Exploring No Man’s Sky, A Computer Game Forged by Algorithms | Hacker News Reader

Exploring No Man’s Sky, A Computer Game Forged by Algorithms

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241 pointsLibertatea120 comments

The issue with a lot of procedurally-generated content is that overall things become same-y. Lots of breadth, little depth. When you have a set number of variable sliders, you don't have to see all the possible worlds to get a sense of how many sliders there are and what their ranges are. The problem only gets worse when moving away from planet/landscape generation (dumb matter) and getting into simulations of history or society.

I'd be really interested in learning about any work in the "interestingness" of procedural content. Is it possible to quantify that sort of emergent complexity that happens in life, or in a work or story with artistic direction that takes on a life of its own? Can a system make a billion compelling and unique stories without solving the issue of Strong AI and just making a superintelligent DM?

Even though I am an advocate of procedural generation, I concur that this is a problem with procedural generation. Even though one algorithm can create millions of permutations, they are all based on the same algorithm (for example, you can vary the size and distance of Worley noise in many ways, but in the end it looks like variations on the same type of noise). For each really new thing you want to produce, you basically have to create a new algorithm to produce it. You can often combine algorithms (say, combining simplex noise with worley noise to produce rocky terrain), but there are only so many interesting ways you can do this, and so many ways you can do it that won't break your game. You can't go wild adjusting the parameters, because 99 percent of the results will look like junk, so you often have to restrict yourself to meaningful subsets of the parameters. Really, it gets pretty close to manual generation at some point, because there is so much human input. Even if you were creating creatures, simply varying the amount of limbs would only produce so many interesting results. Then you have to code separate algorithms to generate eyes, horns, claws, skins, fur, etc -- and then make sure that every generated permutation looks ok.

Edit: to add an additional distinction, I am referring to the generation of visual content here. You can do much more in an emergent (AI-driven, state-based, or chaotic) system and produce surprising results, although you still fall into the dilemma of making sure that all resulting permutations look/function correctly.

If the procedural system were only used as inputs for the initial state and the world were based on a chaotic model then the the starting game state (after some iterations of the world model) could be wildly different for very similar sets of input states.

As you mention, the challenge then becomes to define this sort of chaotic system in such a way that the resulting worlds are not 'nonsense'. Nonsense states could be culled using some fitness functions... sounds like fun :-)

Yes, in my mind there are at least two levels of procedural generation:

1) Generating the layout of the world, placement of entities, and other world states (such as available quests or plot devices).

2) The generation of the actual content itself (NPCs, items, terrain, flora, fauna, etc).

Here, I'm mostly referring to the second type. :)

As far as the first type, there is a LOT more you can do with chaotic systems because they are often AI-driven, and AI-driven things can (potentially) have emergent results (although even an AI-less system, like Conway's game of life, can produce many interesting results).

> Even if you were creating creatures, simply varying the amount of limbs would only produce so many interesting results.

That's exactly what I was thinking when I saw the gazelles, the diplodocus, and that oversized rhinoceros plowing through the purple forest. This is meant to be a one of infinite worlds to explore, and it's just Earth with a few tweaks.

I'd be interested as well in any recent academic research in this. The best I've seen in the wild is Dwarf Fortress, which focuses on building interesting terrain, a rich global history, and interesting local power structures and NPC behavior. I think the ultimate vision for the game is pretty ambitious, and it is slowly getting there, step by step, over the course of years.

> The issue with a lot of procedurally-generated content is that overall things become same-y

Yes. It's easy for a developer to say "trillions of possible combinations" or "every x is unique with a high degree of certainty" but those statements mean very little without seeing the end product.

Creating vast numbers of combinations is completely trivial. E.g. http://jsfiddle.net/JpZ7s/3/ which has ~10 million possible combinations but most are garbage and they're all very samey.

> I'd be really interested in learning about any work in the "interestingness" of procedural content.

Given that selecting "interesting" content from a pool of procedurally generated content is essentially a curation problem, I imagine any such method might also be applied to select potentially interesting content from a pool of human-generated content. As publishing in all media grows easier and easier, curation is going to increase in importance and difficulty.

The No Man's Sky approach to curation is interesting. Bots that roam around and create animated gifs of the universe so the developers can get an at-a-glance cross-section of the universe.

That's often a problem with what's sometimes called "constructive" PCG, i.e. manually writing an algorithm that generates variations of content. It's somewhat hard to craft an algorithm that produces a ton of variations that don't look trivially like variations, at least without a lot of careful tweaking.

> I'd be really interested in learning about any work in the "interestingness" of procedural content.

Some of the AI research on PCG goes in that direction. Instead of writing a constructive algorithm, you instead try to specify what content you want in some formal way, and then use a solver to generate content meeting the description (a genetic algorithm, constraint solver, etc.). I.e. start from the goal rather than from the algorithm. It is still difficult to quantify "interesting content" though! Instead it usually needs to be something more specific, like "a level with the following properties: A, B, C". As a shameless plug, two colleagues and I are working on a book that surveys the current research: http://www.pcgbook.com

> Instead of writing a constructive algorithm, you instead try to specify what content you want in some formal way, and then use a solver to generate content meeting the description (a genetic algorithm, constraint solver, etc.)

