No Man's Sky

[Dweller_Benthos]

If you've heard of this, then you might already know, but this sounds like a pretty cool game. Not open world, but open universe. There are supposedly 14 quintillion planets to explore, not sure if that number is just developer speak for "really a lot" or is the actual number. You have a ship to fly around, and explore, land on a planet, and you can search around for cool stuff, other crashed spaceships, aliens, weird creatures, etc. You can collect loot and mine materials to upgrade your ship and weapons, etc.

Depending on how or if there's a story or if it's just survival, might be an interesting game. Also depends on how or if it's tied into multiplayer or not. But I'll be keeping an eye on it.

[PZ]

That sounds kind of fun.  I like exploring  :-X

[Art Blade]

sounds like Elite:Dangerous

[fragger]

We discussed this game briefly in another thread here about a year ago.

The game has been in development for quite a while. As far as I can make out, there isn't any kind of story to it - not as yet, anyway. I don't think there ever will be. It appears to be a case of explore, upgrade and survive for as long as you like/can. The interesting thing is that everything in the game is procedurally generated as opposed to being predefined, not just the planets but any life forms that inhabit them, so that no matter how many times you begin a new game you will get different planets, climates and creatures every go-around. But given the truly galactic scale of the thing, you could never complete a playthrough of a single game in your lifetime - not if you want to explore every world. As in (hypothetical) reality, it would take centuries, if not millennia, or centuries of millennia, to do so.

14 quintillion planets is a crazy number. If you consider our solar system and galaxy to be "average", than that works out at:

(10 planets in one solar system) x (2 hundred billion solar systems in one galaxy) = 2 trillion planets, which looks like this:

2,000,000,000,000

14 quintillion looks like this:

14,000,000,000,000,000,000

Could there be that many planets in one galaxy? Maybe. Who knows? Maybe the scale of the game goes beyond the "merely" galactic. It's still a lot in anyone's numbers.

I'll be keeping tabs on this one too, it does sound intriguing.

[Dweller_Benthos]

I thought I'd heard of it before, thanks for the reminder, fragger. It does look interesting, and I'll be keeping an eye on it, hopefully it gets a release soon.

[Art Blade]

and I'll bee keeping

Are you unconsciously thinking of becoming an apiculturist out there in space? :-()

[PZ]

 

[Dweller_Benthos]

Maybe, I've done bee keeping in Minecraft mods, so why not in this game too?

But yeah, that was the keyboard messing up, not me.

[Art Blade]

yeah, alright. :-()

[mmosu]

Not sure if anyone has been keeping up on this one recently, but there has been a LOT of new info coming out, and the most recent footage is looking very polished and more "release ready" than versions of the game shown up to this point. This is my most anticipated gaming release in a long time and my 8 year old and I are pretty excited to get out there and explore.
The procedurally generated universe is shared among all players, however while you may stumble onto a planet someone else has been to, don't expect to run into other players often or even at all - the immense scale of the thing will make this highly unlikely.
There is a plot now as well, although not much has been said about it. The over-arching goal will be to reach the center of the galaxy- what waits for us there, only the devs know. However there will be a "trail of breadcrumbs" of sorts - clues and bits of lore that will gently guide us to that end.
Oh, and if you find something first, you get to name it. Planets, oceans, plants, animals- their handle gets updated globally so that if anyone else finds that thing, they will know who discovered and named it. My daughter has already called dibs on "diggety dug-dug-bug" for the first insect-type creature we find  :-X

[Dweller_Benthos]

Cool, glad to see you back, mmosu! Interesting that the game is shared, I wonder how much internet connection speed will effect it? Hopefully it's just for the download of names and other players' positions and such, otherwise, this will be another online game I can't play.

[PZ]

Will be interesting to see how it all shakes out  :-X

[mmosu]

I don't know for sure if a persistent connection will be required. I do know that in demo footage you occasionally see an icon that seems to indicate server communication, but I don't know to what extent. I seem to also remember hearing about the possibility of an "offline" mode in which you populate a "private" version of the same universe- something akin to create mode in minecraft. If this is still a thing, I was under the impression that it was created for kids to play without encountering an animal named "dick-o-saurus" - cause well, it's the internet and that's gonna happen. However, if the feature is still there it could have utility for your situation D_B. It would be interesting to note that since you would be essentially operating in a parallel universe of sorts, you would never find a world that another player had already modified through heavy mining etc

[Binnatics]

The game is getting more and more interesting indeed. That 'searching for the centre of the universe thingy' really warms me up, just like the idea of a universe being explored by thousands of players at the same time. Very interesting. Hope for no server issues and 'unknown connection errors' and such :P

[Art Blade]

mmosu, any chance of you posting a link to some footage you liked?

[mmosu]

http://youtu.be/D-uMFHoF8VA

This footage was new as of last week, and this is new as of a few hours ago:

http://youtu.be/cUnKJyoyIIk

IGN has been a nearly exclusive source of news on this

[Art Blade]

excellent, cheers  :)

[mmosu]

Here's one more, a little discussion from the creator and lead designer on how a procedurally generated universe works

http://youtu.be/ueBCC1PCf84

[Binnatics]

One line in the "Ice Cold Planet exploration" got me thinking.... "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away", by Philip K. Dick. First I thought that author was a joke; A writer named "Dick" doesn't sound too serious. Well, he is. He is reality, so I believe in him.

