Beyond BEYOND - wishlist

I hear they pay good now if you dig up and turn in incomplete fauna remains :stuck_out_tongue:

10 Likes

ha, 100k… I currently get over 50k for a common plant and almost 400k for a rare creature, and my scanner isn’t even quite maxed out yet.
If you want to earn money just by exploring, get those scanner upgrades, and you’ll have no trouble at all. I have never farmed nor mined for money (well, except emeril back in the early days, where earning money was still somewhat of a grind). All I do is scan things, send out a few frigates, and dig up treasure, and I have some 50 million lying around that I haven’t yet found a suitable thing to invest them in…

11 Likes

I wish that the more challenging finds like Hadel? Cores and Larval Cores were worth a bit more for the effort it takes to acquire them.
Surely taking on a horde of monstrosities with only a few upgrades is worth a few extra pennies for your trouble?
It’s early on in the game where you are prepared to take risks for some financial benifit but it isn’t worth that much risk for the poor value.
Later on, when wealthy and nicely set up, it then becomes a bit of random fun…I don’t even bother grabbing the larval core because I don’t desperately need the funds.
Needs to be balanced a bit differently to reflect the danger.

11 Likes

Don’t mind me, i am just spamming the love. :heart::heart::hearts::two_hearts:
I am catching up.

I am out of wishes, there must be something I want. :thinking:

11 Likes

The following is provided as an accessory to this wishlist;
And due to its nature, offered as a separate discussion…

2 Likes

You know what else No Man’s Sky needs? !

USERGEN EXOBOTS

…which opens up to a very popular genre

Hello Games, please do consider bringing “Transformers in Disguise” to NMS :robot:

Why Exocraft Rocket Leagues, when you could have Mega Man ROBO Leauges?

Image Source

Built from logic circuits, mechanical parts, (perhaps base-building parts) and a new assortment of robotic parts… With the optional ability to transform on the fly, into a another megabot; or did I just go too far… Make players really have to work to build this thing, so we have a great sense of accomplishment in having crafted such a masterpiece :hammer_and_wrench:… But do allow for both simple designs and complex; small-scale and large-scale… Something you have autonomously walking around at your base, :scream_cat: perhaps guarding it, or performing other tasks, even just companionship, or that you hop inside and grab the controls… Can’t wait to hop inside my “UserGen ExoBot” and take on a “Procedural Bipedal”… Wouldn’t stand a chance! … Which leads me to thinking, perhaps there should be an even higher level of Elite Sentinel Force, the large-scale “Procedural ExoBots”…

…or was that PvP?

❝EVERY MECH PROCEDURAL❞

Sean’s PlayStation Blog post:

“When we sat down to write those first lines of code I could never have imagined the kind of trailer we just recorded. A multiplayer game, with base building, trading, space combat, ❝GIANT MECHS❞, economies, freighters, first person, third person, and so much more, all set in a beautiful procedural universe.”

Sniff, Sniff… Giant Mech Easter Egg? :egg:

Dr. Crim suddenly falls into a deep sleep, and the wild dream that follows, awakens…

EXOBOT MOBILE BASES

…mobile base computers …or was that hyperdrive engaged? … :thinking: :rocket:

7 Likes

Nintendo & Mobile

The following is provided as an accessory to this wishlist;
And due to its nature, offered as a separate discussion…

Also…

Steeper Mountains

image

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/d6uefg/sits_down_to_contemplate_life/

Plus… Waterfalls and flowing Rivers and Creeks… And denser forests :palm_tree:

5 Likes

Ah, the old problem of knowing which way a river flows without knowing where it begins or ends… One of the holy grails of procedural generation :grin:

This one would at least be technically possible, if they make the water surface another procedural layer. Any kind of water surface animation is essentially already a procedural system.

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I did this once by simulating rain at random spots (random rays pointing straight down) and added some erosion to get it to look natural. It was slow (hours) for my small scene. Doing it this way randomly across the planet would be impractical. However they could add smaller streams, waterfalls and other water features as base building elements, or maybe an option on the terrain manipulator. You could place a starting point and they could generate water geometry based on the ground in a fixed radius. Unless they forced a mostly fixed geometry they would have to get clever to pack this into the save file, but a little bit of water movement/sound around the base would be nice.

4 Likes

Oh, I did similar things. That’s not the point. In this case you have all the data required in memory, and “just” have to simulate a physical process. In a system like NMS, the usual case would be that you encounter a river, but you don’t know where it originates nor where it’s going. You’d have to generate the entire river first, which you can’t do.

That would be possible, yes.