This is basically the difference between imperative programming and logical programming. Each has advantageous domains (basically which ever way is easier to implement).

Dwarf Fortress. Read about it. Play it. Marvel at it. http://www.bay12games.com

There is nothing same-y about a game where you can't hit a bogeyman with a hammer because he's too fast, but you can kick his ass with cranberry leaves because they're lighter and let you hit faster.

Or, how about the elephants roosting in trees? Or the vampirism that can take over a fortress? Of the possible were-versions of most creatures, with infections, meaning were-swallows, were-frogs, and plague-like invasions of were-spiders?

Dwarf Fortress is built to generate stories, not just monsters and treasure. Every dwarf has likes and dislikes, friendships, pets, belongings, all driven by a fairly simple AI that just takes these preferences into account when deciding whether or not the dwarf is drunk enough to actually do some work, or whether it's so depressed it wants to sit in its room and cry.

And if you haven't yet, you should read Roomcarnage

Start at Chapter I and don't spoil it, it isn't yet fully played out and the community anticipates the next installment

http://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/2b6up6/roomca...

I love Dwarf Fortress, and there are some real treasures in the legends of many worlds. But even with all the possibilities, things still get redundant.

Yes, the elephants have taken to their emergent treenests, and that's beautiful. But that's a single bug (feature) that makes us say 'wow' once, after which we've seen it. The possibilities of were-spiders and were-alpacas and reanimated spleens and rains of dwarf blood are just more evidence of those sliders he mentioned. Urist likes tigermen for their stripes, and you can care about it, but Tosid likes cows for their mooing and Tovist prefers to consume purring maggot cheese and at a certain point we've seen it all.

That doesn't mean that Dwarf Fortress is flawed. It's easily the most involved story generator out there, and I'm really glad to live at a time when I get to read about it. But it's still not immune to the issues that the grandparent post raised.

Procedural generation isn't a magic substitute for creativity, it's a tool that requires lots of time and skill. Toady has put the work into it, and it shows.

I think the deeper you make it, the less dull it becomes. For example, I realize all the personalities are created by a relatively repetitive grammar, but all the same I think that it adds flavor to the game with all the little quirks.

You could say the same about movies, or literature. There are many repetitive plot choices, tropes, and cliches that are repeated, but little nuances and tweaks here and there make it interesting. In the Sims, if you think about it there's very little variation in the "sliders", pick a job, have nonsensical conversations, woohoo, and then lock everyone in a room and burn them alive, but the game draws you in because there is enough detail that the human mind can draw a narrative. You've seen the landscapes in Minecraft before, but that makes it no less fun to try and dig to the bottom to find the big caves and pits.

So yes, this game will be really dull if they do sort of a breadth first procedural generation. But if they succeed in adding features that make every interaction deep, I think it could be very absorbing. Sure, maybe it's just another variation of CrocodilePerson, but this particular one has a monogomous mate and 4 children, has scars from a fight with a WereRabbit, grew up without a father and sometimes thinks about it, is well known for his tracking abilities, ect.. I think that kind of depth really adds to the experience.

Yes, Dwarf Fortress is a great example of what can be achieved. To provide some level of distinction, as in my other comment (which I will repeat here for convenience), there are at least two types of generation: generating the world layout and its rules, quests, plot devices, etc, and generating the actual visual content itself.

Dwarf fortress is amazing, the algorithms it must use must be pretty interesting, it would be interesting to piece it out and open source it.

Dwarf fortress also benefits from completely simplified UI. Meaning it can go really deep without worrying about how the rocks are generated. Does magnetite look like pyrite?

It already looks like the scope of No Man's Land has gotten out of hand, maybe it will offer some of the joys of dwarf fortress, but not if it's purely visual.

The author open sourced his last game, Liberal Crime Squad, and its... The work of a madman. IIRC it was one ~40kloc C++ file full of globals and switch statements 6+ levels deep.

I'm sure someone's cleaned it up some now, but it made me wonder if that (unpredictable spaghetti code) is what's required for truly dynamic behavior, the kind that you see in DF and (to a lesser extent) LCS.

Interesting. Perhaps, it was the output of a tool that compiled higher-level code down to C.

Or what you get when you leave a developer to his own devices for a decade.

This. There's a reason Toady won't open source Dwarf Fortress, and I think it is mainly because he is embarrassed. Toady has a masters in math, not CS.

Also there is an absence of beauty in the generative/algorithmic-art scene. Much neato, interesting and colorful - which equates to weak.

It's HARD to make beauty happen algorithmically. Nigh impossible. Frankenstein hard. Also, the intersection between people who code and people who possess a sharp aesthetic sense is minescule.

I'd agree that a lot of coders lack a good sense for design and art (hence the term "programmer art" :D). I'm not a great programmer or artist, but I'm a competent programmer and an "average" artist (at best). This is only because I put so much time into learning art as a kid, and then later doing a lot of design work (mostly related to web design). Additionally I began 3D modeling when I was 13 and most games were still 2D. Anyhow, I think that learning at least a little of both goes a long way in terms of the resulting abilities.

