Gameinformer has done a 30 minuet behind the scenes look and are having the game for their January cover. Apparently to "complete" the game will take 40-100 hours.

Link to gameinformer page: http://www.gameinformer.com/themes/blogs/generic/post.aspx?WeblogApp=features&y=2014&m=12&d=05&WeblogPostName=take-a-30-minute-behind-the-scenes-tour-of-no-mans-sky&GroupKeys=

Link for the lazy

I watched this earlier. That game looks so good.

I'm about half way through the tech video, and as a programmer it's super interesting. I thought the world was randomly generated like minecraft, but as the dude says it's all defined by a formula and then generated on the fly based on the formula. It totally makes sense now how everyone will play in the same world but it will show who discovered each planet.

edit: also i love how you can clearly see he's trying to explain without being too technical lol, i have that problem at work all the time

Not as excited about this as I was.

Most of the planets are going to look like that second one they show: uniform and boring. There's never going to be a Sahara Desert, Antarctica, Mount Everest or Mariana Trench around the corner because the worlds are never going to exceed the parameters of the equations used to generate them. The fact that they keep showing that same first planet over and over is very telling. It's a nice looking planet, but it looks pretty much the same everywhere you go.

There's still no game there. No one - devs included - seems to know what you're actually going to be doing with all this real estate. Judging from the video, they don't even have a way for you interact with it at all short of traversing and looking at it.

It seems they really want to do something completely original, and I really hope this turns into something special, but right now it doesn't look like much of anything.

That was brilliant!

So, I haven't looked at the article in the link but, is this going to just be a space exploration game? Because I'm totally cool with that.

@sinusoidal: I'm just going to use it as my podcast game, flying around and looking at cool shit. It actually being a game would be cool (and is the only way I would pay over $30 for it) but as it is right now it's still really cool.

Anyone else feel like they're seeing too much of this game? I don't mean the content itself. I just mean like.....everywhere I turn, this game is happening everywhere. Jesus christ. Let things breath.

I was applauding this game when it was revealed last year but now I'm just tired of it. Probably sounds super mean but whatever. Game still seems fantastic.

@sinusoidal: you'd be surprised by how you can generate complex behavior from a really small set of parameters.

@corevi: @sinusoidal: They've said you're going to shoot things and gather ressources with a kind of upgradable star trek multi tool type thing. Upgrade your suit to be able to sustain different atmospheric conditions, upgrade your ship to shoot better or jump farther. Not saying it's going to be fun for long or have legs like minecraft and terraria but it's not going to be a walking simulator at least.

It's important as a proof of concept for the math behind it. I think it needs a lot of work to be fun but the work already done will be important to the industry as a whole.

I made it about halfway through the video before I got bored of the repitition. They really really need to start sharing more about this game other than just keep harping on about the world generation.

This is exactly how I feel about this game. As a programmer myself, I'm super fascinated by the tech behind what they're doing. That's what's important, perhaps even more important than whether or not the game is good or not. If this tech works and can be applied to AAA titles like The Elder Scrolls or Fallout, the potential is endless. Obviously I hope the game is good and fun, but I'm definitely hoping more that the tech behind it is real and does the things they say it does, because that could be industry-changing.

I really want to know if there are gas giants, just so the game is slightly more realistic. Also I want to know what happens if you try to fly into a star lol.

I still have no idea what this game is supposed to be or do. Which is causing me to loose interest. So now the universe is static? Everyone gets the same thing?

Right now, it's a cool looking tech demo. If they want to keep my interest, boy howdy, showing how I actually would play and interact with the world sure would be nice.

That was never not the case. The procedural stuff was just for them to generate the insane amount of planets and wildlife. That's what all those "testing robots" we've heard about were looking at. The acceptable planets pass, the unacceptable get scrapped.

The cool thing here is the programming idea that allows them to have this insane number of planets that are consistent for all players and do not require any sort of streaming or even an online connection. The way I heard it explained is through math. It's much more complicated than this, but say the number that caused this planet to generate the way it did was eight. Whatever series of events that cause the generation of planets in this game added up to eight for this planet. No matter what happens that math will always add up to eight. If you leave the planet and come back one year from now, the math still tells the game this planet was an eight, and it recreates that planet right there. If another player visits that planet, the math adds up to eight, and that planet is generated right there in front of them. It's the illusion of existence. It's the illusion of millions of planets, when in reality it's just set math.

I'm at least partially to mostly aware of what's possible. (I studied physics and math and use a lot of procedural generation techniques in music which you can check out here: http://soundcloud.com/underwaterbob if you want.) They mostly show the purple-grass, low rolling hills forest planet. They've also shown the icy, low rolling hills slightly craggy planet, the desert, low rolling hills dry looking planet. I've seen low rolling hill underwater environments, but I've not actually seen them actually enter the water anywhere. I've yet to see them show a planet that had more than one type of weather or terrain. Perlin noise (which seems to be what a lot of if not the vast majority of what they've done so far is) only goes so far.

I don't know, it's really not that crazy an idea. Functional programming isn't new, and using procedural generation in games certainly isn't new. Heck, Elder Scrolls used it extensively already (see Daggerfall), and you can bet your ass that every single tree and grass clump in Skyrim or Fallout 3 wasn't placed by a human hand. What they've really done is just use more powerful consoles to do it on a larger scale.

If you want to know more about using Perlin noise and other types of random noise to generate terrains, check out this paper from an undergraduate student at Imperial: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/teaching/distinguished-projects/2014/j.webb.pdf

I'm not saying I'm not excited for NMS, I can't wait to explore, it's just that I don't think it will change the industry and I can see why Sean was a little awkward in that interview when the interviewer was suggesting he was an evangelist for procedural generation or a god tier programmer.

Fly to planet, walk around for a few minutes: the game!

TBH it sounds like they're doing some kind of assisted machine learning to find "good" parameters for the procedural engine (this is purely speculation based on some of the stuff that's been said in interviews, like "robots" scanning the universe for interesting worlds). This is an obvious idea when you think about it, but the new thing is the scale at which they're doing this (and betting on this). I also wonder: if they have some fitness function defined that determines how interesting some generated planet would be, maybe they've got it setup so that there are multiple candidates for a planet and the game chooses (at runtime) the "best" one? So basically amplifying the concentration of interesting results without hampering the scope of the universe? Again kind of an obvious idea but the devil is in the details.

That would be neat if it was choosing between multiple possible planets on the fly, although I'm not sure if its necessary. They might just be using the robots to check for any obviously "broken" planets to avoid edge cases in the procedural functions (like a planet is inside out or something :P ). I kinda hope there are broken planets though... Imagine if you found a planet that was a donut instead of a sphere? Or gravity was backwards.

@ares42: yes, sometimes the marketing feels live their selling an awesome tech demo.

I'd like to see a simple 10min uncut of someone running around and playing the game. Everything has been about how awesome the world generation is

I think we'll get the demos you desire eventually. Until then we must be patient.

People assumed a lot of pie in the sky things this game would have and the devs never ever promised that stuff. They shouldnt have to apologize for people's wild imagination thinking this giant game with a small team would have all this content they imagined it would.

This game is flying your craft and walking around in their world generator algorithm. If that doesn't "feel" like enough to you Im sure modders will do something about that at some point. That's why they're not showing factions and conquering and some kinda nemesis system and a bunch of Eve Online stuff or even a bunch of Spore stuff. Cus nobody ever said this game was gonna be any of that.