No Man’s Sky – Procedural Content

Re:No Man’s Sky – Procedural Content by dr_zoidberg on Monday October 17, 2016 @07:34PM (#12730803)

I was going to suggest some form of automated testing during development and monte-carlo simulation of games to run a batch of "10,000 playthroughs a night", paired with a cost-function to "evaluate" the strength of a character-build (it can be as simple as "total damage" or "total DPS") and see if some outlier(s?) appear.

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Re:No Man’s Sky – Procedural Content by vidarh on Monday October 17, 2016 @08:17PM (#12731010)

That's probably a good idea.

But you can also pre-empt a lot of problems by designing the system around physical limitations. Many games have done that for a long time. E.g. I believe Terminus included things like mass for components, so adding all kinds of extras had a cost in fuel usage and maneuverability. So if you did build a ship loaded with the most powerful weapons, you could, but it'd also be a slow, hard to control, big target.

Mass, volume, energy expenditure, waste heat - there are lots of factors you can add to make it hard to exploit. Of course, you need to tune those factors, but it makes it less likely for really extreme effects.

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Re:No Man’s Sky – Procedural Content by dr_zoidberg on Monday October 17, 2016 @10:55PM (#12731673)

Yes, but even well designed games (from a gameplay pov) can have unexpectedly powerfull builds, like what happened with Starcraft 2 and the genetic-algorithm build order[0]. So simulating builds/gameplays can give you another edge at detecting strange/powerful scenarios.

I also think you should rely on player feedback and community to spot this kind of things, but that could become time consuming if you're a lone developer.

[0] http://lbrandy.com/blog/2010/11/using-genetic-algorithms-to-...

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Re:No Man’s Sky – Procedural Content by vidarh on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @04:50AM (#12732965)

Absolutely - you can't get away without testing, and I agree simulation is probably a necessity given the complexity no matter how much the design tries to counter it.

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Re:No Man’s Sky – Procedural Content by stcredzero on Monday October 17, 2016 @08:47PM (#12731146)

I totally want players to have extremely powerful effects -- but coupled with really big penalties.

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Re:No Man’s Sky – Procedural Content by vidarh on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @04:51AM (#12732968)

Yeah, that makes sense. Powerful is fun, but not if it becomes unbeatable.

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