Curse_Hawking

Planet sized planets have been done before, so i don't know why you say that when quoting this. There are other promised features of this game which would be far more impressive than a large planet.

I didn't really mean the size of just those particular planets, but of the entire scope of the game. The claim is that the universe is technically infinite, therefore there are probably a huge variety of planet and moon sizes.

They've said that if they put a million people on a single planet, the likelihood of any two people meeting would be very small. This would obviously depend on the planet, but that's what they're saying, and the trailer really doesn't show enough of this supposedly infinite universe to determine whether that statement is true or not.

I think a few journalists did some more indepth interviews with a couple of the devs and they were allowed to see the game being played, and they saw the tool set that they developed for this game. So i think we'll get some more information later this month from various sources which hopefully will answer some of these questions.

I just don't see how anyone could determine the size just from seeing those pictures or watching the videos. Yes, you can see the different terrain, what almost looks like the beaches of sand and the red grass and trees distinguished in that image, but those formations could be massive and simply may look small because of the perspective.

An interesting thing i noticed when re-watching the trailer is that there are three planets or moons in (what appear to be) very close proximity to each other. These all could be fairly small moons or planets in an unusually close multiple system arrangement, or that third purple planet could be very far off in the distance and could be a gas giant, the two bodies visited in the trailer could be moons that orbit that gas giant. These are just two more imaginary scenarios that anyone could come up with from that trailer, and it doesn't definitively mean anything.

I don't think the devs would make such bold claims if they couldn't back up what they said. I'd hold judgement until we get more direct information from the devs, or until we actually play the game. There's no real reason to doubt what they're saying at this point

The dust clouds are a bit unrealistic, i'll give you that, i re-watched the trailer and i originally didn't realize that the gas was actually in space, i assumed that was still part of the atmosphere. That said, you're making conclusions about one feature based on a completely different feature. You also don't know how large the second body in the trailer is supposed to be, it could be completely realistic to have such a small moon, although that's still entirely based on your perspective of what you're seeing. Unless you're saying you've played the game and have definitive evidence to show that that planet or moon is far too small to be considered realistic. It's easily possible to see individual rock formations on our very own moon with a telescope, so i don't see how that's a problem.

I'm not one of the devs, if you don't believe the devs then that's fine, but what i'm saying isn't from my own personal opinion or my assumptions, it's what the devs have said. The fact is that i'm simply repeating information that the people who are making this game has put out; what you're doing is the equivalent of arguing with a book, the information is just there and your opinions can't change that. I feel like you're arguing for the sake of argument at this point.

That's possible, however it would contradict what they said, which is that they had to spend a lot of time flying around the universe before they found that particular planet. From everything they've said so far, the universe that they've generated is likely already there, they're just trying to make sure it's a good working universe where all of their rules and parameters work as intended. Which would explain why they said they've created simple AI to fly from planet to planet making animated .gif images of various scenes which get saved onto some separate machine where they can later comb through it all by hand.

This is based on what, assumption? I'm going off of what the developer said. I doubt he would blatantly lie about such a key feature of the game.

There's nothing unrealistic about gases in space which could appear to be purple, and there's also nothing unrealistic about binary companion planets. That said, i don't think those were binary planets, since Sean mentioned that the second body they went to in the trailer was a moon several times. I never claimed that it would be a realistic space simulator, i'm simply repeating information that's already been put out by the devs.

The devs have specifically said that everything is at a 1:1 scale, Sean has used the analogy i used above about putting everyone on a single planet himself. Obviously floating islands on a planet aren't realistic either but that doesn't mean that moon/planet isn't of a realistic size. When Sean mentioned that he didn't want it to be too realistic, he was referring to ignoring things like the limitations of the speed of light, this is probably why the planets appear so near to each other and escaping the atmosphere wasn't a challenge.

The debate was about the claims of an infinite universe, just because it can't continue to infinitely create entertaining new features doesn't make the generation finite, infinity doesn't care about anyone's entertainment.

That would only apply to unique variations of something. There's nothing impossible about a piece of software continuously generating some form of data, even a string of the same exact number can theoretically repeat infinitely, so long as the physical hardware is capable of keeping up with that, just because an exact duplicate is created doesn't mean that only one or the other can exist. The physical plane of existence is most likely not the only one that exists, when talking about infinity you have to consider the possibilities beyond the physical world that everyone understands, since the theory is inherently impossible physically, yet the theory exists in our minds as a possibility.