Nonetheless, many of the old demo-scene pieces, which are entirely algorithmic, are occasionally beautiful, I'd argue. (A lot of the newer demos just look like music visualizers though...for dubstep songs :/ )

Ya, I dig alot of that demo scene stuff too. I sniff a natural beauty there somewhere. A natural beauty, a smart shape game, or something. It's what I'm trying to get at with my own work (http://fleen.org). Sorta got a handle. Frankly done with the whole subject presently.

Wow, that is some impressive tessellation :)

A totally different type of procedurally-generated content: The physical card game, Dominion.

It is a deck-building game, where players play cards to generate cash to buy cards that go into the deck that they are playing out of (which cycles endlessly). There are 6 boring and fundamental cards that are present in every game, and 10 'kingdom' cards which do interesting and clever things. The 10 kingdom cards that are present in any given game are randomly selected from a set of 25 (around 170 in the expansions), without constraint.

The variations are extreme. Some games have fast drawing and high power curves, some are slow slogs. Some games progress linearly, others build slowly and then explode, and some have stair-shaped power curves because there just aren't any cards at certain price-points. Some games have ways of attack other players. Some games have alternate victory conditions. Some games have multiple paths to victory, other are won by fine-grained control over normally-minor details. In short, the variation is immense and novel experiences have continued, even years after I first started playing.

Can we extrapolate from this? I think so. The two conclusions I would draw are: qualitative variation, and combinatorial traits. Differences in game worlds that are the most interesting may not fit into a slider, and binary or enumerated traits should be considered. Also, the interaction between random variables is what allows for a combinatorial explosion of situations. Stemming from that, it must be the case that multiple variables are meaningful.

I wouldn't say that's procedural content, I would say that it's emergent, or even less impressively, combinatorial.

I would probably call it emergent, in that the designers likely could not test the entire state space of all strategies.

What's impressive, in light of that, is that the game ends up balanced, or at least not fundamentally broken.

To your point though, is that the "content" (cards) introduces mechanics. Most procedural gameplay content doesn't necessarily introduce mechanics. That's why it's easy to feel "boring".

Dominion is balanced largely through the fact that it's symmetrical. No matter how good or bad the kingdom cards, both players are interacting with them in the same way, so, barring things like writing cards that give additional advantage to the first player, it's hard to unbalance it.

If you played "a game like Dominion, except each player had their own independent set of Kingdom cards," it would be big-time not balanced. Like, kingdom sets aren't balanced against each other.

Or perhaps you meant that it's balanced like "a given card tends to be about as good as a given other card." But that's just... not very true. In any Kingdom, there are typically a few must-buys and a few must-not-buys, and there are cards that are almost never good buys and cards that are almost always good buys.

Source: played a few thousand games of Dominion on isotropic back when that was a thing.

Disclaimer: Haven't played Dominion since Hinterlands, so this may not still be accurate.

Thanks for clarifying, I've only casually played Dominion.

Dark Ages and Guilds don't change this.

Oh, you can definitely break the game with the wrong combination of cards in the same game. When we were starting to play, I did just that... I could essentially cycle through my entire deck on a single turn. But here you can always choose which cards to include or exclude, so the overall game is mostly not breakable unless you choose to or luck into it.

Games are played and any amount of variation that isn't reflected in the game play is quickly filtered out. It isn't a problem of better sliders or more sliders or more realistic ranges of results, it's about the variation in gameplay they produce. The variation in game play is all down to the rules of the system and how the generated world influences that.

While I don't know how readily Dominion conforms to the definition of "procedurally generated", it's interesting to consider how its lessons can be applied to creating unique experiences in repeatedly-played video games. The game is always built on the same foundation of rules (expansions notwithstanding) and every game has the same goal. The difference in each game is the selection of actions available to each player, and the thrill is in attempting to compose a more effective sequence of actions than any other player.

To make this interesting, you need both a very wide pool of potential actions, and the mechanics of each action need to be designed such that feedback loops arise naturally.

Dominion gets off easy here, as the "medium" through which different cards interact is the very simple system of resources: actions, gold, and buys. You can create an enormous selection of cards just by having any given card grant some unique combination of these three resources, and then attempt to balance the card by dialing up or down its cost. It's all very abstract, and that eases the burden on the designers.

But how do you do such a thing in a video game, where actions are usually not abstract, but specific (and as a result, limited in number)? What medium of interaction do you exploit to create the game-breaking feedback loops that are the delight of a Dominion player? Better still, how do you make it so that the interactions between actions are subtle enough that game-breaking strategies are non-obvious, making them a joy to discover?

Off the top of my head, you could start with a game that already has a huge number of actions and create a replayable game mode where you limit the number of available actions. Let's use MMOs as a concrete example. You could just take World of Warcraft, assemble four five-man parties, and then present each party with the same randomly-reduced selection of the game's classes, where each class is limited to only one or two of the three talent trees, the class' usable abilities are pared down, and the talents within each talent tree have been shuffled randomly. Each group then races to assemble a functioning party and see who can down the most bosses in a non-randomized dungeon. And instead of instancing each party, you could just pseudo-instance them: for instance, downing a boss makes that boss unavailable to kill for any other group, rewarding groups who made hasty party selections (but punishing them if their hasty selections slowed their ability to deal with the trash mobs leading up to the boss).

