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- Hacker News
- Hug of death already I thinkby alienbaby
- Anyone else went along and reached the center of the universe on permadeath?
- One of the most interesting talks on the math behind procedural generation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9RyEiEzMiU
That presentation was foundational for me personally wrt quite a few things.
by ralusek - The issue with procedural generation isn’t how to do it, the issue is how to keep it from being boring.by Retric
- If you add civilizations and intelligence to procedural generation- you get really fast into foundation prime radiant territory- where you generalize from huts to radioactive ruins or substrate (matrices) - the rise and fall of civilization from first principles. To put that into deterministic math- is fascinating - but then to add the players input and have the fate diverge..
As in deterministic circumstances + a historic noise + a formula for civilizational fungi.
Basically a recursive scenario-tree- with branches for capabilities- and regressions as loops to previous iterrations. The noise function is the index and the dice - and the tree modifies its branches depending on the iterration. You gain a panopticon- your chance of accidental nuclear war wither- the loop back to savagery reduces in likelihood. And so on and so forth.
by 21asdffdsa12 - Never played, but it seems to me that this shares the same problem with Holodecks, from Star Trek, which is why would anyone ever want to leave?
- 10 years later I can say they spent a lot of time putting lipstick on that pig, maybe even a dress and a tiara. Probably one of the nicest pigs out there, but it's still a pig and always will be.
- I can't believe how little this article says about the game itself. It's basically the author taking a victory lap for being the game's #1 fan since launch. If I didn't already know what the game looked like, I would leave still not knowing.by jackb4040
- I am the author. I've been running the blog these 10 years.
I sat down to write about the game, summarizing it and how it has grown over the years at this huge milestone. And then, as I started writing, it occurred to me that ... I -- a person who has been playing this game daily for ten long years -- am probably more of a story that some may find notable than anything I could write on my "just for fun" NMS blog as a general recap of the game's history, with so many mainstream gaming sites surely doing the same in articles and YT videos.
So, instead, I just told about my time playing it. Obviously a lot of people couldn't care less about what I've been up to all this time (that's not lost on me!), but I'm still happy with how I decided to mark the occasion and what I decided to write about.
by blakespot - The OP is also the author, and writing on 'NMS Spot .com".
This is an article for fans, with an audience of fans. Explaining the basics would be unnecessary for the vast majority of readers.
Now, maybe posting to HN requires you address your new audience as well, but I'm just pointing out the above.
by dpoloncsak - Slashdotted: https://archive.ph/RnExBby mikestew
- I was so pissed off by the lies around the launch of this game and subsequently being refused a refund that I never went back to it.by retrac98
- I think it's fair to say they started off bad, but redeemed themselves.
In contrast Star Citizen is far more ambitious but shows 0 sign of ever actually landing.
NMS is still a great fun space game to play, the lore / back story of each faction is quite bleak though and the lack of good individual characters does leave it feeling more like exploration sandbox than a really compelling world you care about.
- At least it didn't drive you to smoke crack like it did to of my friends. Though ironically he still plays to this day though a lot less than he used to.by MisterTea
- I'm curious who refused you the refund? I seem to recall it being refunded pretty steadily by everyone who sold it digitally. Maybe I am misremembering.
Still entirely fair to have been turned off by the experience. Plenty of developers or publishers I don't purchase from anymore due to similar shenanigans.
by drakythe - I don't always seem to be able to stick to my values, but this time it was easy to just write them off and never look back.
I think maybe because there's just so many games being released every single day that this is a sufficiently competitive market. It's not like I'm deciding to never take the city bus again.
by Waterluvian - They really turned it around. You should check it out.
But yeah, super crappy launch.
by gtaylor - Everyone is well aware of how crappy the launch was.
From the article: "Speaking of No Man’s Sky’s updates, there have been 286 of them since launch. Hello Games has released 54 major updates as well as 232 smaller patch/updates across these ten years. That is a total of 286 updates—and every one has been free. Hello Games has never introduced paid DLC, microtransactions, loot boxes, or any such thing. Over the life of the game, they have been updating it at basically a fever pitch—and always for free, and free, the updates shall remain. This is pretty unheard of in the game industry."
These guys have done everything humanly possible to make things right. I think they had things pretty much fixed up within a couple years or so. They are doing a better job than virtually everyone in the gaming industry and have been doing it for most of their existence at this point. Maybe you could stop holding a grudge 10 years later.
by jm4 - Does anyone know what the roughly square-aspect monitor in the middle of his 3-monitor setup is? Looks interesting but I can't zoom in far enough to see a logo, and the Upgrading the Gaming PC[0] post. Thanks
[0] <https://nmsspot.com/2023/01/20/upgrading-the-gaming-pc/>
by zbikowski - Im having trouble zooming on the image but I'm pretty sure benq has the only 3:2 desktop display on the market that isn't a graphics tablet.
You should also look at the LG Dualup if this kinda thing interests you.
- It's an LG Dual Up (you can find the info in some earlier posts)
Technically it's 8:9 so not a perfect square, 2560 x 2880
by haunter - I actually really enjoyed the game on day 1!
Unfortunately, even with all the updates - they never fixed my main gripe - each planet is just lifeless, and it's basically the same few square kilometres copy and pasted over the whole planet (I'm about 120h played).
I wished they somehow made it more exciting to explore.
by Incipient - I think that's the limit of procedural generation. What you're asking for probably requires gen-AI or similar.
- Have you played somewhat recently? They've had a few expeditions that addressed variety in planets.by squigz
- Same. Played thru the original version. The overall vibe of the game was great and incredibly polished for a game half done, but yeah it was stretched very thin and started to lose feeling after a while.
That said,idk if I would like the fame at all now. Base building seems antithetical to the original nomad-like setting. And there's only loss to have adding identity to the protagonist after having played it as "yourself"
by maxlin - I'm also a day one NMS enthusiast. I thought I was the only one. I can definitely agree with your critique, and I think the difference was in how I played it. On release day it was basically a really pretty tech demo. You couldn't really die/fail in any meaningful way unless you tried to. But wandering the universe in a goals-agnostic sort of way, looking for different types of exocritters, learning the different alien words and doing some resource gathering/trading was satisfying enough as a second screen experience. Much like when I play American Truck Simulator, or when I focus on cargo hauling in elite dangerous, it's just kinda something to keep my hands busy while I listen to a podcast or documentary or just sit and bullshit with my wife.
- And apparently this is one of the main criticisms of Starfield. The Bethesda designers either never played No Mans Sky to understand the problem, or they simply believed a large enough budget could mask these problems.
- The scary thing about this article is how quickly ten years can pass—especially if you are in a video game world for many of those ten years.by thataccount
- I know, right? I got the same feeling for WoW’s 20th anniversary.by kergonath
- The days are long, the decades are fast. (Something like that)by Brajeshwar