I've been pouring over all of the videos that have been cropping up on YouTube over the past few days and I have to say a lot of the animals look like they were made in Spore. There is even this https://youtu.be/_ywI5OSwkwM video which shows animals on the same planet with the same exact body but a different head. Just throwing it out there that this seems pretty lame. Your opinions?

That's what happens when things are procedurally generated. As in, not hand crafted. It'll be the same for the planets. Swapped out parts, pieced together according to their algorithm. What did you expect?

I agree the creatures I've seen so far look pretty unimpressive. Looks like the procedural generation of creatures works by randomly matching together prefab pieces and then modulating their shapes and colors a bit. The animation looks pretty crappy by todays standards too, seeing as we've been spoiled by incredible animation in a lot of modern games. I understand why it's this way, game development is incredibly difficult. It's just that 18 something quintillion planets becomes kind of meaningless if it's all more or less the same stuff just swapped around and tweaked a little bit.

I was hoping the devs had developed some novel techniques of generating organic feeling species that would truly feel unique and alive. There's just that part of us that always wants to believe in something unreasonable and magical...

When I was younger I often became obsessed with upcoming releases and the hype leading up to them. Because of this I understand what a lot of people are going through. At this point I don't really get that way, there's too much other stuff in life to become obsessed about one video game. Having said that, I would love for this game to be good. I don't personally think it will be this unbelievable thing, but I would love for it to at least provide some moments of awe.

Because that's exactly how they do it?! How else would it work? There's a video from gamespot here. Starts at around 6:30ish

This game is going to disappoint many people.

You should know that the most impressive/high fidelity things in games are hand crafted. Motion capturing animals still isn't that common but produces incredible results. That kind of thing can't be 'generated'. The game has always delt in scale, which doesn't allow for high fidelity in everything.

Exactly, but I really don't think it has to do with the game's quality or any lies they've told.

The main concern for me is the overbearing sentinal presence, seems irritating that any time you do anything the "police" have to come check it out.

@alistercat: I know. The devs simply lost control of the hype train.

@mmmorrowind92: In the streams I watched there were barely any sentinel drones on the planets. I also only saw them hostile once. I don't have a sense of how much you have to do before they really get on your case.

@the_tribunal: I think it plays in to the narrative of the scrappy young indie studio making a huge game, with a lead designer that's bashful and has a charming smile. People were sold on the image and not the game they were making.

This is reminding me of how many people just don't understand what the devs mean when they say procedural generation. Reminds me of when I used to see people complain about the first Borderlands guns just being a bunch of similar guns with different parts swapped on. If it's being generated by a computer it's pretty much just going to be part swaps. The computer isn't going to make entirely new art assets like a person hand crafting the creatures would.

@alistercat: True that about the compromise you have to make between scale and fidelity. I still think procedural generation techniques will eventually get to the point where they may even surpass the quality of hand crafted stuff. Looking back at a game like Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall from my youth, No Man's Sky looks incredibly by comparison. In Daggerfall the world was gigantic but it seemed in actuality there were like 5 different cities with swapped around textures :).

I feel like the potential is there for mathematics to generate really awe inspiring stuff. I am the type of person who can spend hours exploring the mandelbrot set which "generates" infinitely detailed and beautiful images, from as simple an iteration as f(z) = z^2 + c for each pixel in the image. I'm not saying that the mandelbrot set has any direct application in generating video game worlds or creatures, just saying there is a possibility of generating genuinely (imo :)) beautiful stuff through math and algorithms. Given the current popularity of the video game industry, the assumed increase in computer power and the cost of hand crafting, it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect procedural stuff to get more and more interesting.

As for No Man's Sky I guess I've only seen a few snippets of some streams, and perhaps there will actually be some awesome stuff lurking in there in that game world. As always it's best to have low expectations that way you won't be dissapointed but may be pleasantly surprised!

:)

@mezza: This may be mostly the case at this time. But this doesn't necessarily mean it's always going to be the case. Though I agree that it seems to be the case for No Man's Sky.

@g00z3m4n: Well our world is procedurally generated so if you can just put the god algorithm into C++ you will have a game with a world as beutiful as ours. At some point it gets to much to ask for in a game though. I prefer handcrafted works of art and generally become insanely bored as soon as something gets generic, i probably wont like this game.

@g00z3m4n: There certainly is potential for the application of something similar. The difference is games rely on things such as physics, logic, collision, pathfinding, space and geometry (as in, physical space in a game world that needs to be navigated), LoD and view distance and many many more things that I can't speak to. This is why most games that use procedural or 'random' generation rely on prefabs and No Man's Sky is no different.

I guess I just disagree that the animation looks crappy. It looks standard (and I'd say the standard is pretty good overall, just not comparatively). I get that if you expected something new or revolutionary you'd be disappointed. Outside of games like Uncharted 4 the animation seems on par with most game animation. Uncharted 4 felt like I was watching actors on a green screen, but I don't expect that from most other games, especially those with scale. Which is why I have always been content with the less than stellar animation in Bethesda's games.

@g00z3m4n: Well...yeah. Of course I mean with our current tech. Never said it's going to be impossible forever, but what's possible with procedural generation in the future isn't really relevant to gaming at the moment. There's just too many moving pieces in games that have to be accounted for it to be what people dream it to be right now.

@mezza: True

Who is to say that the animals on Earth weren't all procedural generated, and we just got used to them???

This seemed like a given, to be fair. There was no way they would be able to make animals completely random. As long as planet terrain is truly random and not built from prefab parts, then the game still is meeting my expectations. I'm most curious to see if/how oceans are represented. I really hope you can make more than a ship. An all terrain vehicle would be rad.

Wait they do? Someone lemme know when they find a giant bipedal cock and balls.

Like how some monkeys got the walk on two legs animation?

@rethla: You ever seen a Baboon's ass? Tell me that thing ain't procedurally generated.

@artisanbreads said:

Is that real? Cause if it is - Jesus, man. I'll buy this game just to find this poor thing and put it out of its misery.

I remember reading that as you get deeper, creatures will start to look far more alien. So I'm curious where they go with it.

But anyway, I don't think they misrepresented how this procedural stuff would work.

The guy that got a leaked copy and was posting on Reddit said that wasn't true. He said the only discernible difference he found as he got closer to the center of the galaxy was that the weapon crates got better. It also seems like kind of a strange thing to try to quantify anyway. How would you even define one thing as more weird than another?

I wish they'd foregone the unnecessary space combat to flesh out the animal behaviors more.

I want to see adaptations like camouflage, symbiosis, herd behavior, parasitism, different senses, hives, metamorphosis, or reciprocal altruism.

I doubt the game will have anything more complicated than one animal trying to eat another animal.