I dunno, I suppose it could be fun with enough effort.

I think of lot of the solution to this problem is going to be make the random creation conditioned on user-provided examples of interesting content. You already see a lot of this happening in the most recent SIGGRAPH papers, such as http://people.cs.umass.edu/~kalo/papers/ShapeSynthesis/

The article mentions of evolution of creatures, which probably involves genetic algorithms. I suspect if you would procedurally generate planets and move the clock forward with genetic algorithms a few million years, both landscape and life would look pretty natural.

But since even our best RNG algorithms eventually converge, the resulting systems would start converging as well. So the issue of same-yness is an inherent issue of CS.

There's a possibility for hybrid approaches, where interesting content is generated procedurally from a corpus of real-world content. For example, lichess generates chess puzzles by [procedurally analyzing real-world games](http://en.lichess.org/blog/U4sjakQAAEAAhH9d/how-training-puz...).

Imagine a tactical warfare game that drew from actual military upsets. I think this would avoid the same-yness problem.

I've been working on combating this problem for a few years now. I'm working on a game called Spire (http://hitboxteam.tumblr.com/), which is a mix of Quake and Roguelikes. Every procedural dungeon creator I've seen so far seems to just use pre-made rooms or chunks of rooms, and shuffles them around. It never feels like you're in a new world each time, it just feels like you're in the same world jumbled up.

For the past few years, I've been working on an alternate system, which is to use a goal-oriented design based around the player experience. Each element in the world is placed purposefully, instead of randomly. I do this by emulating the traditional level design process. I think about every action and intention that goes in creating a level manually, and reduce it to rules for my system. The goal is that the end result feels crafted to guide the player through an experience, rather than to rely on the player to create a experience for themselves.

Examples of the generation behavior:

- Lights are placed in areas to guide the players attention towards the primary path, or treasures and dangers.

- Geometric features are generated based on spatial aesthetic rules (eg. a pleasing amount of symmetry and repetition), as well as gameplay rules (eg. jump distances based on player capabilities, corridor widths based on desired feeling of claustrophobia and combat difficulty).

- Unique color palette for each seed.

- Parameters of room construction have emotional analogues (high density -> claustrophobia; harsh angles -> tension; high symmetry -> order; sweeping vistas -> a moment to take a break; gradually lowering elevation -> an unsettling descent).

- The curve of emotional parameters over time have varying mathematical relationships to other parameters' curves, so every seed feels like there is a unique consistency to it.

> It never feels like you're in a new world each time, it just feels like you're in the same world jumbled up.

This was always the feeling I got from games like Daggerfall / Arena Scrolls, which procedurally generate dungeons. Sure, it's technically a different dungeon each time, but in reality it's just the same set of blocks in a different order. Even the mob spawning was based on the block type, so there were few surprises by the end.

Genuine procedurally generated architecture sounds like an awesome challenge - good luck!

The "emotional analogues" sound actually very interesting. I wonder how well that will hold up in practice - it seems like if it were possible to generate a compelling story from variables we'd be able to do it by now - we would be able to consistently put out compelling stories in book form at the very least. Its frequently not the structure or even the overall plot that's the point, but the little details that matter. I've heard it said of movies that the point is not what happens, but how it happens (probably a paraphrase of Roger Ebert). It feels like we're a very long way off from having any machine generate that.

It's certainly an experimental method, so I'm not quite sure how it'll turn out (but it's getting there). I agree about the details - although of course it's important to have a proper structure to the world and narrative, as it gives context to the details. My aim to build a thematic structure, and then to bring it alive through the details. Things like light placement, color, room shape, prop placement, and the overall mood of each section should all work to build an interesting world.

We even have generators that make tiny little stories out of the props - a campfire might have candles and tomes next to it (signs of a ritual), or maybe utensils and dishes (signs of a traveler's meal). Not to mention, the actual gameplay of movement and combat is intended to be its own world of intricacy (the other guys are working on that).

I'm not aiming to explicitly generate narratives of characters and dialogue and words. Rather, the system generates the feeling of narratives. Rising action, conflicts, an interesting flow of emotions, pacing the intensity, etc. The player can fill in the details themselves, as they (not their character) are the protagonist, exploring the world and going on a journey of discovery and mastery.

My thinking is that what it lacks in human touch, it makes up for in mystery. Knowing that it's a unique world that no human has ever set foot upon before is genuinely exciting, and gives a real desire to explore. It's like that feeling you got the first time you played Minecraft, and found some amazing outdoor environments and knew your eyes were the first to see it - but then as you played over and over you saw the patterns and it lost the magic. My goal is to capture the first feeling, and to hide the second effect with not patterns but processes, generating things based on a thematic goal in mind.

Good video games cover the little details through gameplay.

The secret seems to be a mix of a meaningful possibility of failure with 'fair' gameplay. Basicly, I did something stupid, so something happened, which I responded to by doing X which worked or almost worked but failed.