4 Likes

Flowing Water

Should this be an entirely separate update — Call it “The Basin”!

Such a lovely update would fit beautifully with “The Abyss” v1.7.

Or “The Oasis” has a nice ring to it - Most fitting is “The Basin”.

What if…

the whole topographical scene of

are treated as a whole procedural system
a natural free-flowing part of the terrain

  • NOT separate points of interest
  • (unlike buildings or other sites)

spreads across all surfaces freely

  • on horizontal & slopping surfaces,
  • that give way to white rapids when…
    • tilted slightly
  • that give way to waterfalls when…
    • tilted vertical
  • pushing and affecting our character

are based on random topographical markings

  • which react under a procedural system
  • which result impressions in the terrain
  • which volumize and flow with gravity
  • if more gravity, then faster flow
  • faster flow = more mist + more sound
  • longer the waterfall, greater the intensity
  • especially intense at bottom of waterfall

coding: perhaps a combo of terrain generation and cave generation

direction of water flow is based on

  • gravity: highest to lowest

Oncoming flow

  • affects intensity
  • ensures direction

EXAMPLE:

IF a flat surface is encountered

  • direction is determined by oncoming flow

:volcano: figure this out, and you’ve automatically figured out lava flow

slow it down & thicken it to a glowing superheated substance :fire:

true rivers and creeks do not exist v2.0

oceans, lakes and ponds do exist.

but without flow, so suggestion:

direction of water flow is based on

  • randomly placed invisible undercurrents
  • sporadic &/or steady wind moving water

that should take care of surface flow and under flow

all types of flows

  • intermingle and affect one another
  • and lead to the lowest water level

Options

BONUS #1 — whirlpools

  • add occasional whirlpools, affecting flow
  • perhaps these could be of varying strengths
  • randomly place these above and below

tip: use the same system of whirlpools for tornadoes :tornado:

BONUS #2 —natural springs

  • waterfalls gushing out of vertical edges
  • then flowing into rivers / creeks
  • and, flow rising up from underwater caves

BONUS #3 — caves

  • surface water flow; cave water flow
  • surface water flow falling into caves

BONUS #4 — geysers

  • water gushing up from horizontal surfaces
  • then falling as copious showers like rainfall
  • a natural spring &/or cave water flow, combo

sign reads ⦂ ❝gone skinny dippin’❞ :shorts:

  • Or was that, ❝gone fishin’❞
  • :eyeglasses: needs new glasses
  • Oh, “rafting” :see_no_evil: Oops, my bad
  • Or was that surfing? Or…

“It was then that Mr Oblivious found himself in a cave behind the waterfall”

“Caught in a pixie-swirl w/ pots o’ gold at the end of an anomalous rainbow”

5 Likes

Having a liquid flow dynamic for the game would be great. This would be key for making the worlds look more realistic. (It may wait for the PS5 if we ever see it.)

My further thoughts were: if they could to it for normal old dihydrogen oxide, shouldn’t this also work for lava flows or toxic goo?

6 Likes

Oh, for the umpteenth time: This is an unsolved problem we’re talking about. Every solution you’ll find for the problem requires knowledge of the terrain in advance. NMS doesn’t have that.

Even letting the stream carve out a canion isn’t a feasible solution, because there might not be any terrain to carve out. Let’s say you have a ditch. So that fills with water. Fine, no problem there, all localised, you get a small lake (expensive in CPU cycles, though). Where does the water leave the ditch to flow onwards? At the lowest point of the ditches rim, of course. Pretty simple.

Now answer me this: How are you going to know where the water will flow through if a) you don’t know that there’s a ditch in its path, and b) where the lowest point of its rim is? That’s right, you can’t. Just simply C.A.N.T.

So what can you do? Well, you let the course of the river be determined by a mathematical function instead, as everything else. Now you always know where the river is flowing through, right?

But oh wey, now there’s a ditch in its path, and the ditches lowest point happens to be not where the river is determined to flow. Great. Now you have a magic water wall.
What could we do about that? Well, we might locally edit the terrain to form a river board. Now we’re having an additional expensive layer of post-generation that needs to analyse the terrain first, so good bye PS4 and Xbox, but at least it works.

That is, until there is a giant canyon intersecting the stream perpendicularly instead of just a ditch. So now the water falls into the canyon in a majestic waterfall, flows right across the canyon, and burries itself a completely illogical cave at the other end instead of following the canyon, which would have been natural. Ok, fine, I guess we can live with weird things like that. Except, now I scale the canyon wall on the side where the river flows underneath and walk a ways. After a while, the game doesn’t know anymore that there is a canyon back there. So… How on earth does it know that the stream runs underneath the surface, and not on the surface? After all, if the canyon wasn’t intersecting the flow, the river would just have continued flowing naturally across the surface. So since we now don’t know that there is a canyon, that’s obviously how things should be. And we get an entire river magically popping into existance on the surface. Until you walk back to the canyon, when it just as magically disappears again because it realises that it should run at the level of the canyon floor. Big whoops.

