I don’t think you can handcraft a whole world with any reasonable team/timeframe for video game development. Looking at the (very short) video I suspect there will be handcrafted areas like cities, and they’ve put more emphasis on that than in NMS because the size is more manageable. But 80 or 90% needs to be procgen to make it something that can be delivered in years and not decades. Although being a single world, maybe that let them have more visibility of what was being generated (vs checking millions of planets) and then tweak manually large parts of it.
But is it procgen as you go? Or did they procgen a whole map, which exists from start for you to explore?
Because the latter is very cool, but the verbage around it so far feels like they mean the former, and Ive no clue how that would work with what theyre claiming the game is.
I think it’s the second. Even on No Man’s Sky, with the bazillion worlds, they all exist “as they are” and are consistent from the beginning. If you revisit a planet, it’s exactly as it was.
Now with what I know about this technology, I suspect the way this happens is every planet had a seed (a number) that you can pass to the “random planet generator” it will generate exactly the same thing over and over. Then basically when you load a new planet it goes “right, with this seed, what would we have in these coordinates?” And the answer is persistent.
However having seen how that looks in NMS, I feel they’d have had to add a bit of extra spice to be able to sell a single world. In my mind that involves manually crafted areas almost necessarily, as well as checking most of the planet manually to oversee the procedural generator and massage anything that doesn’t pass a level of quality. If I were to make this game myself, I would use procedural generation for the different areas and not for the whole planet, so that I can give certain sections of the map a “reroll” if I don’t like them.
Sounds plausable. I guess they generated the planet an then told the generator “place this handcraftet city/dungeon/cave/whatever x units away from another handcraftet thing” at least i hope they did otherwise it will get boring pretty quick i think.
I don’t think you can handcraft a whole world with any reasonable team/timeframe for video game development. Looking at the (very short) video I suspect there will be handcrafted areas like cities, and they’ve put more emphasis on that than in NMS because the size is more manageable. But 80 or 90% needs to be procgen to make it something that can be delivered in years and not decades. Although being a single world, maybe that let them have more visibility of what was being generated (vs checking millions of planets) and then tweak manually large parts of it.
Yeah, the size dictates what’s possible and what isn’t, and that’s absolutely fair.
But hey, this is just a first trailer, so we shouldn’t really make any assumptions, good or bad. Let’s just wait and see.
But is it procgen as you go? Or did they procgen a whole map, which exists from start for you to explore?
Because the latter is very cool, but the verbage around it so far feels like they mean the former, and Ive no clue how that would work with what theyre claiming the game is.
I think it’s the second. Even on No Man’s Sky, with the bazillion worlds, they all exist “as they are” and are consistent from the beginning. If you revisit a planet, it’s exactly as it was.
Now with what I know about this technology, I suspect the way this happens is every planet had a seed (a number) that you can pass to the “random planet generator” it will generate exactly the same thing over and over. Then basically when you load a new planet it goes “right, with this seed, what would we have in these coordinates?” And the answer is persistent.
However having seen how that looks in NMS, I feel they’d have had to add a bit of extra spice to be able to sell a single world. In my mind that involves manually crafted areas almost necessarily, as well as checking most of the planet manually to oversee the procedural generator and massage anything that doesn’t pass a level of quality. If I were to make this game myself, I would use procedural generation for the different areas and not for the whole planet, so that I can give certain sections of the map a “reroll” if I don’t like them.
Sounds plausable. I guess they generated the planet an then told the generator “place this handcraftet city/dungeon/cave/whatever x units away from another handcraftet thing” at least i hope they did otherwise it will get boring pretty quick i think.