
World without end - nqureshi
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/world-without-end-raffi-khatchadourian
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bane
I always feel like games like this die in the late-game. Once you've had fun
with the exploring and are collecting resource units for the nth millionth
time, the game kind of runs its course.

It would be far more interesting if, as you play, you can participate in a
large economy, slowly growing your gameplay experience out from say, a single
guy mining and selling minerals on a planet, to an galactic empire.

Even better if you could participate at just about any part of the virtual
economy, buying, selling, crafting, shipping, policing, fighting, robbing,
pirating. You could own a store on a space station or a repair shop, make
enough and buy a ship, or buy a station. Now you're managing station ops.

Exploration is just one of the X's in 4x, and I feel like there's so much
untapped potential in the genre.

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kbutler
Sounds like Eve Online meets your wishlist...

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Cthulhu_
Exactly like Eve, yeah - the sheer scale and possibilities of that game are
unprecedented.

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testguy34
The hype around this game reminds me of the hype around Spore a decade ago (it
didn't live up to it).

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crimsonalucard
The trailer implies that these games offer worlds of boundless possibility,
what it really is, is worlds with a bunch of generated primitives and sliders
to change some numerical parameter. It's not that the trailers for these games
lie, it's just we subconsciously expected more.

To achieve what we expect, the programmer needs to implement features that
allow emergent gameplay and unpredictable situations to arise alongside
procedurally generated settings. There are few single player games that
actually pull this off. Dwarf Fortress, ARMA, and GTA V to name a few.

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undertow
Yeah, sort of like those "32 in 1" and "112 tele-games" Atari cartridges,
where each "game" was a permutation on the number of players, how the players
were organized into "teams" combined with difficulty levels, or some such
modifier. In reality, it was just the same game, and maybe you passed the
controller around differently.

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pluma
Or the cheap "pop station" handhelds that blatantly give you multiple copies
of the same game, just with different "sprites": snowboarding, skiing,
motorcycle racing, car racing, bike racing, etc all effectively identical.

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Mithaldu
Games like these come from amazingly humble beginnings:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDNMTnXoG9M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDNMTnXoG9M)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTJFChB5wyY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTJFChB5wyY)

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zxyzzxxx
Thanks for that.

There should be more games like this. The technology obviously isn't the
limitation here.

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lovemenot
>> Murray’s primary coding contribution is to planetary terrain, and he had
developed a special appreciation for such formations.

So Slartibartfast then: "[Norway] was one of mine. Won an award, you know.
Lovely crinkly edges."

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jpatokal
The trailer, which the New Yorker is too old school to link to:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gQi2bv1DHg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gQi2bv1DHg)

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figure8
They do have video commentaries which are generally great:
[http://video.newyorker.com/watch/commentary-the-universe-
of-...](http://video.newyorker.com/watch/commentary-the-universe-of-no-man-s-
sky)

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smegel
> using money he raised by selling his home

Holy cow, that's a brave move!

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aluhut
I wish he could join this up with Elite Dangerous. Elites space environment is
pretty impressive and if it needs something, then a proper surface-dimension.

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hyperpallium
The strength of this is its weakness: because the worlds are generated
procedurally, they cannot contain dependencies between the elements of the
world, unless they have been specified in the formula. The article gives a
good example, of how a river can't emerge from the slopes of the terrain -
instead, you have to encode the river as part of the terrain. It's not
emergent. It's analytical, not numerical.

They can still have a sophisticated generation method, which does encode
several different features, that can co-occur in unexpected ways, but it can't
be a deep interaction. In effect, the designers are exploring the space of
equations for world generation. The advantage is they can have billions of
planets without storing them or expensively generating them. Analytical
solutions are extraordinarily efficient - it's just a formula, you punch in
the seed and you're done. No iteration or search.

In the videos I've seen, the planets all look alike, just different shapes and
colours for trees, grass, terrain.

Still, I admire their dream and fervor and hope it's more interesting than I
expect.

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starshadowx2
I still haven't seen any comparisons of this game with Mirrormoon EP, which
seems a lot alike to me.

You could fly through space to any of the stars you see, it was procedurally
generated planets, bright artistic colour design choices, etc.

The only thing that seems different is the much more content and actual
realism in No Man's Sky.

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putlake
There are theories that our own universe is more likely to be a simulation
than "real". e.g. [http://www.simulation-
argument.com/simulation.html](http://www.simulation-
argument.com/simulation.html)

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GaiusCoffee
“So, annoyingly, by doing it wrong you get a nicer effect,”

Realism vs Cinematics :/

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spectrum1234
Amazing. This will be the first video game that I've played in a long time.

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spectrum1234
THIS GAME IS GOING TO CHANGE THE WORLD