Think dangerous enemies with vary low HP. Or useful but not nessisary NPC's that can die.

Sounds a lot like the AI director in left 4 dead: http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2009/ai_systems_of...

Yup, there's a lot of inspiration from that, except the big difference is that this system isn't dynamic. In L4D, the flow would change based on your performance. We want our system to be fully set up from the start, since we're designing it to also be a competitive speedrunning game and need reproducible challenges for everyone.

In case you don't know it yet, you should probably also really check out the blog I linked in my other post.

http://www.gamesbyangelina.org/2013/05/the-saturday-paper-du...

This guy makes PCG art: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathanmccabe http://vimeo.com/jonathanmccabe/

He does interesting things with fitness functions that try to vary the entropy across different regions.

Are there "a billion compelling and unique stories" to be told? Perhaps the reason procedural content falls down is because it's so much easier to exhaustively explore than real life. In other words, the novelty of real-world stories is an illusion borne from ignorance/inexperience.

> The issue with a lot of procedurally-generated content is that overall things become same-y

Unless you are Dwarf Fortress.

idea: random constraints

A grammar that generates every possible squence of symbols is boring. What makes it interesting is contraints, that only some subset of all possibilities is generatable. Even the Chomsky hierarchy relates to characterists of the subset defined.

So, you don't need more elements, but more constraints. e.g. a novel is a sequence of a small number of symbols...

This would make each section of a game have a certain style or character. For gameplay elements, figuring out the constraint could be part of the puzzle.

Generating interesting constraints then would be the difficulty...

This is true, but I don't think it's a huge obstacle for this game or others like it. Sure, it'll get boring after a while, but what game doesn't? It will likely remain interesting enough to enable dozens of hours of play, if not hundreds, which is more than anyone could ask. Minecraft and Starbound are both procedurally generated, and I got lots of enjoyment out of both before eventually getting bored.

A long time ago (so forgive me if I can't provide the reference), I read a paper about exploring a parameter space with a focus on "novelty".

The basic idea was that there were two different machine learning algorithms competing against each other. One was searching for configurations in the parameter space (I forget what type of learning algorithm the first one was), and the other was an unsupervised learning algorithm (a Kohonen self-organizing map (SOM), IIRC) which tried to model/predict the output of the model with the parameters chosen by the first one.

So there was a parameter space being explored by some search/learning algorithm. These parameters, when fed into a model (I forget what kind, I think it was a procedural graphics formulas of some kind) produce an output image. This image (not the parameters) is then fed into the SOM (which is doing online learning, so it's training and classifying at the same time), which slowly adapts to what sorts of images it sees, creating a sort of internal model.

The parameter-configurations found by the first algorithm were then scored against how well the SOM could fit/represent the output image of those parameters (IIRC, in the SOM algorithm you can calculate a score for how well it's doing).

So if the first algorithm would find something novel, something unexpected, the SOM would have more trouble fitting that output with its internal model.

From what I remember, it worked relatively well. The output images definitely had more "variety" in them than purely randomly chosen parameter values.

I'm not at all sure how to apply these ideas to planet/ecosystem-generation, though.

Apologies for the super-vague description, but it must have been at least 10 years since I read that paper :)

BTW another completely different approach to this problem might be found by using constraint solvers. Check out this site: http://www.gamesbyangelina.org/2013/06/the-saturday-paper-go... (if you're interested in procedural content generation, there's a lot of cool articles there, bringing together scientific research and game development).

I'm not entirely sure why, but from most examples I've seen, generally when you add constraints to a random generator, it tends to produce more variety. Variety is really all about restricting the randomness, anyway. White noise all looks the same, but it's the most random from an entropy point-of-view.

Looks like it could be a good game either way, but I'm questioning their use of words when they say "every atom" is procedurally-generated, as in their first reveal trailer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6fCn8oB-sg

From what they have demoed, they have not proven that anything actually is being generated. My best guess is that they randomly vary colors and textures (and generate the atmospheres, as they say), and randomly place models about the planet, which is a far cry from actually generating all of the models and animation for everything. A lot of it just looks modeled by an artist (and they do have an artist on their team). Anyhow, I don't think this will necessarily detract from the game, just a nitpick on choice of words...

An additional concern is how quickly this game came out of nowhere (I think?). The Inovae (formerly Infinity) engine took many years to develop - it was one of the first of its sort to allow seamless planet to space transitions with tons of terrain detail. If you look in close detail at the differences between the two, you can tell that No Man's sky does not have a very good sense of scale when flying into a planet (unless the planet were incredibly tiny). Also, note the angle of the fly-in is straight on; its much harder to prevent detail popping when flying in tangentially to the planet and I wonder if they have yet addressed this. Again, just another nitpick. :)

No Man's Sky (2:00 in for the planet fly in): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLtmEjqzg7M

Inovae/Infinity: http://www.inovaestudios.com and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6a69dMLb_k

That bothered me too. They clearly aren't simulating atoms here.

