Speculation: Why NMS really lost its rotating planets

[Simons Mith]

Originally posted by retroquark:

And so removing rotating planets in NMS increases the market appeal, because a significant amount of ps4 players would like the earth to be flat, and the universe to be made up of discs floating through space on the back of invisible turtles. And clearly "most gamers" also think it's very confusing with the whole "sun passing overhead, but not really, because it's actually the planet that rolls around, like a tennis-ball on a string tied to a pole, ouch ouch Copernican crisis incoming, I want my skybox back!"- thing.

I shall look past the picking on PS4 players and boil this down to "rotating planets were removed because it confused too many gamers", and then assume that's the core point to respond to.

I think this is an interesting (and sad) part of NMS's journey, but also that it's a subtler problem than just 'some players are stoopid'. There's a user interface design sin NMS committed back in the day, which is still in the game, which probably forced them to this regrettable development. User interface design isn't my main bag, but it is a side interest of mine and I suspect this is a great example of the big effects a small-seeming UI mistake can have.

Note: this whole post is speculation, but I hope some people will find it convincing. Preamble over. Article now:

So, back in the day, NMS had planets that moved and orbited. And players ran about on planets exploring stuff and all was good. Except, NMS's procedurally generated planets are kinda samey. It /is/ easy to get lost, and it was just as easy back in those days. But! At least there's a nice big landmark floating overhead. Players can use that to orient by.

Unfortunately, the landmark moves, which is the one thing you really don't want your landmarks to do, so the players get lost anyway, and then the players complain. And NMS makes planets not move any more to make those complaints go away, and IMO that sucks, because I would have loved to have moving orbiting planets and we're never getting them back :-(

The logic here is pretty reasonable though; players are getting caught out using an unreliable 'landmark', so the only way to fix it is to make the landmark more reliable, and it's just a pity you have to throw away the cool orbital mechanics to do that.

But the game has also always had a scanner. It tells you all sorts of stuff, including local time and local coordinates (top-right of the screen). It's just that that information only pops up on-screen when you're actively scanning something, and not when you're just moving about.

If the UI had been designed differently so that planetary coordinates were present on-screen all the time (and an exploration aid like that would have been a totally reasonable thing to put in to a damned exploration game), then as the player moved about the planet, the coords would have ticked up and down in real-time as they moved about, and players would have noticed that, and quickly realised it was a way more reliable position marker than some yucky old moon floating nearby. Everyone, even the stoopid players, would have become accustomed to using those coords right from the outset, because they'd have been readily available all the time. But because it either wasn't present at all back then, or was buried in the scanner UI where it's a pain to access, a lot of players don't use planetary coords even now, and because of that we lost our rotating planets and I'm sad.

[Jouchebag]

Have some points... I can only assume that's the actual purpose for a topic grounded in nonsense conspiracy theory and furor with some sort of "stoopid" bogeyman.

[Voodoojedizin]

It was because in a system with 1/2 a dozen planets and maybe a few moons
moving with the sun hitting each of them differently it took too much computing power/memory/CPU whatever the reason for it to be rendered properly, at the time the consoles would not have had the ability to run the game. This game was designed to run on low end systems or consoles. Or at least this is what I have read.

[Mr. Bufferlow]

As I remember launch, there were no coordinates to use on a planet.

The reality is probably close to the myth. Player testers were struggling with the revolving and rotating planets. Having them do that took a lot of extra computing resources. As with many of the changes since launch, it was probably the easy answer to just eliminate a feature that was problematic and did not seem to increase the "fun" level but it definitely increased the frustration level. Pretty sure the player testers were not picked for being "stoopid".

The water was much nicer in the original game- but again- it takes a lot of computing resources to have that. So they changed it and most players didn't even notice. A few players groused about it but at the end of the day- it did not really add much of a game feature.

So now, with game systems added that really are not able to be pushed much more, it is unlikely they will change anything in a radical way.

We never really lost it, we just never got it to begin with.

[gNg]

Originally posted by Voodoojedizin:

It was because in a system with 1/2 a dozen planets and maybe a few moons
moving with the sun hitting each of them differently it took too much computing power/memory/CPU whatever the reason for it to be rendered properly, at the time the consoles would not have had the ability to run the game. This game was designed to run on low end systems or consoles. Or at least this is what I have read.

This sounds far more likely to me.

[UNBREAKABLE]

Not really sure if the whole "planets used to rotate" thing is even true, It was already barely credible before internet historian brought it up in his video.

If you play the build of the game that is dated before those patch notes that supposedly made them not rotate - you'll find the planets still don't rotate. The only source of this even happening were those day-1 patch notes.

