No Man's Sky

[Art Blade]

 

[fragger]

The patches are coming thick and fast. I'm a few patches behind already

Right from the start, joystick support for the flying was on my wish list for NMS. I have a perfectly good Thrustmaster just longing to be connected to a spaceship Maybe one day... At least it sounds like PC players will be able to look around while they're flying - finally

[fragger]

Well, I bit the bullet, downloaded all the patches and fired up the game again.

So much has changed since I last played that I had to essentially learn everything all over again. I sorted out the keymapping conflicts that were giving me grief last time, all OK now (though it would have been nice if the game had told me there were control key conflicts, like almost all games do when that happens).

There is a lot more to it now, but man - no matter what I do, I just cannot get a decent frame rate out of this game. I've had to drop the res as low as I can (while keeping a 16:9 aspect ratio so everything doesn't stretch out), turned all graphic options like AA etc off and set everything else to low, and it still runs like a dog I don't understand. I can run a graphically-intense game like GTA V at 1920x1080, with all options set to around medium and pop density at about 75%, and it runs good as gold. Maybe NMS just doesn't like my graphics card or something. More likely it's just a crummy port with little effort gone into PC optimization.

There is a lot that's new. Some of it I like and some of it I'm not crazy about. Plutonium seems much harder to come by now, and you need it for your thrusters, as usual. Each take-off still uses up 25% of your thruster fuel, so you go through the Pt pretty quick and it's a bugger finding more. I'm having to resort to buying it from the station, where there is tons of it for sale, and while it's not ruinously dear it's not dirt cheap either. Since you need Pt for the thrusters, trying to mine it from a planet is a case of going through your thruster fuel as you travel from one place to another looking for thruster fuel. It's kind of a break-even situation, which pretty well forces you to go to the station and fork out. Maybe there's a way around that once you get a base happening.

Generally the game looks better in terms of displays and menus and so on, and some of the new features are a distinct improvement. One little example - when conversing with an alien, I discovered that clicking the left mouse key will speed up the textual process - instead of waiting for the alien's dialog to appear word by word, you can left-click and his spiel will all appear at once. You can also hold down TAB when one of those "milestone" messages appears and it will get skipped over.

There are nice fog and atmospheric effects on planets now, but they impact the frame rate, of course. Great. Planetary terrain redraw while re-entering is way better than it was originally, but there is still a good dollop of detail pop-up once you get down low. Overall though, a major improvement.

Being able to look around while you're flying is a welcome addition, you just have to hold down an Alt key to do so. The ship will keep going where it's pointed while you Alt+mouse your view around. As soon as you let go of Alt, your view automatically slews around to face straight ahead again. I like that. Flying controls are rather uneven using m&k though. Banking control takes up quite quickly, resulting in inadvertent barrel-rolls from yours truly, yet the pitch control is rather sluggy and slow to respond - at first - before it rapidly sort of engages and I find myself looping over like the Red Baron in a dogfight. There is a nice "angle of attack" type indicator-thingy on the ship's HUD which is helpful for determining just how much pitch you are applying. It all works fine once you get the hang - I find I have to be gentle on bank and assertive on pitch, but only assertive for a moment before I have to quickly ease off or else I do the Richthofen thing. You can now fly very low - in fact I bumped into the odd cliff and hillside which didn't seem to damage the ship but just brought me to a sudden halt. You can actually slow your ship to a hover in space (and I think on-planet) which is good for asteroid mining - no more back-and-forthing as you try to disintegrate a big copper asteroid. You can just hang in one place and pitch and yaw the ship while you mine. The landing reticle that appears when you get close to a landing pad works much better now, resulting in fewer over- or under-shoots.

I still wish I could use my Thrustmaster for flying though. Come on, Hello! Look into my eyes... You WILL include joystick support in the next update... You WILL...

I didn't get very far in yet, since I had to start from scratch which meant the customary "find the resources to fix the ship first" routine. Unfortunately I started on a stinking hot planet and my life-support was going down quick, and since you can no longer charge it up with Plutonium or Carbon (you now need Thamium9 or power modules to recharge it, and I had neither), I nearly died before I could get anywhere. I'm nowhere near erecting a base or anything yet. I'll probably go back in again and play a bit more, but like I said, that frame rate, more than anything else, is my greatest bane.

The game still has that weird, floaty menu thing going on, like the menus are resting on fluid and moving the mouse makes them drift about a little. What in the blue blazes is that all about? I've never seen a game do that, and NMS has done it right from the start. Maybe the devs did it just to mess with stoners' heads, but if it's a quirky glitch, they don't seem to be too eager to fix it.

That's enough for now. NMS is inching closer to being a cool game. As it is, if they could just make the game less jerky I would be a much happier camper and more enthusiastic about it.

[Art Blade]

very nice report, fragger. +1

I can virtually see myself do what you did, so.. all in all, I'll wait some more.

[fragger]

Thanks for the kudo mate Where they're at with it now is about where they should have been about halfway through beta, I reckon. It's still a flawed game, but credit where it's due - the Hello devs could have just walked way from it all, but they didn't. It's been a year now since release (yeah, I know) but they're persevering with it.

