Comment by gavanwoolery | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gavanwoolery | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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.

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.

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