Maybe someone familiar with the files has a better idea of if it actually existed or not. You'd figure there is/was at least some left over code if they made such a decision last minute.

[Simons Mith]

Originally posted by gNg:

This sounds far more likely to me.

And me too, I must admit. Doubly so if it was a feature eliminated at the playtesting stage.</sad>

Originally posted by Mr. Bufferlow:

As I remember launch, there were no coordinates to use on a planet.

Yep, that does sound typical for NMS. What would an explorer need coordinates for?

[Foxglovez]

Every time I have to find something, I wish for coordinates visible all the time. It always seems dumb to me that all that info has to be requested every time.

Regarding the use of sun as landmark, duhhhh, not on land so why would anyone do that? But then some of us have actually been outside (prior to games) and had to use compasses and irl landmarks so maybe we just know not to use something that moves, or should anyway, as a not-so-land-mark.
If gamers are that stuupid I am really sad.

[Typha]

At least an option to make coordinates visual would be really nice.

Most planets don't rotate by the way, at least to our best scientific understanding. They're very often tidally locked. Moons too, including our moon.

[retroquark]

lol

Originally posted by UNBREAKABLE:

If you play the build of the game that is dated before those patch notes that supposedly made them not rotate - you'll find the planets still don't rotate. The only source of this even happening were those day-1 patch notes.

It's specifically referenced in the ps4 beta changelog. So although it is plausible that the ps4 beta people suffered a collective psychosis, it probably really happened.

I'm not sure if the moving space station was the issue, either. Because either you'd see it move (before the off-planet pointers were removed.. it'd move incredibly slowly, but still). Or you'd only see it when taking off again(so most people(tm) would probably not remember where it was anyway, or forecast it as a potential UNACCEPTABLE SITUATION). But could be someone complained about that, absolutely. Imagine you stayed on the planet for a local solar evening and sunset -- and then afterwards the objects in space, like stars and moons and international space-stations and such, would suddenly be placed in different directions. ..that's.. clearly not how it works on Earth, right, so that would be really scary.

What the wandering marker/compass thing (which was a hot topic also after the beta) is referencing is also not it: that was a marker far off on the planet that you would be trying to reach, say, while flying planetside - and it could then escape and disappear around the planet, so to speak, once you came past the middle. So if the planet was spinning a million revolutions a second - it wouldn't matter as long as you spun with it. If you guys have heard of the legendary trek around the circumference of a planet(the runner's name escapes me, sorry), this probably originated with someone joking about how someone better prove, soon that they weren't going to fall off the edge of the planet if they walked far enough. Because in the early days there were entirely serious, and very angry people, complaining about how the backside of the planet clearly wasn't there (and probably that god didn't like where all this sphere business was going /s).

Some people (not naming names) really were saying that the underside of the planet didn't exist(lots of half-technical terms were thrown around), and that it would cause problems (also with memory and so on) to assume it was. And insisted that implying it existed with pathing, waypoints, and so on, would break the universe and hang all the cpu-powers in existence. And things like that.

This is not how this works.

By the way, the whole "it would take too much processing power to turn the planet, and also it would be really heavy to push it" problem. Also not how this works.

What may have been an issue would be how moving the planet slightly would have potentially created a mismatch over time between the current position and the geometry. But that's not a different problem from what has to be dealt with for the entire game to even work in the first place. So this is not the issue either. If you generate parts of the planet, rather than a sheet based on a planet tileset - you're already forced to deal with and solve that issue. So all the "I'm a coder, I know this is difficult, the Unreal 3 engine doesn't do this automatically, so HG couldn't possibly have ...".. not appliccable.

You could maybe argue that reducing the area you would render in lesser detail could be reduced, to make things run faster with .. you know.. ps4 people recording footage and using all the background psn features.. It's possible. There were a lot of complaints about the speed of the ground blipping in, and it is possible that some of the "solution" would involve some very harsh choices. But because of how the world is generated in NMS, that also doesn't make any sense.

Maybe it would be possible to say that if the planets rotate, then at a future point in time when freighters and many other ships would be implemented - then it would make it look unnatural because now the ships are not in orbit. And bringing attention to that would upset the astronomically inclined among us. But that defies any kind of plausibility, even if you accepted that the ps4 people were psychic. The solar systems weren't realistic, but have more of a film-realism.

So finally: could you argue that having this subtle effect in there wouldn't actually make much of a difference, but that it might cause issues? Yes, absolutely. But it wouldn't have been argued like that -- were there no other gameplay, or perceived gameplay, reason to remove it.

