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[Superb Joe]

can whichever of you guys made no man sky give me the requested sum of money, thanks

[Capntastic]

Joe, while you're out, pick me up a key, ta!

[Superb Joe]

attention: norman, creator of "norman's sky". iwill give you positive press for money by saying i like your version of minecraft. you dont even have to send me a demo or a system to play it on, because i wont do it.

[Mark Mayers]

can whichever of you guys made no man sky give me the requested sum of money, thanks

only if you're a Nigerian Prince

[Capntastic]

Lots of PMs in my inbox but no key for this game

What gives??

[s0]

I am enjoying this game a lot and this will be my new chill out game.

As a fellow noctis fan, how would you say it compares?

i think noctis is still better. the lo-fi graphics (that vaseline filter!) and limitations of the engine/design make noctis way more engaging (at least mentally) for me. there's something about filling in the gaps with noctis that really gets me going. all the kind of half-baked systems in NMS as well as the higher-fidelity graphics do a lot to pull me out of the wondrous state i found myself in when playing noctis. i still find the exploration in NMS a lot of fun and it scratches at least some of that noctis itch, especially the naming/discovery stuff. i got really into naming stuff in noctis. and it has caves. all i wanted from a potential noctis v was caves. and NMS is way easier to play than noctis in this day and age.

i heard following the "quests" you get is actually a bad idea because they ask you to do tedious stuff that doesnt really help progression. is this true?

btw the noctis dude actually praised NMS on facebook and congratulated hello games for finishing what he couldn't haha (u know how noctis V turned out to be vaporware and all that). too lazy to look for right now, but you can google "alessandro ghignola".

[Capntastic]

Did Noctisguy ever finish his programming language?

[Tanner]

pretty sure he hasn't finished linoleum, no

i like the flavor of the path i chose. i don't really know how well the game would work if you chose the option to go it on your own, because the first steps of the quest basically teach you how to gtfo your starting galaxy. it would've taken me a while to suss out how to get the hyperdrive working, i'm pretty sure.

[MrBones]

so is everyone shitting on it on metacritic just trying to be edgy and contrarian or is it actually as disappointing as I keep hearing

[s0]

from what i've seen: a bit of both. mostly people had the wrong expectations.

im still unsure whether to get it so im reading and watching a lot.

my impression so far is (and yes this is another noctis comparison):

the universe is too "samey". you find more or less the same sort of shit on every planet and the sentinels being everywhere adds to that. noctis spread its "special" content very thin. most planets were just boring rock landscapes (or occasionally cool rock landscapes), so there was a real sense of mystery and intrigue whenever you found some kind of alien structure or a life form, or even materials with weird properties like translucent rocks. you immediately thought "why is this here, who may have built this, what are those creatures" etc. the blur effect helped this too by keeping shapes vague and sparking the imagination. also because of this sparseness it was difficult to recognize patterns in the galaxy generation. some of them just wouldn't repeat enough to get a grip on.

maybe no man's sky has some mindblowing stuff that no one's found yet, but so far it seems like the devs wanted to ensure immediate entertainment for players, which in this case actually makes the game more boring. it plays its hand of procgen cards too liberally, resulting in obvious repetition. also the generation is too simple for the interactions between the different algorithms to produce truly surprising results, a la dwarf fortress.

the universe also seems "dead", but for the wrong reasons. npcs don't move around much or do much of anything. noctis worked because the galaxy was extremely sparsely populated to begin with. NMS tries to evoke a "living breathing world", but ends up just feeling like an elder scrolls animatronic theme park.

[Chris MacAdam]

Its Pokemon Snap 2016. 
Just kidding though. I am actually having a great time with the game. I agree that a lot of the planets do have a 'samey' vibe. I have found a few that have stuck out though.

I think its that a lot of people just had the wrong impression of the game. The way I am playing is just kind of relaxing, looking at vistas, finding rare minerals worth a decent amount, find a new planet, rinse and repeat. Its very slow and relaxing and a good way to unwind after a day of work or something.

Its not the best space trader, or the best combat sim, but it does the job of making you feel small in a giant universe I think.

[gimymblert]

Also I'm sure they have to dial down a lot of stuff because of that severe popin with generation eating all their processing budget. Wait for nms neo, or maybe the pc version.

here is extract of an "essay" I gave up finising, it should have been an answer to an earlier statement I made but re reading the tone was kind of harsh and needlessly antagonizing. And that's not may goal, I would rather prove things by making game, but right now I'm busy on something else anyway.

So here it is. It explain how some decision don't play in favor of the game. NMS turn out exactly how I expected it regarding the limitation of design and simply cpu. Most people had pie in the sky expectation but forgot that no man sky is seamless unlike other game who have generation time but do more (or are technically less demanding).

