?

Regular expressions are a simple kind of grammar (aka "Regular Grammars") - you can see generation as choices made for explicit choice operators ("|"), and choices of whether to loop ("∗") or continue. Although limited, they can be surprisingly expressive. Context Free Grammars allow you to generate things that have the basic structure of xml, json and source code. And you can have Turing Equivalent grammars that, in describing a subset, can compute anything.

Of course, grammars aren't restricted to the Chomsky Hierarchy, but can include any way of describing the subset of streams (or generating an instance of them) - for example, the recent HN travesty/markov generators.

You can search for the right grammar (machine learning), by taking a corpus of instances of what you want to generate, and test out your grammar, by seeing how well it compresses them. This shows whether it is capturing regularities within them and between them - the rules or laws that are the essence of a grammar. In doing this, you should also take into account the size of the grammar itself: consider the extremes of one grammar that factors out deep regularities; versus one that is simply a choice between each instance, verbatim (this compresses real well: it just needs to encode which instance. i.e. log2(1/N) bits, e.g. 8 bits to encode which of 256 different instances, assuming uniform probability). Accounting for the complexity of the grammar avoids this.

This comes down to the length of the description of the instances + the length of the description of the grammar.

( "Model" is probably a better term than "grammar", since it doesn't imply a sequence. )

Re: your last point, there's no theoretical reason that an extremely accurate model must be computationally expensive to execute (e.g. flocking behaviour was simpler than expected; and Occam's Razor gives us hope) - but it might well be computationally expensive to discover in the first place. e.g. require many great leaps of intuition by humans. (Even if it's obvious in hindsight.)

The trailer looks a little repetitive to me - esp the yellow underwater plants; and the trees seem to be random blocks of foliage - like minecraft trees or github icons, just rendered nicer. I don't want to criticize, as they probably have some cool innovations hidden away in there.

What I'd like is gameplay-significant procedural generation. e.g. trees you can climb, so their shape affects where you can reach and how. Terrain - mountains, streams - naturally has this effect. Then, developers have to make it work right! So far, only the minecraft/dwarf fortress genres do this. Because generation is fundamental to their concept, their gameplay, and why people like the games, I suspect that that genre is where we'll eventually get the hi-res breakthroughs - whereas for every other genre, including "No Man's Sky", if their gameplay isn't 100% dependent on generation, whenever there's a conflict between the two, generation will lose (crunch time! what must be finished to ship?). Servant of two masters etc.

FWIW I still think FarCry2 (not 3) creates the most immersive world so far. Hopefully something even better will be done for nextgen consoles/PCs, as opposed to just higher resolution and higher gamification.

I think theproblem is with Kolmogorov complexity. No matter how much variation there's in your game if the algorithm to create it is simple people will quickly develop intuition about what to expect, and get bored.

The only game that I've seen doing procedural generation right is Dwarf Fortress, because it's too complex to model it in your brain as you play.

I'll have to see if I can pick up the whole series. Thanks again!

It's like if you made some algorithmic music and claimed every nanosecond was generated automatically, even though we tend to think in terms of notes that are orders of magnitude larger.

If they really expect anyone in the gaming community to believe they're rendering each blade of grass with a few Octillion points or polygons, they're absolutely insane.

He was developing it in Linoleum, which is his own portable assembly language that he wrote. It's still available and an interesting experiment.

My skeptical question would be: how can you set a mission in a genuinely dynamically generated world? For example, you might not even know that a bit of land will exist where you want the mission to begin. But, maybe I'm missing something obvious.

The performance difference for some cross platform games is huge (around 30 - 40% slower on OSX).

Another reason for this is that this kind of asset is way easier to implement than full blow realistic 3D models and environment.

In the end it's all about that, sacrifying game immersion so to be appealing for casual gamers who are not interested in game immersion and could even be put off by that because it contributes to let them think game is harder to play because it's not 'just a game'.