Okay, so it sounds like this is going to be online, with thousands of players and a world bigger than any previously seen. This makes me wonder: How the f*ck are they going to monitor all of this? Where are they going to save the worlds? It sounds like it requires petabyte upon petabytes of data storing this world?

There's no word on if there's any heavy netcode at all in this game but I think most people are optimistically hoping for a peer to peer streaming in of other players like how Journey does it.

As for the shared world? It's all procedurally generated from the same seed, like how minecraft works. There will then be trading systems which will probably be handled by dedicated servers but that's not exactly network intensive.

Some devs have said theres no multiplayer and some have said there's seamless multiplayer. It's kind of a mess.

From what I've understood I think I get why they are being vauge about how the online works. It sounds like there is no traditional multiplayer. You don't see other humans. What you do get however, is actions that other players perform grow your world. For example Player A discovers Planet X, and when Player B visits Planet X he gets to see where all the cool shit is immediately.

I presume that kind of stuff will expand to in world events of some sort, at least it could (should) potentially.

Also no it wouldn't cost them any data at all to store the world - Planet X isn't generated the first time someone goes there and saved to a database, Planet X is generated exactly the same for every player who visits it by their game client. Their algorithms always produce the exact same planets at the exact same coordinates, as I assume it is all set of with the same seed. Thus no need to store the universe - just generate it on the fly.

@jazz_bcaz: If they don't monitor all the players actions (handle them on the servers) it will be really easy to cheat, and they will also have to store data of all the generated worlds, like minecraft, otherwise every time you arrive on a planet, it will be like no-one's ever been there. Why do you think most minecraft servers limit their area to something like 10000*10000 blocks? Because their servers can't handle any more.

Doubt that you'll leave any large (if any) mark on the planets you visit.

They don't need to store generated worlds, only the actions taken on certain objects of that world.

For example let's pretend the universal seed everyone uses generates a gas giant somewhere with a large hole in it's center, and in that hole is a platform with some sort of monument.

That seed will always generate that world given the algorithms, so the geometry doesn't need to be stored, just how you can send a friend the seed to your single player minecraft world and it'll be exactly the same for them.

Now let's say one player decides to blow up that monument with their space ship, now it's just rubble, that information would have to be saved in order for it to appear in everyone's game, it's something new added to the equation that didn't stem from the seed.

So while they don't have to store millions of stars and planets they do have to store any significant interaction you have with them.

Some of the language with how the devs are talking makes it seem like you will be able to play with other people in your world. If that's the case I think the most likely case is a Destiny type deal. Everyone is their own locally run instance of the game until two instances overlap and they then share that space and can interact. Based on the scale of the game it's unlikely that more than a few players will share space at any one time, so the shared instance could probably be hosted by one of the players in it pretty easily.

They would likely build a cap into each instance as well, so only a dozen (or maybe even fewer) people can share an instance before another separate instance is made. That would avoid people just trying to break the game by all going to one spot. Now what happens if one big shared instance destroys a space station and a separate instance is looking at that exact station at that exact time? Who knows, they haven't really talked about how 'live' the updating to the central server is. If I had to guess, your local client has a version of the system saved on your drive, and updates on warp to that system/ login if you logged out there. I'll admit I haven't coded anything like this, so I can't speak to how hard it would be, but if it is feasible it seems like the way to go.

@viciousreiven: Cool, clears it up, thanks :)

I thought you never saw other players?

I never thought the online bit woudl be like most games, I got teh feeling the online would be like Journey but more like choice to see others worlds. ... I could have been wrong.

I dont think we're even going to have that much interaction with other players. From what one of the devs said in an interview, it's very unlikely that you will see other people in your game and that it will be virtually impossible to even find your friends in this game. At most, we will only see evidence of players with the names they give to planets and creatures around the universe. I guess there is the possibility that within the community there can be player hub worlds where everyone goes to hang out and trade (if trading between players is even a thing in this game) much like how in Eve Online there are several hubs located all around the game's universe. The difference being that in Eve there are devs that are constantly fine tuning the server to have a ton of players on the screen at once, while No Man's Sky only has a handful of devs who might not even be thinking of this possibility. So I doubt we will even see things like player hubs around.

The stuff I heard is that you can be in the same world as other people but you don't really see them.

So they just share world state, not player locations. Shouldn't be too bad to work out.