I wonder how many trillions of floors Diablo 1 had if they had used this weird way of marketing No Man's Sky uses.
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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Why is trillions in quotes? Did they add them or not?
I write a planet generator. All of the planets are the same to begin with, so realistically I can only generate "1" planet. Then I add one toggle which is random, if it's on the planet will be completely water. I now have "2" planets. Now I add another toggle for one huge mountain, I can now generate "4" planets (dry,water,dry-mountain,water-mountain). Keep adding toggles, sliders and parameters until you have "trillions" of possible planets and you're done.
The funny thing is that the changes are cumulative, so if I release a game that can generate X planets and I add a binary toggle I can now claim I added X planets to the game. If I add a slider from 0-9 then I added 10X planets. So since No Man's Sky already had a giant number of planets, adding trillions of them could mean something as stupid as they added a new resource to the game so now every planet can have that resource in different amounts.
I thought I'd check which 2^N gets you to a trillion, it's N=40. So you can have 40 parameters per planet and add one more, then suddenly you've created an extra trillion planets.
And that's assuming just toggles, if each parameter has 10 levels you only need 12, then add one toggle and you get trillions. Heck, I can name 12 parameters that have at least 10 different values off the top of my head:
- Amount of water overall (oceans and lakes)
- Amount of mountains
- Amount of Forrest on the land
- Amount of life forms
- Temperature
- Amount of moons/rings
- Size
- Amount of rivers
- Whether the landmass is one big continent or multiple small islands
- Amount of volcanoes
- Amount of caves
- Amount of iron (or any other resource)
Congrats, if you now add a does the planet rotate toggle you've created trillions of planets.
It’s a procedurally generated universe(s). These systems haven’t all been pre-generated, but will rather be generated to explore when a player visits a system for the first time.
Right, but that still counts. Although I guess it's kind of an "if a tree falls in the forest" question. If the world doesn't exist unless you find it, was it really there before?
The point is rather how meaningful this statement is. It doesn't really matter if your algorithm can come up with trillions of ways to place trees, if it's the same handful of trees it's still gonna feel samey after the third time.
Hmm, true
I'd trade that update for one that fixed the jank combat. I will continue to complain about the gun being auto-holstered after 2 seconds without firing as one of the worst parts of combat, so "line your shot" is a terrible strategy because by the time it's lined, you'll miss due to the animation creating a 1s lag between click and shot.
The almost random targeting of what you'll interact with when holding E is another big annoyance.
Capital ships are a total letdown, too. All they do is sit around motionless in space. Can't destroy anything bigger than a fighter.
When they say “trillions of new planets” they mean one new biome with the plants and rocks in a trillion different places.
Just more procedurally generated and boring as fuck “new planets”
To be fair, what this really means is that it adds more options for proc-gen. This means planets will be more diverse, which is good. The actual number of them is totally pointless, but it's easier to report in than the tangible effect.
I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, as the review scores keep improving so obviously folks are liking it, but you’re not alone if it still doesn’t click. They keep polishing it and piling on more stuff, but the base game is still rather disjointed and in my opinion, easy to burn out on. Procedural generation doesn’t mean any of the procedurally generated things are going to be interesting.
I like to pop in every time they drop an expedition. Those let you speedrun the game and get reacquainted with it with not much effort. You also get introduced to whatever new thing they added. It's a bit like playing ARK on a 20x resources 20x taming server so you can just play the game without so much grind.
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Isn't the game's universe randomly generated and had nearly infinite worlds since launch? 🤨
Close, proceduraly generated so psuedo-randomly to ensure that no planets are exactly alike. If you spend enough time in game it does begin to feel a bit like more of the same. Within 24 hours of this update I had already found a few things I had never seen anything similar to in the game.
Were they interesting? Or at least enough of a change to make them significant? Or are we talking random rock model here?
I found a planet where half the aliens had a star on their belly and they excluded the other aliens from all the activities so the two groups were locked in a bitter eternal civil war.
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Well that's good, I was just getting close to running out of the old planets.
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