No Man's Sky

IIRC from an old data structures class, one could do a quick access indexed list of strings for about two 64 bit/8 byte addresses per entry. Any unicode character is two bytes.

20,000 players, playing 24/7, and naming something new with a 20 character name every 10 minutes would generate 6.7 Mb/hr, 161 Mb/d, 1.05 Gb/wk, 384 Gb/yr.

I can buy a 2 TB drive for under $100.

It's probably a bit more space given it records discovery date, and probably some flags, but I feel someone at Hello wasn't thinking this through.

it's probably more about the bandwidth/server strain i'm guessing

lol the update on that story is that it was a server issue and all of their discoveries are still there

"Update: this story is 100% wrong. anywho, here's the original story!"

steam offering refunds regarldess of playtime, amazon offering refunds on physical copies, psn also has a route for refunds:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/4zuydl/psa_steam_is_offering_no_mans_sky_refunds/

Latest patch seems to have added some neat things. We had butterflies in one planet!

so i'm getting the sense that i should just wait about 6mos for this to ripen or

NMS's always going to be an example of ambient gaming, that quite unfortunately and inappropriately was marketed as a multiplayer universe simulator by Sony. Don't expect a chill Elite Dangerous. Expect a borderless and beautiful walking simulator.

gbx: it seems possible! I mean I'm not banking on it 100% and like sanpaku said, fuck the multiplayer function, I dont care for it anyway.

I would, however, like to see:
- the actual ship classes they said there'd be (ie difference in performance, speed, storage and weaponry)
- stackable slots for all item types
- way more variety with the races and their facilities. Cmon, theyre 3 different species, why do they all have exactly the same shiny, chrome, vaguely art deco interiors?

- a bigger ask, knowing what it'd involve build wise, would be to have proper interaction with NPCs in the world, Elder-scrolls style, and also with the animals. Oh and some actual cityscapes. But I have lived and worked with many game programmers, and I know this stuff is not easy.

I think some people have been way too hard on these guys esp given they apparently lost everything in a flood and had to start over, then had sony up their arse to get it out ASAP.

theres already a dozen space sandbox games on steam early access that are trying to siphon off the angry gamers who didn't like NMS

huge pan from tom chick
http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2016/09/01/no-mans-sky-vividly-realizes-meaningless-emptiness-space/

I’m wondering whether I dare equip an upgrade because upgrades always take up inventory slots. The better you are, the less you can carry.

sad but true

posted unwatched but i used to really trust this guy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFEi_BdLHlc

i was thinking earlier about the fact that every single of the 18 quintillion planets is already discovered by one of the alien groups and populated with roughly evenly spaced outposts and other small groups of buildings. it seems silly on the face of it, and it definitely dulls the sense of exploration and discovery because everything has already been discovered and populated, albeit in very lonely fashion, with only a single alien playing with its tablet to be found in every handful of buildings. there are no interactions between the aliens, no love or fighting or camaraderie. all of them are alone at the desk, just waiting to be fed a trivial amount of resources that are already located within 20 feet of their swivel chairs in exchange for the knowledge of one more word in their unknowable language that is used on around 6 quintillion planets in the universe.

that's not a good backdrop for exploration, but it's actually a kind of interesting story, potentially. it's like this is the end of a grand scope sci-fi series, the end result of an exponential growth of machines programmed to explore, creating dyson spheres and mining resources in order to produce more exploration crafs, splitting off and exploding outward and colonizing every planet at an expanding speed, until after X^X years later every single planet is colonized with evenly spaced outposts, each designed to completely surveil the entire planetary area in the most efficient manner possible at the time of colonization, each outpost populated with a single alien that has never directly interacted with any other of its kind, only through the internet. etc etc. it's kind of lame but at least it's a story that explains what you're seeing. instead you this atlas path generic stuff with All is One and Quest for Knowledge and all of this bullshit. the story in this game has nothing to do with what you're seeing.

The devs addressed the arbitrary nature of their universe in lore.

SPOILER
Physics simplistic. Chemistry arbitrary. Hypothesis: simulation. Galaxy not base existence. Explore but beware red orb. Find flaws in model, exploit, find truth.
Peripatetic path to galactic core. Path message from creator? Or sloppy workmanship?
This is not real. It has never been real. The universe is an expression of a single thought. It is neither wanted nor designed.

That Errant Signal video is great. Captures a lot of why I keep playing despite all its many flaws.

Thanks also for the Errant Signal pointer - great source for more mature reviews.

yeah i forgot about the errant signal guy for a couple years but he's great

I edited down the game text dump to a lore file (spoilers aplenty). Those looking for gnostic tropes in modern media would have a field day.

the update has started to address a couple things. a bit more variety. also more
jittery

first tweets from Sean Murray since August 18:

Sean Murray ‏@NoMansSky 2m2 minutes ago
If anything was a mistake, it was using Linked In without 2FA.