[Art Blade]

they made a mistake. They published way too early. It was like selling a bag full of ingredients but calling it cake. At least they've not given up, indeed. Perhaps there was that pride element that helped them overcome the shitstorm 

[BinnZ]

I will wait a bit too, but; I'm reading, I'm reading.

[fragger]

I played for a few more hours today. I'm slowly grinding my way up, getting my suit slots upgraded and either trying to get money together for a decent ship or keeping my eye out for a promising wreck to salvage. I've started in a system with three planets, one of which has a moon. This moon seems to be the only place in the system which has those drop pod things for getting extra suit slots, and unfortunately the moon is also home to some vicious critters - in particular a big nasty that looks like a T-Rex with a huge parrot's head. They charge at you when they spot you and they can run pretty fast, so I have to be careful when I'm out and about. I actually saw one chase down and kill a couple of herbivores, which was pretty cool. The good news is that when you land on a planet, you no longer immediately get booted out of your ship - you can stay inside, and with the in-cockpit Alt+mouse look function, you can have a quick look around to see if the coast is clear before you get out. You still automatically get out whenever you land in a station or on any kind of landing pad though, but monsters can't get at you there so that's okay.

Remember those dispenser things inside those little shelters on planets that yielded blueprints for upgrades? They don't do that anymore. Now they yield a few "Nanite Clusters" which you can collect (up to 250 of them in one suit slot) and when you get enough, use them to trade with an alien on the station for blueprints. He has his own little office-type space just off the station lounge. You can't just buy any upgrade though - some require you to attain certain status levels before they become available for purchase. The guy in my station doesn't have that many upgrades to choose from, about 10-12 or so, so maybe different traders have different upgrades available in different systems. I haven't left my home system yet - I want to collect more stuff, learn more Korvax words and upgrade my ship weapons before I venture out into pirate territory.

The "lounge" in my station has three Korvax and one Gek in it (as well as the upgrade guy) and the room on the opposite side of the hanger no longer requires an Atlas pass to get into. Inside there is a teleporter which links to your planetary base (once you have one) and another alien at a counter who dispenses missions when they are available. So the stations are a bit more populated now, not just one lonely alien. Ditto the on-planet Trading Posts. The lone alien you used to find there now has a few buddies for company, and you can interact with all of them.

I'm actually having fun with it again and I'm looking forward to finding out more. There are whole new dimensions to interstellar trading which I haven't plumbed yet, and I want to try getting a base happening. The devs have managed to breathe some new life into the game, and I can even say I'm eager to get back into it How long my interest will last, I can't say.

Here's a few pics:

Cruising along on top of the cloud deck. Looks good now.
Still get those annoying messages in the lower-right part of the screen, dunno if they're turn-offable.

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The Galactic map looks cool now too. The little planets slowly orbit the sun, and you can see how the big planet on the right has a moon (click to expand the image if you can't see it).
The row of controls which used to be along the top of the screen have gone. I haven't played with this display much yet.

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Polly the T-Rex wannabe with a couple of animals it killed. I took this shot from within the safety of a shelter,using a zoomed-in scanner.

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Here, I tried to get a shot while looking out to the side using the Alt+mouse function.
Problem is, the screenshot key won't register while I'm holding down the Alt key, so I had to snap the pic as soon as I let go of Alt and the view slewed on me a bit before the piccie was captured.

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[Art Blade]

hmmmm. It looks almost playable 

[fragger]

It's more playable than it was - or at least, it promises to be. There's lots I haven't sampled because I don't have the resources, am not leveled up enough, or just haven't gotten around to it yet. Blueprints for things seem a lot harder to come by, and I think I may need to go interstellar to get access to more. But once you get a base up you can hire aliens to w0#k for you, and one type (can't remember what he's called) can apparently help with new techs and such, so maybe I need to do that too. Like I said in an earlier post, so much is new and/or changed that I need to learn a lot of the game from scratch. Eventually you can have a ground vehicle associated with your base to make getting around the local area more convenient instead of having to walk long distances or hop your ship around.

I've stopped being able to find drop pods for extra suit slots (up to 18 now), but I learned just before I exited the game that you can build your own beacon on a planet that will let you scan for specific locations (drop pods, observatories, shelters, etc). These are like the ones that you used to find near settlements in the original game, but those have been done away with (you used to have to craft and spend a Bypass chip to interact with them). So when I go back in, I'll try building one.

One major gripe of mine remains from before - the inability to place your own waypoints (although I think the beacon described above may act as one, will confirm yea or nay). I've found a promising 28-slot wrecked ship, but I need to get to a terminal somewhere to buy a Dynamic Resonator for it and I just know that if I leave the wreck site I will never find it again. Waypointing is still a bit hit and miss in the game - some of them stay, and some seem to disappear or just pop up when they feel like it.

