The size of the actual earth?

[Odium]

I dont think they should go for making it the size of the actual earth. I mean make it large. But I mean how long do we really want to be walking through a desert for? If they make it the size of a real earth than days. you could be walking in a desert if you dont have a mount for dayysss.

What If you went for a super long flight and your big fat humming bird dies somehow and you have to now walk back?? all those mountains and lakes/oceans you flew across you now have to find your way back. Other than that this game looks absolutely amazing. Survival crafting games are in my top 3 genre. Mat trips will be an actual adventure though I suppose.

[wildbill]

Originally posted by Aye Harambe:

There's always something you can improve.

Top of mind is making POIs modular, just like the modules in Fallout 4. If you wanted to be lazy, you could still build decent ones with just randomized module fitting and pathfinding checks. But...we have decent machine learning available to us these days, and could easily makes a series of rules to build POIs that look and feel much more organic.

Instead, most developers have settled for a cut and paste job.

Well you know I have created a few POIs myself for Minecraft. I suppose what I did is a bit simple, but I can say they do take a lot of time to create, test, and get working right. I just mentioned it because if you want hundreds of hand crafted POIs, that will take years to create in my opinion.

I'm also in the software business as a software tester. I might be wrong, but the average lay person has no idea of the capabilities of AI and what it can do. I know a lot about software, but not a lot about AI. It is a very specialized part of software development, that I doubt very few game developers would actually use it. Personally I look at it as all marketing hype for the most part and wouldn't want to play any game that says it has AI to generate the map. I'd think that is all marketing BS.

We used to call them algorithms in the biz, but now some are just called AI. In no way are they intelligent, so calling them Artificial Intelligence is a very deceptive term.

Many games that use modular buildings are not procedurally generated. They could be hand made and then simply placed on the map, same as you would place a prebuilt shape programs that allow that like Visio.

I'm playing Bethesda's ESO (they also make Fallout 4). You can tell the buildings are modular, or like a kit of pieces they assembly into a city, a dungeon, a graveyard, whatever is needed. They have little parts too that can be placed for the proper effect. Just today I fell into a hole that would have left me stuck and there was a ladder placed there, just so I could escape (this was obviously a simple fix to a screw up someone made designing that location).

You can place these modular items on a procedurally generated map too, but of course, they will become repetitive after you see it a few times, just like they do in NMS.

Best you just change your expectations and find other things you do enjoy about the game, as it is unlikely that in a reasonable amount of time and money spent (time is money in game development), you will get anything revolutionary and amazing. This is just a game after all and we are not sending a Satellite up into space. BTW, stuff sold by the company I work for is used by some companies that do just that. I like to say sometimes at work, "It isn't rocket science, oh ya, it actually is"

[GoogleSword]

I was worried about the addictive ness of this game, due to the fact that it is a massively multiplayer, but I did a bit of calculating and here is what I discovered if your curious,

There are 11,084 playing nms at 12:00. Assuming every one who plays nms downloads LNF, there would be 11,084 players (plus a lot of new players, I don't know how many) playing at twelve. The surface area of earth is 510,064,471 km^2, so, there is 46,018 km^2 per person (about the surface area of Estonia, a country near Sweden). The length of the side is 214 km. The average walking speed over forest footpaths is 5km/h, so, it would take you 43 hours to walk to the next person assuming they stood still and I went directly towards them.


this is very rough draft and obviously ignores the fact that people will not be evenly dispersed, they would not put one player in a barren wasteland with enemies every where you look and put another in a beautiful jungle with no threats and plenty resources.
it also ignores that mounts will be able to bring you around much faster ( I don't know the average flying speed of a dragon so I can't calculate that)

Anyways, thanks for reading!

[Odium]

Originally posted by GoogleSword:

I was worried about the addictive ness of this game, due to the fact that it is a massively multiplayer, but I did a bit of calculating and here is what I discovered if your curious,

There are 11,084 playing nms at 12:00. Assuming every one who plays nms downloads LNF, there would be 11,084 players (plus a lot of new players, I don't know how many) playing at twelve. The surface area of earth is 510,064,471 km^2, so, there is 46,018 km^2 per person (about the surface area of Estonia, a country near Sweden). The length of the side is 214 km. The average walking speed over forest footpaths is 5km/h, so, it would take you 43 hours to walk to the next person assuming they stood still and I went directly towards them.


this is very rough draft and obviously ignores the fact that people will not be evenly dispersed, they would not put one player in a barren wasteland with enemies every where you look and put another in a beautiful jungle with no threats and plenty resources.
it also ignores that mounts will be able to bring you around much faster ( I don't know the average flying speed of a dragon so I can't calculate that)

Anyways, thanks for reading!

Terrifying. So its kind of like NMS at launch then...."Mulitplayer"