No Man’s Sky – Procedural Content

Re:No Man’s Sky – Procedural Content by chongli on Monday October 17, 2016 @08:53PM (#12731163)

My point about chess is that the benefits and tradeoffs of a particular move are not always immediately quantifiable. I think too many computer games have this habit of presenting a whole bunch of quantitative information to the player and then letting them go nuts with comparisons. In a lot of these cases, it comes down to the player deciding "I prefer to maximize armor at the cost of cold resistance because none of the enemies in this area use cold attacks" and then all equipment choices are no longer meaningful, they're merely a continuation of that original choice which in itself was fairly obvious once the player had access to the data.

With chess, on the other hand, the choice of 1. d4 vs 1. e4 is a huge one with TONS of implications, none of which are immediately obvious at a glance, but which are so rich and diverse that you have players literally identifying themselves as "d4 players" or "e4 players".

I hate to keep leaning on chess examples but they're the easiest since almost everybody knows about chess. I'd have slipped in a Battle Line example but almost nobody knows about that!

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Re:No Man’s Sky – Procedural Content by Tyr42 on Monday October 17, 2016 @11:54PM (#12731927)

I think this is a really good example of "Calculation" vs "Choice", as defined in this Extra Credits video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg8fVtKyYxY

TL;DW

"Calculations are decisions based solely on reason, with a clear correct answer." That'd be the decision to chose armour instead of cold resistance.

"Choice is overcoming internal conflict. Without conflict, there is no choice, only decisions." This actually is a good example for the "only turn left" gun, as there's a conflict between maneuverability vs firepower, which are rather incomparable.

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Re:No Man’s Sky – Procedural Content by stcredzero on Monday October 17, 2016 @09:05PM (#12731213)

So basically, you want the challenge of dealing with highly nonlinear, even chaotic, emergent effects. I'm all about such emergent effects. Hell, my project is called "Emergence Vector." The specific point is to see how many emergence fostering features you can workably combine into one massively multiplayer online game. The point being: that I find most MMOs insulting to my intelligence. Their power seems to come more from variable schedule of reward than from any genuinely intellectually interesting complexity. I really want to change that.

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Re:No Man’s Sky – Procedural Content by Ntrails on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @04:44AM (#12732951)

How does making rare item combinations available based on willingness to grind them out become intellectually complex? The original Star Wars MMO had some cool crafting mechanics, but I don't know enough about them to really explain.

Eve Online has emergent gameplay but most of that is space politics and metagaming - almost despite the game itself rather than because of it.

Heck, vanilla minecraft has incredibly complex outcomes from basic rules - vis a vis redstone and automation and so on.

I've played hella grindy Korean MMOs, they were just a case of spend x time get y thing. No real challenge, just a willingness to keep trying until complete. I'd strongly suggest highly complex systems restrict player innovation and emergence, in a way simpler rulesets do not.

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Re:No Man’s Sky – Procedural Content by stcredzero on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @04:16PM (#12738241)

How does making rare item combinations available based on willingness to grind them out become intellectually complex?

One ethos of my game is going to to be "work smarter, not harder." The kind of player who feels entitled to succeed just because they've spent enough time mindlessly grinding resources, so feels entitled to have awesome stuff dropped -- I hope those people spend their time elsewhere.

The player will be able to find very pointed capabilities that come with big disadvantages. The point will be to improvise around those weaknesses while exploiting contextual advantages. Others may choose to exploit in-game scripting and manufacturing capabilities to automate the search for certain technology combinations, but this will entail maintaining installations and the combat force to defend them.

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Re:No Man’s Sky – Procedural Content by biot on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @12:32AM (#12732121)

Sounds like a really cool project. Can you share what your tech stack look like? (Assuming you've gotten beyond conceptual planning.)

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Re:No Man’s Sky – Procedural Content by stcredzero on Tuesday October 18, 2016 @04:27PM (#12738339)

I'm writing the game servers in Golang, with the client in Javascript in browsers. I have a cluster of server processes that currently runs on the same AWS EC2 instance, but which could easily run on different instances. I currently have the procedurally generated universe up. If you are interested, I can let you log on. It is very much a work in progress. (My email is in my HN user profile.)

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