The wrecks no longer appear to offer just a single extra slot above that of your current ship, like they did before. I've found this 28-slotter while I'm still using my original 16-slot start ship, so that's an improvement. A 28-slotter costs several million to buy from an alien, so it represents a massive saving. I already have everything I need to repair the wreck except for that Resonator. Similar thing with new Multitools found in Settlements. I could have bought a 23-slot one (one slot short of max) to replace my piddling 5-slot one - if I'd had 3 million units or so to spare

You can also find Freighters that have crashed dirtside. They're enormous, and their wrecks cover a considerable area. They aren't salvageable, but there is a goodie or two to be found there. At least I don't think they're salvageable - I couldn't find or interact with anything to suggest that they are. I priced a Freighter earlier when I was onboard one: a cool 88 million units, for a 16-slot "C" class one (As I understand it, Freighter slots hold more than starship ones). Hate to think how much a top-of-the-line one would cost...

There's a bit of dirty pool on the game's part concerning those big, T-Rex-like predators. Twice now I've been making my way back to my ship on foot only to have one of these monster parrots materialize out of thin air, right before my eyes. That's not very fair - I managed to evade them, but I mean, really. One beamed in right between me and my ship, close enough to spit on, and I had to hurriedly jetpack over the top of him to avoid him. You can shoot them of course, but my Multitool isn't much upgraded for combat yet and one of these things could rip me a new one before I could bring it down.

Here's some pics of the crashed Freighter:

Approaching the wreck. Big.

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You can see my little fighter at lower right for comparison (with the spaceship icon on it).
The main part of the wreck in the distance looks gigantic once you get close to it.

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These are some serious engines. I jetpacked up there to see if I could get inside one, but there's an invisible wall across the whole back of each engine. You can still stand on it though.

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View from the other end. It's hard to convey the scale in these snaps.

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Look at all that metal! Too bad I'm not in the scrap business
These five engines are along the side of the ship, not at the back, so I think they're maneuvering thrusters.
I would have been only about as tall as one of those circular nozzles at the centre of each thruster.

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[Art Blade]

interesting.

But man, Cr 88M for a *bleep* freighter.. and monsters spawning in your face.. I can only guess what pirates will do next you see them.

[fragger]

I'm not looking froward to that at all That's why I'm trying to do as much as I can before I leave my comfort zone

[Dweller_Benthos]

Glad to see you're getting back into it, fragger. Not sure what could be causing your framerate issues, unless your video card just can't handle it.

The science nerd in me is making me do this, I'm so sorry, Plutonium is Pu, Platinum is Pt.

Yes, you can build a "thing" finder that will act like the old ones did, you can pick drop pod, or three other options that I didn't care about so I don't remember them. You can also build a navigation beacon that will then stay up as a waypoint on your HUD so you can go back to that spot at any time. I built one near a factory that wanted a specific mineral in order to solve it's puzzle (one of those you have to break into with your grenade launcher then use the console to turn off the alarm) and I didn't have any at the time so I left a beacon there to go back to it. Making too many though, would crowd your HUD, I would think, since they have the same icon as your main base (when you have one) and keeping them sorted might get complicated. You can also build communication stations which aren't what you think, they are to leave messages behind, I presume for the rare occurrence that another player might stop by and read it. I guess this is a new mini-game sort of thing on Reddit, to find other player's communication pods and leave one of your own, especially on planets with portals or something unique.

Another thing you can build is a ship recall device so if you wander far from your ship and don't want to walk back, you can call your ship from anywhere. I've never built one, because I don't think I've learned the blueprint yet. I've also not build a rover yet, I didn't have the materials needed, and still might not.

Since I continued my old game, I already have the upgrades for the ship, suit and weapon, but now there's more things to build for each, and they are rated by class. Mine are all "C" class which is the lowest. The other classes give a bonus to various aspects, and "S" class is the best.

[Art Blade]

That sounds very interesting. I'm starting to want to return to the game. But I'll stick with FO4 for now.

[fragger]

Oops, I stand corrected. Indeed Plutonium should be Pu, not Pt Evidently my memory of the periodic table has taken a beating with age

Thanks for all the info Dweller I'll be sure not to go sticking beacons all over the place then

Regarding my frame rate, I do know that it's not just me. There are, and have been, a lot of complaints about it since the game was released. A Google search using "no man's sky frame rate" will reveal the extent of it, as well as lots of ideas for fixes. Some I've tried, some I haven't. There are some people who have high-end machines yet still experience low FPS, so I think it's likely a case of the game just not being comfortable with some card makes/manufacturers, or certain configurations. I can run other demanding games quite well like FC4 and GTA V, even at native res, so I don't know. I have noticed that I take the biggest hit when there is flora present, i.e. in view. If I'm on a planet that has flora (especially grasses) but I'm in an area where no plants are visible, the frame rate improves dramatically. Naturally, plants, grass and animals all visible together gives me the biggest FPS headache. Flying around off-planet is very smooth, even with lots of rocks and other ships around, as is being on planets with no flora and fauna.

I can live with it though. Most of the time it's acceptable, if not silky smooth.