I've played a lot of No Man's Sky since launch. I wasn't overly "hyped" for it when it was initially announced, as I didn't really understand the difference between it and Elite. I remember sitting with my friend (who coincidentally, worked at Hello Games for a few months) and saying to him, during the announcement at the VGAs: "It doesn't matter how many planets there are, with procedural generation that's just maths, add as many 0's on the end as you like. There's not gonna be a quintillion assets or textures". I was sceptical. I'm cynical of everything - but that's something I'm working on.
In the run up to launch, however, the trailers and news surrounding the game got me looking forward to it. "This is a world I can get lost in", I thought, "I could relax and just explore the worlds". I believed I'd be able to use it like meditation, just think of nothing and admire the prettiness.
I'm able to admire the prettiness of the game, and am enjoying playing it (A LOT!), but I'm not immersed in it.
Just as I begin to lose myself, something happens to take me out. Whether it's some unfortunate geometry, an object clipping into a wall, or a script behaving badly. There are so many things that the 'paint-by-numbers' procedural generation cause to pull me out of the universe I'm exploring that I've given up trying to be immersed. Now I listen to a podcast while playing.
The first time I noticed something, I took a screenshot. It was a collection of objects that should have been on the floor, but instead were floating in mid air. Presumably it was thinking the floor was at some elevation to the cliff face as a result of checking an anchor point of the models were intersecting the ground, without checking the rest of the area.
I thought this would be a few and far between experience. Not so and unfortunately this isn't going to be a game I can be immersed in. Too much breaks the experience. However I still love playing it, and have changed my attitude to document all the jank, and enjoy it instead.
I recorded this video to show a few friends what i was talking about and I want to share it with you. It's my most favourite jank I've seen so far. In this case the governing algorithms decide that it's going to spawn an entire shoal of fish at the same X,Y,Z co-ordinates in world space, and on land instead of in water.
This results in the AI behaving strangely as it probably has no programming to move on land, or perhaps is trying to move down towards the water but is colliding with the land and the outer-bounds of all the other fish that are in the same world space. The result is many fish all rotating, on axis head first.
It's pretty funny, right? and it might take me out of the universe, but it's a laugh to see how the algorithm messes up, and how the resulting scripts break fantastically. The other day, there was a forum post regarding whether we live in a simulation or not. I'd like to amend my answer. There's not enough jank for reality to be a simulation.
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