Sean Murray ‏@NoMansSky 14m14 minutes ago
Server hacked. We're binging Mr Robot Episodes as quickly as we can looking for answers. Ep05 is a cracker

u ok hun

server hacked huh? good thing this isn't a multiplayer game ;)

this game finally got a big update yesterday. among other things it adds a Creative Mode which focuses on exploration and basebuilding, and a Survival mode which does the stuff you'd expect.

http://www.no-mans-sky.com/foundation-update/

i dropped into the new no man's sky to see if the fundamental experience has changed. it has not. after the initial positive vibes to be had from seeing more aliens in space stations and buildings, and some different architecture types, you're still ultimately aimlessly floating above planets that all end up being similar. apparently the patch added different terrain, greater elevation variety, more naturally clumped vegetation, etc, but exploration still feels pretty much feels the same. Creative mode allows you to buy ships and freighters for free. skipping past the "gameplay" of spending hours and hours searching for shit to mine, trade in, and craft so that you can upgrade your shit, i instead warp sped to the reality of having a freighter (which basically is just a glorified Stash that you can access to store even MORE items!!) and a nice big ship, and the feelings it inspires: nothing at all. wow, now i have lots of space on my ship to store all this other shit. and i am learning new alien words as i go! i didn't get into the basebuilding or farming (you can now grow your own plants which give you resources).

(i haven't tried survival because it seems like it would only magnify all the original mode's faults, but who knows, maybe it makes things more intense and urgent in a fun way? probably not).

back to the witcher 3

40% off on Steam offer isn't even tempting to me anymore

truer sadder words have never been etc etc

Still my game of the year. But I never had an issue with what it wasn't. I enjoyed what it is.

and star citizen is going to be amazing

(jokes jokes)

Aside: This post election environment really sapped my desire for escapism. It's one thing to fantasize in an era where hope is possible, and another when all the institutions around me are poised to be used to entrench awful people. My global warming reading queue is way too long for me to enjoy NMS right now. I look at the icon on my desktop as I used to eye the bottle of vodka I once hid behind the monitor.

I look at the icon on my desktop as I used to eye the bottle of vodka I once hid behind the monitor.

This is great

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/youmakespacejesuscry1_8171.jpg

i'm kinda there with you sanpaku but trying to figure out how to normalize internally, not externally and i think fantasy is still part of that

http://www.polygon.com/2016/11/30/13791782/no-mans-sky-false-advertising-results

kinda nice to see these guys winning for once. there were 23 complaints total lol to doomsayers.

someone posted an insanely tall structure indicating Fallout 4-level base building with no height restrictions

Seriously, some of those complaints re the ad are hilarious. Speed of galaxy warping!? Come on, you're not going to show 20 fucking seconds of loading screen in an AD. Might as well raise a complaint because some Star Wars movie wasnt as punchy and fast paced as the trailer, i mean ffs.

it looks like Astroneer is the actually good version of this

Yeah been keeping an eye on that one, looks promising.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice-

Actually yeah I will probably check out astroneer.

http://blog.astroneer.space/system-era/50-days/

just watching that video, i see that the astroneer development team has somehow mastered the impossible problem of how to allow two or more people to walk around on the same planet and do stuff together

WOW

*excited*

this is pretty cheep now and latest update is tempting. still a bad idea?

i got like 15 hours out of it before i got bored the first time around, haven't checked out the updates yet but at a lower price point its probably worthwhile. i dunno if there's another game yet that hits the same notes this does, though i'm sure a few studios have one in the pipeline

actually looking at the info on the latest update is making me want to install again, here we go..

i was also kind of intrigued by the latest update. i think that after a few more updates, maybe by next year, it'll finally resemble the game a lot of us thought it would be in the first place, but by then another new game will have come out that does the same thing but better.

I still think the vistas of alien worlds NMS sometimes offers are fantastic, though I still think all the improvements since launch are frosting on a turd of a game loop. While there are a number of long standing projects with procedurally generated worlds, to my knowledge only Elite:Dangerous has woven its lifeless rocks into an engaging game, and I haven't seen notices of anyone else making the attempt.

I think NMS could have been a lot more interesting if most worlds weren't inhabited, so that the player could believe they were actually explorers, and the three cultures had some sorte of mystery to be solved, preferably in a way that would require collaborative effort for month/years by players. E:D is doing something like this with its Thargoids, for several years.

currently on offer at £16 and with this new update (plus previous ones) I'm started to get real tempted.

$20 on gamefly
https://www.gamefly.com/#!/game/No-Man's-Sky/5010179

i played it a bit this weekend and the gameplay still feels half-assed even with more quest line stuff - i enjoy just wandering around in creative mode more than playing the "actual" game. there's definitely fewer buildings on planets now than there used to be, i found some worlds that didn't seem to have any, whereas last time i played you could go down to any planet and just cruise along the surface and run into outposts everywhere even if it was 100 degrees celsius and barren. there's a little more variety in the environments but you still won't see major elevation differences, flowing water, anything resembling a forest, etc.

it's still a pleasant experience that isn't really replicated by any other game, but it only really works in small doses before you start to see a lot of lookalike planets.

actually looking on reddit now it seems people have been able to find foresty planets and some bigger mountains now - i haven't seen any yet myself though.