I wonder, if atoms, then molecules, then DNA, then viruses. We'll see if the dinosaurs get sick, and whether there will be players who choose to become doctors to heal, or at least understand the diseases.

Mmmmm, somehow, no.

There has to be some level of abstraction, otherwise they'd be recreating the actual universe, and I don't think the PS4 could handle that.

They haven't gotten into the specifics, but they are pretty adamant that this isn't just reskinning and randomly putting stuff on prefab environments. Their interviews with Eurogamer and the like from E3 are illuminating in this regard. I understand the skepticism, but I personally would rather be excited that this might in fact be something very new. The proof (or lack thereof) will be the game itself, so we'll just have to wait.

I'd be happy either way. :) But really, for the sake of their own credibility, they should demo these things to the public (regardless of how broken anything is, it would go a long way to reinforce what they are saying). I definitely would not say they are "lying" about anything, just that until they show their tools, we have no idea how in-depth the generation is.

They've already talked (and showed) quite a bit about how stuff like animals, trees, ships etc are done. Essentially what they're doing is building a base model (a prototype, I guess) for everything that is then changed with something like the sliders in any character creator, but more extreme. So from the "cat" base model you'd get house cats, lions, leopards, tigers etc from that, in addition to really wild things.

Yeah I read a few more articles and it sounds a bit more promising. As mentioned above, I'd still like to see them actually demoing these things so I can make a more solid judgement of what is going on.

No Man's Sky doesn't have a seamless world. It is separated between space and planets. The first clue is the incorrect size ratio of ships to planets when in space and when on planets. The second clue to this is the video, at 2:16 in the video[0], two ships most far away from the player( not the three close in front ) disappear into the planet's atmosphere, that is the line that separates the two worlds.

[0]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLtmEjqzg7M

None of these articles on No Man's Sky ever mention Noctis, which is really strange. That's clearly a precedent here worthy of mention. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis

It's very strange, and a little disheartening. Noctis is the best!

http://anynowhere.com/bb/layout/html/doors/local/frameset_no...

Not even Spore.

We don't talk about Spore.

Lets not even go there. Too much disappointment down that road.

I get the gist of how Minecraft is constructed: just a bunch of blocks with algorithms which hide certain blocks when they aren't in the player's view.

Are there any articles about how an engine like this is built? It is an extreme level of procedural generation (apparently), but the graphics aren't blocky and as abstract, but rather pretty impressive.

In a similar vein is Eskil Steenberg's Love [1], but this is on another level entirely.

[1] http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/index.html

Sounds like it's quite the artful balance between procedurally generated and manually curated content.

A bit (but just a little) more information can be found here: http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2014/06/25/crafting-the-endless-...

I disagree, I think that it's the procedural generation that needs to be done artfully! Unfortunately the tools and experience to be creative in this medium are a few years out :)

I am working on a full procedural generation engine (not like minecraft, but it does use voxels at a much higher resolution). Wrote up an overview of how it works, if you are interested: http://www.voxelquest.com/news/how-does-it-work

Thank you. Your work is impressive and it is good to see someone putting forth a technical explanation like that. Much appreciated.

Thanks! Any questions just let me know :)

As someone who's tried to make a simple version of minecraft as a hobby project I think I can shed some light.

At its core, procedural engines are built on generating different kinds of noise and then filtering and combining them to produce the types of values that you want.

The values you are looking for depend on how you model the different elements of your world.

As an example, in my game I wanted to generate regions consisting of different types of terrain. I ended up using voronoi noise (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram) to split the terrain into regions and then used the cell value as a multiplier for how bumpy the terrain was. The bumpy terrain was generated from smoothing regular white noise. The amount of smoothing was random too so you could have smooth hills or jagged mountains.

As you can see, you can kinda go wild with it.

> Are there any articles about how an engine like this is built?

It isn't that different, the only real change is how you handle edge conditions, as you can have finer detail so need to filter less.

Minecraft doesn't use blocks to simplify world generation, it uses blocks to simplify world modification by the user. The blocks restrict you making it easier (oddly enough) to create things.

Here's an old video from on of the people working on the game with a demo of terrain generation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4X_EZZn7dc&list=UUqN5uW6xLO...

Remember that Minecraft is a very different sort of game than No Man's Sky. Minecraft is a completely destructable/constructable world. You can demolish the entire world down to the bedrock and build whatever you want in addition to or in replacement of what existed previously. That's why some sort of segmentation system is necessary, there needs to be some sort of unit of interactability/construction/destruction, and for Minecraft that unit is a 1m block. No Man's Sky isn't like that, it's not filled with world's you change, just world's you visit and explore. Because you don't need that fundamental unit of interactability you can use more traditional world modeling that looks more like what we've come to expect 3D worlds to look like.