What he says got me thinking. I mean how can you know for sure that something doesn't go away when you stop believing in it? As a practical oneliner it makes sense. Take the tree along the road. You can stop believing in it and drive right through it; reality won't go away which you will find out. But such a line implicates a deeper meaning, like devine things or the 'why' of living. Many scientists claim to search and describe reality. They try to calculate and proove every movement and appearance until they are certain it's real. They claim to describe the truth. They believe in it. Until they find out that there's something underneeth that truth that describes why and how they were fooled by what they thought was the truth and they start believing in that 'new, underlying truth'.
Still the appearance that they once took for truth is there. The difference is that they learned something more about it; they know it's not the end of things.

When they discover molecules, they realise that all the colours we see, the visual appearance and behaviour of materials, is actually not reality, but being caused by a structure of protons, electrons and neutrons. Then they discover that these parts actually consist of some other parts even smaller. And still reality is beyond that phenomena. Wise people know that. Every part can be devided in half, or smaller. Energy is guiding us through the discovery of endless smallifications.
Which makes me realise: Reality is fake. It's a concept on which we hold on to in order to being able to act to the things we sense, ... or imagine.

Tell a schyzofrenic that it is not true that he has a chip inside his belly through which the FBI tries to control him so they can rape his sister; he will murder you.

So no, the tree won't go away. It will rubb its reality in your face. So better don't stop believing in it.

We live our lives based on what we believe to be there. That is no reality. It's our conception of what might be. The only reality is that we're not sure. And if we stop believing in that, we are gone.



Besides this little off topic philosophy, I think it's going to be a great game.  ^-^

[mmosu]

Something along those lines that I have always found fascinating is the perception of color. Color, as we tend to think about it in our conscious experience of the world, isn't real! It's not a property of matter that's actually "out there". It's simply the way our central nervous system interprets the different wavelengths of light that happen to bounce off of the objects around us and onto our retinas.  :o ???... ???? ?

How do I know the blue sky you see appears the same to you as it would to me? How do I know that the red apple we're both looking at appears the same hue to both of us? Maybe if I could see it through your eyes I would find it actually looks orange! It's just impossible to know for sure.

[Binnatics]

Indeed Mmosu, that's fascinating :)

[PZ]

What is a massive game  :-X

[fragger]

Dogs. It's a fallacy that dogs see the world only in black and white. They do see colours, but their retinas or rods-and-cones or whatever are attuned to a different set of wavelengths compared to ours. Anything below what we think of as the "green" part of the electromagnetic spectrum looks like grey to a dog, which is why they have trouble seeing a red toy in long green grass. They see colours most vividly in the blue and violet end of the spectrum, and it's possible they see colours beyond the violet end that we can't. But dogs rely more on smell than eyesight, with a sense of smell greater than 10,000 times that of ours, so I don't think they're much bothered by their less-colourful world :-() Same goes for their hearing. They can hear higher (and lower) sound wave frequencies than we can, which is why there is such a thing as a "dog whistle" and why they know there is a thunderstorm coming before we do (I think they can also sense changes in the surrounding atmosphere and subtle electromagnetic fluctuations or something. My Maggie gets very agitated in a certain way that lets me know there's a storm coming before I sense it in any way myself. She's better than a barometer :-()).

"Colour blind" people have colour perception similar to dogs' - reds and greens can look the same to them due to a defect in their rod-and-cone composition. My best mate's father had that, so when driving he thought of the top light in a set of traffic lights as being "stop" and the bottom one as being "go". They looked the same to him.

In light of all that (pardon the pun) it's interesting to speculate on how a being would perceive reality if they could see in the x-ray spectrum, or in infrared, or even in the "radio" part of the spectrum. That may be theoretically possible - radio, microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, x-rays, Gamma rays... they're all part of the overall electromagnetic spectrum. It's only differing frequencies/wavelengths that distinguish one grouping from another. Take a radio signal, then keep shortening its wavelength, and eventually it will become visible light.

The world would look vastly different to people with radio eyes, and that in turn would probably influence how they thought about reality. Whose "reality" would then be the more "real" - theirs or ours?

[mmosu]

Good point, we really all do just live in a simulated of what's actually "out there", all created by the way our sensory organs and nervous systems interpret the different energies in our environment. It opens the possibility of other sentient beings out there with vastly different perception from our own.
On the topic of No Man's Sky, the procedural generation of flora and fauna will hopefully yield lots of variety and surprises. I saw one thing where the dev team itself doesn't know for sure what we'll find out there in this "universe", and so they sent out virtual "probes" to sample virtual worlds and be sure everything was working ok. I guess what they found in some places surprised even them - giant sand snakes, fish that swim through the air, etc

[mmosu]

Oh, and before I forget (and speaking of the aforementioned variety), here's some brief new footage, out just yesterday

http://youtu.be/CTRi2aEJrgQ