[...]
In fact I can point to some aspect of no man sky who makes it improper for actual variety before even progen is involve, someone mentionned generic survival game, a lot of them are handcraft and still suffer the problem. Ie that since it's a survival game, and the player can be anywhere at anytime, resources must be equally distributed in all direction by design, that already flatten whatever diversity bit you have to a rot gameplay pattern, it enforce repetitiveness right off the bat before progen.

The other problem is plain scale, nobody has ever made 18 quintillions (10¹⁸, that's a billion of billions) map, creativity is not stretchable to infinite, and there is so much you can do. The problem is that the game burn through and smoothly to all those possibilities, you don't even spend 30mn on each planet, that are earth size. I also really doubt that all of humanity have created so much creative works in his existance anyway. The "smoothness" of permutation is a problem because you would tend to see, as most CURRENT algorithm are designed, small permutation from one iteration to another. This isn't a problem of progen only, it's a problem with "genre" and lack of evolution in creative practice, small iteration burn faster.

There is a problem of CONTRAST, generally creativity is contextual, something looks new because it departs from the establish pattern, smoothness expose the bigger pattern too fast. This problem is further enhance by the fact that each planet is mostly single "biome" (3 sub biomes sometimes, cave, surface, underwater, with limited flora and fauna), and the fact that each planet variation are simply additive extension of each other (a rocky planet, add water, plants, and animal, done, new planet). To enhance contrast you must increase the step distance(ie parameters sampling) between two generated instance and therefore limit the possibility space by sampling it more sparsely to create interesting juxtaposition.

[...]

Also

[...]

We need more thought on progen of high level structure, behavior, situation, encounter, story etc ...

And counter intuitively, less "creativity", repetition bring meaning through establishing relation, in zelda you automatically know the small chest is likely to have resource objects while the big one have one time objects, it's enforce through repetition, any variation need to expend meaningfully on that.

Too many make each of these less meaningful and totally random, if chest of any size can have item of any importance, it will be seen as just as repetitive than the same chest everywhere doing the same thing, establishing relation is what is lacking in many procedural world algorithm. Spelunky is great because it has encoded this type of thinking (you always know the exit is at the bottom, there is a clear critical path in the generation).

Another way to look at the parameter sampling problem is that people use random instead of shuffling. A good example of shuffling is deck in card game or tetris shuffle the order of the block so you don't have the same block at least three time in a row (it goes through all the shapes then shuffle again). No man sky have a lot of bad streak because of that.

[Tanner]

I think its that a lot of people just had the wrong impression of the game. The way I am playing is just kind of relaxing, looking at vistas, finding rare minerals worth a decent amount, find a new planet, rinse and repeat. Its very slow and relaxing and a good way to unwind after a day of work or something.

Its not the best space trader, or the best combat sim, but it does the job of making you feel small in a giant universe I think.

this is pretty much exactly how i feel about the game. it's nice to just drink a beer and listen to a podcast while you're out mining and exploring and trading.

[gimymblert]

https://twitter.com/hashtag/crackachu

[s0]

so, this game has SERIOUS performance issues on pc. i can run witcher 3 at max settings with almost no hiccups and this thing has major stuttering issues even on medium settings. also i can't change texture detail and other settings ingame it seems. also not letting me change gfx options before my first game starts is a big no-no.

EDIT: also alt tabbing out of this game crashes it.

EDIT 2: oh, you need to actually HOLD DOWN the mous button to select most options. who the heck designed this interface?

[Tanner]

yeah that hold down thing almost makes sense on console where it uses a destiny style cursor for everything. on pc it makes no goddamn sense. also apparently the PC version is capped at 30 fps until you change a setting.

[gimymblert]

so, this game has SERIOUS performance issues on pc. i can run witcher 3 at max settings with almost no hiccups and this thing has major stuttering issues even on medium settings. also i can't change texture detail and other settings ingame it seems. also not letting me change gfx options before my first game starts is a big no-no.

EDIT: also alt tabbing out of this game crashes it.

EDIT 2: oh, you need to actually HOLD DOWN the mous button to select most options. who the heck designed this interface?

To make changes to Graphics Options you have to hold down the mouse button to confirm.
- For Stuttering, make sure to disable V-Sync and remove the 30FPS Cap.
- Force Anisotropic Filtering to x16 into your graphics control panel.
- Set the game to Borderless Window (might help with alt+tab issues)

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1261995

[gimymblert]

THey should scale up, they can't stay "indie" with the attention they have received. The scrutiny they will be under will crush them logistically.

[mks]

Gam crashes at start; I'm able to see the Hello Games logo though.  

[s0]

disabling vsync never does much for performance and introduces screen tear.  

uncapping FPS does make things slightly better but landing on a planet is still a nightmare of stuttering

i guess i might actually use a controller. the panning is just too irritating. didn't expect this game to feel like this much of a shoddy console port tbh. but seeing as it almost ended up being a ps4 exclusive i guess i was dumb for expecting anything else.

i am actually enjoying it tho. it is indeed pretty chill and does have a noctis feel.