You may want to check out Everquest Next. I think it would be fair to say that EQN is very close to a completely voxelized environment and at least mostly procedural. There is a great deal of curated content as well, but it seems like they are working on sourcing lots of that from players. The voxelized environment in EQN is based on Miguel Cepero's work. I believe they in fact hired him. I have been reading his blog for a long time and you can get a pretty good idea of the techniques that are being used.

http://procworld.blogspot.com/

A couple of quick hints to get you going in the right direction is that there are ( I believe ) a couple of generalized tricks involved to pull this off well. The first is using the 'correct' method to tesselate your voxel geometry. Minecraft literally uses cubes and you are familiar with the result. Another 'classic' method is the application of marching cubes/tetrahedra. This gives you fairly good organic-ish shapes but suffers from the inability to render sharp edges. Everything looks blobby. I believe the method used by EQN makes use dual-contouring, or a variant, which allows you to create organic shapes and also preserve sharp edges. A second factor is the ability to use different levels of resolution or scale for your voxels situationally. This allows you to craft human-scale things like cups and swords and whatnot, with human-scale details, and still craft houses and mountains and trees, without the need for storing extreme resolution in those items as well. It can be very tricky to patch together various bits of geometry tessellated from different voxel resolutions like this, and not end up with ugly visual artifacts. There is also the thorny issue of applying textures or materials to everything I have mentioned previously, which I have never investigated :)

"The tens of millions of planets that comprise the universe are all unique."

We will probably never know, but I wonder if the reality of our own universe is that any life on other habitable planets will look remarkably similar to that here on Earth; given the parameters within which a sustainable biosphere are possible quite narrow. There might be some local variation but nothing that would be particularly mind-boggling to biologists (e.g. non-carbon lifeforms).

I think Brian Greene suggested that in a sufficiently large (i.e. approaching infinite) universe, if you travel far enough you will eventually encounter a multitude of 'Earths' that are the same as our own but subtly different in various ways.

In which case, if its a criticism of procedurally-generated worlds that they tend to have a lot of repetition, then the models are probably quite accurate!

There are several kinds of infinite. The kind where assuming the universe can be arbitrarily large would eventually allow you to encounter a parallel or subtly divergent Earth, with a historic Napoleon and where people speak Hindi, probably isn't the kind of universe we inhabit.

I'm having a partial flashback here and its killing me. Back in the 90's there was a guy who was building this exact same vision "Space Galaxy" or something where every planet was unique, every alien race unique, every solar system, full planet to planet seamlessness. Derek somebody? Generally considered impossible and derided by the PC gaming press corps.

I agree with most that you need a certain dimensionality to the generation in order to get something credible. Definitely going to check this one out when it comes out.

Derek Smart! Never forget!

Battlecruiser 3000AD!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD

65% on Metacritic. If that doesn't show what that site it, what does?

RIP coke machines.

Yes, that's the guy! At least I had his first name right. Such a huge vision of what he wanted to build.

Another space game coming out this year that will heavily use procedural generation to re-create the milky way galaxy is Elite: Dangerous. I'm in the beta and it already looks great despite many features not yet being activated for the beta players.

You can't land on planets :(

This is coming out as an expansion after the initial release of the game. Or at least that's what the developers are promising if the initial launch goes well.

Indeed planetary landings (and walking within a space station) requires as much work, if not more than, the space-flight stuff, so it's understandable that they don't want to just tack it on.

Frontier and First Encounters games all had seamless planetary landings so the goal has always been to include them in Elite: Dangerous as well. Everything the developers have promised so far has been realized (although some things a little later than initially scheduled), so thus far it's a good bet that they are not overselling their capabilities.

Check out Universim.

To be honest, I thought our sun would be around a lot longer.

“If you were to visit one virtual planet every second,” he says, “then our own sun will have died before you’d have seen them all.”

...

"The tens of millions of planets that comprise the universe are all unique."

That's pretty funny. Though what I think they're saying is that the total size of the result-space for their planet generating algorithm is, whatever, hundreds of quadrillions or quintillions or whatever it is that makes that work out, but that a given instance of the universe comprises tens of millions of planets.

Now what would be really interesting is to have some sort of rudimentary evolution in a game like this. Star systems, planet geology, flora, fauna, everything.

No, what would be interesting is everything that you said with the addition of relativistic-speed travel. Take round trips near (or over, depending on your reference) the speed of light and watch how things evolve.

I downvoted you because of the unnecessary one-upsmanship and trivialization of the grandparent. You might have your own idea, but you don't need to dump on his.

I'm not sure how you read either of those (horrible!) things in my comment but since I wouldn't want to ruin the OP's day, let me try again.

Instead of:

> No, what would be interesting is everything that you said with the addition of...

How about:

> Yes, what would be interesting is everything that you said with the addition of...

I think this is officially the silliest thing I have ever felt compelled to type.

My god, the Loading times would be unbearable.

Easy solution to that. Build a computer in-game that runs the game, and then do your relativistic flight while it calculates the time evolution of the game.

At a low enough LOD it's not unthinkable to simulate such stuff using GPGPU (CUDA/OPENCL) for performing such simulations in realtime.

That is only possible in single player.

Loosely related: there is a multiplayer RTS that allows both players to travel forward and backward in time at will. It's a pretty neat mechanic.

http://www.achrongame.com/site/achron-and-the-grandfather-pa...

I wonder if any games have implemented Minkowski space and Lorentz transformations. I could imagine a puzzle game using mechanics like relativity of simultaneity and length contraction to challenging effect.