Anyway. I wasn't privy to the feedback itself in the ps4 beta (I have it second hand, from someone who didn't want to be engaged in it, and talked about it like someone would talk about a family dog that got rabies. Maybe they exaggerated, I don't know). But the logs for the ps4 beta changes clearly referenced that there were confusing parts involved with the planet movement. This is not in dispute. It may not have happened in exactly the way I suggested, but I have a genuinely hard time imagining anything rational taking place. Because I can't find a rational explanation for it. There isn't one, in fact.

What has been in dispute, of course, is how this ps4 change somehow affected all versions of the game. And that's a different discussion about parity agreements. But that is also the case that that is a thing. It's not as easy as "oh, but it never was there, because why would the ps4 version change the pc version, haha!". Also not logically sound.

Note that I'm not bringing this up just to lampoon ps4 beta testers. I'm bringing it up to point out what sort of feedback has dominated the creative direction of NMS since before the release. Remember that the ps4 beta was preceded by a closed beta. And that it coincides with the start of a 6 month delay. So the changes were made here.

And if you know what an initial beta-test entails (not the public betas that we all participate in and enjoy as early access), you know it is that at this stage all the features that aren't perfect(tm) will be taken out. There will be no "but this will work great, just wait until after release". That's not what 0-day patching is going to update. What is being worked on at that point is getting the solid features down, and then fixes to all the main stuff that will be in the game.

All the extraneous things will be axed here. Do you have some icon wandering, but could fix that by pulling out an experimental, non-essential feature? Well, now it's gone! Do you have a small gameplay niggle that could be fixed by just removing a bunch of objects and things that might be causing issues? Well, that's how you fix that! Do you need to reduce the complexity of objects everywhere to not croak the graphics card once the surface filters are in place? Well, then there's a solution right there! Is there a million trillion possible pitfalls that could potentially happen with the geometry-generation? Well, then.. you get the idea.

[Lindy Bomber]

Originally posted by retroquark:

lol

Originally posted by UNBREAKABLE:

If you play the build of the game that is dated before those patch notes that supposedly made them not rotate - you'll find the planets still don't rotate. The only source of this even happening were those day-1 patch notes.

It's specifically referenced in the ps4 beta changelog. So although it is plausible that the ps4 beta people suffered a collective psychosis, it probably really happened.

Have any of these beta testers every confirmed this public or is there in game video of rotating planets? The "confused players" always sounded like bovine excrement to be.

[Dirak2012]

Honestly, I think the whole "rotating planets were removed" is just PR talk.

[retroquark]

Originally posted by Lindy Bomber:

Originally posted by retroquark:

lol

It's specifically referenced in the ps4 beta changelog. So although it is plausible that the ps4 beta people suffered a collective psychosis, it probably really happened.

Have any of these beta testers every confirmed this public or is there in game video of rotating planets? The "confused players" always sounded like bovine excrement to be.

I agree that it sounds completely insane. But the changelog is entirely real, and - at the time - not actually hidden from public view (and why would anyone hide their great work at making the game better than ever?). So there is and was no need for any beta-testers to break their nda to confirm any of this. There was also dev-talk about how toning down the effect (or making it very slow) wasn't a solution, either. It's real, there's no technical barrier to overcome that hasn't already been solved in the game as it's made.

See, this is why I can't do journalism for paid gigs: no one(tm) in the click-sphere wants to listen to evidence, or see the actual investigation. They want to hear "the truth" from some obscure, hidden source that guards secrets of the arcane in their special position, emerging from the depths to reveal what is indeed obscured from the eyes of mortals. "I get my information straight from the source", as one said, about reading Intel's press releases. And if it's not from the clearly always honest corporate producer person, then it's questionable and subject to misunderstanding and agendas. Really, logic, computer programming, maths-- the agenda! It's a vast mathematical conspiracy! One time I wanted to do a more technical overview of a game, and got shot down halfway into the process because the owners of this studio didn't want technical talk to be seen. So my source panicked and forced me to pull the whole thing. Because they know you guys! They know what you want, and what you're impressed by! And it sure as hell is not an actual explanation for how something works, and neither is it technical talk from actual devs. You want the publisher and producer to waffle "bovine excrement" that sounds technical. This is what you guys crave and clearly wish for, and so that's what you get.

It's the same with the thruster brick/newtonian flight. People genuinely think it's made up. It's the main feature in one of the eternally most popular mods for the game - it is the most requested specific feature in this game by far(next to capes). But it's not talked about in press releases, I guess, so it doesn't exist.