In a sense you're right, but because the seed is there for it to continue generating, in another sense it is infinite. Just because the hardware isn't capable of storing that data doesn't mean that it doesn't exist in some form. The algorithm used to create what you actually see and interact with is what the universe actually is, and since that algorithm is theoretically capable of infinitely generating content, it's therefore theoretically an infinite universe, whether or not it will ever been seen or not doesn't change that.

However to say that it will be smaller than the Milky Way from the start is assuming too much, there's no reason to believe it will be any particular size, other than large. It could be several orders of magnitude larger than the Milky Way for all we know. I've never read or heard of the devs say that you would start on a single galaxy either, this particular point is quite important since one of the key things mentioned when talking about progression is that there's something at the center of the universe. So the point at which you start relative to the center of the universe would play a large role in how difficult or time consuming completing that goal would be. If their idea of a "universe" is a single galaxy, then that's a bit off to say the least. I hope that's not actually the case.

As said above, because the hardware isn't capable of actually storing the data, doesn't necessarily make it finite, because the algorithm used is what is essentially the essence of the universe that they've created, it doesn't really matter if anyone ever sees it or not because it potentially does exist in some way. The very concept of infinity is very philosophical and can be interpreted in many ways with no right or wrong answer, so for the sake of this thread, i'll just agree that it is definitely not going to be infinitely generated or rendered due to the physical limitations.

@golguin: I don't think the game will be designed to fully ignore other planets that people have discovered. It's been mentioned that there is a star map, this is where all the collective data of every player gets stored, and it's how you see what's been discovered. One would assume that in the star map, you would see the usernames of the people who discovered each location. Even if this were possible to ignore, that would mean missing out on a lot of the game, at least i would think.

The issues of not wanting to see other usernames, but still wanting to see other people's discoveries is a valid issue in my opinion, i'm not sure if anything will be done with it, but it doesn't seem like something you could just ignore, since part of making this game so big is to work with the idea that the collective discoveries of all the players will uncover the universe.

@seppli: No offense intended, but you also don't seem to understand the proposed scale of this game either. Sean Murray has said multiple times that the universe is infinite, so anything (even the Milky Way) compared to infinity is close to nothing. It's large enough that no single player will ever see everything, most will only see a small fraction of what's out there. Another thing that has been said is that everything is at a 1:1 scale, so planets are the size of actual planets and the distances between celestial bodies are realistic, a planet the size of the Earth would therefore be considered to be fairly small. If everyone who owns a PS4 played this game and all went to a single planet the size of the earth, it would be hard for a single player to find other players at all unless they all coordinated somehow. People who aren't into astronomy probably will have a hard time imagining how vast a single galaxy is, let alone infinity, it's a concept that the human mind can't fully comprehend; but even in an average galaxy there would be somewhere around 400 billion stars, so even if it took you only a single second to discover each new star, it would still take an individual 10,000 years of non-stop playing to find all of those 400 billion stars, and that's still close to nothing compared to infinity.

There's no promise that each star and planet will feature completely unique ecology or people-like beings (for lack of better terms), but the actual geographical features of the planets could have enough variance to feel realistic, since that would all be generated using fractals which is how realistic terrain has been modelled in 3D space for some time now, it's also how almost everything in nature forms in the real world. In fact, from what i've read, even the ecology could have enough variance to feel realistic and not as predictable and repetitive as many other procedurally generated games have been in the past; they've said that they use a template of a certain animal or plant that's modeled by hand and that object is given a large number of parameters that can be adjusted by the software, similar to the way you create a character in a sports game. So instead of modeling different legs, arms, or heads, etc like most procedurally generated animals in previous games, instead they model certain whole types of creatures or plants, which can then be molded into almost anything like a piece of clay. Furthermore, they've said that certain combinations and formations of things can only occur under certain conditions, mostly based on the atomic make-up of a planet, so we theoretically shouldn't be left with lions with zebra legs, or hippos with turtle shells, or rainbow colored grass or trees, because that sort of thing may not fit within the rules set in this universe.

A lot of the individual features that has been talked about has mostly been done before, just never all together, and i think that's really what makes this so impressive. There's no single thing in particular that seems impossible to me, it's just very impressive that they've seemingly managed to write code that's efficient, yet exact enough to be able to execute all of this in a single game.

This is of course what's being claimed, whether it's true or not is yet to be seen by the general public, but i don't find it too impossible and i'm hoping they pull it off.

To be more on topic, i think if they assigned a randomized name to each player so that instead of seeing their username you see a name that befits some sort of alien being, then that would help with keeping immersed in the experience. As the player, you would still see your own username, but wouldn't have to look at ridiculous usernames. Maybe that could even be made as an option to be turned on and off. I would prefer not to see usernames myself.