PS4 only, really? Why can't developers release cross platform games these days? Releasing it for one platform prevents a significant amount of potential users from even trying the game.

I'd play it when they'll release a Linux version.

Independent developers need money to fund the development, being exclusive to a platform gives you those funds, as well as marketing and various other forms of secondary support.

The alternatives are a publisher (historical a pretty mixed bag, gaining control of your IP, changing the focus or name - see Divine Divinty) or crowd-funding (usually not enough to fund the entire project, unless you're Star Citizen :)).

> Independent developers need money to fund the development, being exclusive to a platform gives you those funds

How exactly? You can say that releasing for a single platform reduces costs. But how can it give you more funds? Marketing isn't really bound to limiting platforms (only expenses wise, same as development). However covering more platforms gives games more exposure, so more potential sales.

Cross platform tools are quite good these days (SDL2, etc.) so overhead of cross platform releases while still present is going down. A lot of the independent games of interest that come out these days are cross platform to my knowledge.

Console makers will sign deals giving you advance funding if you promise to make the game exclusive to their platform.

I see. That stinks, but I can understand why some developers can fall for this. Crowdfunding is a good alternative to prevent such kind of lock-in.

You're a bit too aggressively negative, hence the downvotes, I guess.

But I concur - as someone who can't afford to buy a PS4 or other current consoles (especially given how there's just a couple of exclusive games coming out for them), I won't be playing this unless it comes on PC.

I was excited to read about it until I saw it's only for a console. I've wanted to build a unique "park" world with similar ideas for a long time, but never had the time or resources. I guess you have to start somewhere, but doing this for a single console (P4) is not what I would want to work with. Outerra is the engine that has taken real world geometry combined with procedural geometry in the direction I wanted to go and is built for PC/Mac when it's complete.

It's likely coming to PC as well. It was announced last year without any console attached. At E3, it was at Sony's keynote, but it wasn't announced as an exclusive. On the other hand, they haven't explicitly said it will be on PC either, it's just an educated guess.

Disappointing article. There's no discussion of the algorithms the game uses to generate content.

Without trying to be too critical, it's strange hearing the term "algorithm" get a lot of use nowadays. Example: this BBC article fom 2011 about "When algorithms control the world", with phrases like http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-14306146

I suppose it's the natural evolution after "programs" and "apps" became mundane things and data science became more prominent, but the way these articles talk about them with no detail makes me think that they might as well describe algorithms as some mysterious fairy-like substance that causes magical things to happen.

Hopefully this isn't too spoilerish, but this reminds me of the scene in Transformers 4 where that one guy screams, "Algorithms! ... Math!" :P

I'm very impressed that you can fly from the surface of one planet to another seamlessly. Sure the science of partitioning space and changing levels of detail based on distance isn't that difficult, but it is rarely implemented.

Holy shit, I guess I'm getting a PS4.

I suspect--or hope, at least--that they've built meshes that can be combined in a myriad of ways, so by combining the hundreds or thousands of combinations you can get millions of animal or plant types.

These are animated characters. So not only do you need to have the 'flesh' made procedurally (meshes/polygons), but also the 'bones' onto which the meshes are attached for animation. Procedurally creating static meshes is one thing, doing the same for bones and animating it with a mesh so that it looks credible is a whole other story ...

I read something on Reddit the other day which goes some way towards capturing my expectation about NMS. It's not particularly succinct.

http://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/28cddf/im_worrie...

That is, procedurally-generated worlds are one thing, but an engaging environment (Minecraft) or story or purpose are other things entirely.

I have a flat game concept involving procedurally-generated concept but just can't think of what might tip it over into super-engaging territory.

I think the key mechanic that makes games like Minecraft fun is simply the creative element. Once players are given the opportunity to not only experience a dynamic world, but also shape it, that's when they feel that it's truly not static. Otherwise, the "procedurally generated" aspect is just eye-candy, as the reddit post mentioned.

I was impressed by the demo until I saw the very flat explosions that just faded out quickly, which took me out of the illusion immediately. Perhaps that's just a pre-production thing. Impressive product even if the article is sort of gushy and breathless...when I was playing Elite back in the 1980s the planets were just a circle with a smaller circle rotating on it for perspective XD

Did you know Elite is going to have a sequel end of this year?

Planets looks a little better this time around:

http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140618220148/elite-dang...

http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140618220220/elite-dang...

http://i1242.photobucket.com/albums/gg522/frobitz/ed-rings-8...

I have been trying to resist the temptation to purchase the beta edition :)

I bought the Premium Beta a couple of weeks ago and have not regretted it one bit ;)

Only about a week to go till the next update to the Beta and I'm looking forward to it - oh and premium beta entitles me to lifetime expansions so I reckon it's good value for money.

Go for it - you won't regret it ;)

But Frontier: Elite II did have seamless planet to space to planet flight, and procedurally generated planets. And accurate orbits (you could watch sunrise/sunset, and watch the right stars show up in the sky for example).

This game looks impressive in terms of generating fauna and flora etc. but the planet to space flight and procedural generation in itself is hardly new.

Can we please call this what it is. Spore: Galaxy

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