Just a small note here. The ease with which you could implement orbits in a game like this - and the difficulty, the horrorific difficulty it would be if you tried to do it in an Unreal Engine scene - must make it so enticing to do for the developers they must be just shaking their heads in disbelief. Like I've gone through many times before: what has happened to this game is that the creative direction is being guided towards putting all the conventional stumbling blocks of a typical space-game design into a game that doesn't really have them to begin with. And it's just a crying shame. For the devs, for the players - and for the publisher too, who is sabotaging a really interesting game that could be genuinely new and interesting. Because it's a design that has proven to be incredibly engaging for years, and survived how many space-game launches that would wipe the market by now? 8 games like this? It's produced a space-genre by itself, in an industry where "space sim" is a curseword. And I assure you it's not because of the third tank-vehicle you can spawn on a planet to drive with. Neither does it rely on the community being "engaged" in minutia of how much recoil the multitool should have. Why, for example, doesn't Sony just focus on pushing in VR and context-panels for existing features - this takes work, and could be completed to great effect. Rather than going head first into creating a galactic buck counter in the left corner that spins through 15 digits? What could possibly have been the reasoning behind adding enough emeril in the updates so that any planet would supply every space-station in an infinite number of galaxies to the end of time? What critical game-centric point did that serve? What about the products you can produce with increasingly obscure items - what in the world is the point? To hold on to the two guys who play a space-exploration game to see the space-buck counter go up? It takes a grinder a very short amount of time to get bored of that - so why bother with it? Meanwhile - the actual request was about having a functioning economy in the game. Not to have a "I haven't worked a day in my life, and never will, because I can ask my dad to give me money at any time"-economy. With literally pointless tasks given to you that pay absolutely nothing, and economy-indicators that have nothing to do with the technology or supply of items on the stations. That wasn't the request. But that's what we got. And I assure you that adding this amount of items, and putting it into a system that at least programmatically hangs together - is not trivial. This is a lot of hours of real work that someone did, and therefore someone paid a lot of money to have this extremely pointless economy put in there. Does this type of addition to the game give Sony a return for the investment? Obviously not.

The game is so extremely full of questionable creative direction like this, that it is clearly not the product of a designer sitting there and planning a game that would appeal to a niche, or even a wide audience. Neither is it an egosentric design that some curious programmer has picked in isolation. What it is is a committee based design that has no cohesion or structure at all. It's the "a-bunch-of-stuff-thrown-in-there" design that consistently lessens the value of otherwise interesting games.

[Zloth]

I think the original poster is closer to the answer, but I wouldn't call it a problem with the interface. The idea of giving us, say, some sort of on-screen icons to track where the planets are is an obvious one. If they aren't doing it, it isn't because of a GUI design mistake, it's because Hello Games chose not to put it there. They WANT you disoriented! That's not a GUI mistake, that's a design decision.

So how fast are these planets moving? If it takes a year to get around the sun, there's not a lot of point to having the planets move because nobody is going to stick around long enough to see it happen unless they log off for weeks.

On the other hand, if you make them go fast enough to see the effects, think what will happen when you land on one of two planets that are close to each other, do some mining, scan bunch of critters, and take off again. Ooops! That 'close' planet is now gone! You have to search the skies all over again to find that it's now on the opposite side of the system. And that's going to happen every time you stay on a planet for more than about 10 minutes.

I think that was more disorientation than HG wanted. They could have simply given us a solar system map, let us pick the planet we want, and give us an icon to it (or even an auto-pilot), but then the disorientation would be completely gone. Instead, they stopped the planets from moving, so we can do the discovery process when we warp in but not over and over again.

[Dirak2012]

The whole thing seems just a PR stunt because... was there ever a sun? Why there are no images or anything about something as big and important as a sun? Also people would instantly try to fly into the sun. Why no comments about that?
I still think the planets never actually rotated, it was just a weak justification from the time before they decided to shut up and just work in the game.

Even then, the most important evidence against that is... HG doesn't have beta testers, even now WE are the beta testers. I'm pretty sure that the only ones that test the updates before release are themselves.

[Simons Mith]

Planetary /orbits/ round a star, you could track at negligible cost. Recalculating the positions hourly or even daily would be more than enough. The closest orbiting bodies have periods of a few days. Tracking that would have no computational overhead to speak of. Planetary /rotation/ and orbital movement would. The ISS orbits the earth every 90 minutes, so in-game almost everything artificial should default to a powered geostationary orbit, then it doesn't move relative to the planetary surface, at the cost of having to use its engines to stay in position. Then the game only has to worry about natural stuff moving. That's still a big ask IMO. It would be cool, but... I'm not going to ask for it. I'm greedy enough already.