So let’s not do waterfalls, because any waterfall will inevitably break the flow of your procedurally generated river, because its flow must be generated without knowledge of the terrain its flowing through. You’re left with spontaneously generating in some kind of natural aqueduct to carry the water over the canyon, or generating some weird basin walls crossing the canyon so part of it can fill up and become a rather weird lake. In any case, we now officially banned waterfalls, because there was simply no other joice, so we achieved nothing, because people will keep asking why there’s no waterfalls.

I’m not claiming the problem is unsolvable, mind you. But as of right now , again, it is unsolved, and if a solution exists, it has to be so out of the box and bat-shit bonkers that nobody thought of it yet.

5 Likes

With BEYOND, I have encountered a couple of planets with long narrow lakes that resemble rivers. Of course, they do not flow. Some planets also have red skies which cause the water to resemble lava. I have also found that you can remove terrain and expand these “rivers” to a certain extent. I imagine this is the closest to flowing lava rivers we will ever get.

6 Likes

Concerning lava, it would of course be trivial to just change the properties of the water on a planet to turn it into lava. I’m not sure what changes would have to be made to the water physics to make it less viscuous so you can barely swim in it, but in a pinch you could just give it insane heat damage and near-zero visibility, plus not generate any flora or fauna, so there’s no motivation to go swimming it anyways, at which point nobody will complain about it behaving the same as water when you go for a swim.

The most effort would likely be spent on a shader that makes it look like lava. Oh, and the whole thing would probably require emmissivity, but all of that sounds rather simple. In fact, I would very much welcome more specificity and variety in the actual nature of the liquid (because at some points it’s pretty obvious it ain’t water, judging by the temperature). Would also make the whole thing more emersive, and there’s not many technical challenges here.

I don’t expect flowing liquids to be in the cards ever, though, for the reasons explained above.

3 Likes

Likely, you would experience extreme heat damage just going near it. So no one would ever go in it…well, I am sure someone would.
Of course, then the fauna would need to burst into flames if they get too close. :scream:

4 Likes

Does NMS have knowledge of the terrain in advance?

If not, then… How do things render if there’s no knowledge of what to render?

How is it that when we return to a destination - it continues to look the same?

So it would seem that…

  • NMS does have knowledge of the terrain in advance
  • it just only tangibly renders in so much of it at a time
  • and this applies to all aspects of the game


Continuing from my prior writing…



First, let’s establish this:

In No Man’s Sky…

  • game assets = handcrafted
  • use of assets = procedural

So terrain generation is based on

  • hand-drawn terrain templates

Is this not “knowledge of the terrain in advance”?



Therefore…

Topographical Markings are

  • a separate layer
  • a procedural system
  • a collection of hand-drawn assets
  • a collection of hand-coded rules
  • a layer reacting with other layers
  • programmed to work across terrain templates
  • seeded with logical random placement, based on preset rules

So, clarification…

Topographical Markings

  • are not directly hand-placed - otherwise, how?
  • are instead procedurally placed - sounds right!
  • a layer reacting with other layers
  • based on preset rules…

Example:

  • IF terrain scenario, THEN basin scenario
  • IF cave scenario, THEN basin scenario

Terrain Variable:

  • IF mountain scenario, THEN basin scenario
  • IF canyon scenario, THEN basin scenario

a collection of variables, based on a collection of principles

To what extent are ‘terrain templates’ hand-drawn?

Do we traverse planet-wide replicas, or near replicas, or based on principles?

How do all aspects of our terrain seem to match up? …seamlessly, is if magic,

…would be how a water system would match up, :sweat_drops: including rules on flow.

Just one more thing: Add a setting to turn off/on ‘The Basin’ layer. Thanks!

:pray: Here’s hoping our diligent efforts are enough to inspire Hello Games. :pleading_face:

1 Like

Seriously? That’s the whole point of procedural generation. That’s the entire crux of the technology. That you can persistently generate any point in the data, without having any of the rest of the data. You don’t have to know an entire infinite line to know whether it intersects with an object or not. That’s the basic concept at work here.

So to address this directly:

No. It only has knowledge of the terrain currently in memory, most of which you are seeing on screen (at least if you could look in all directions at once).

No. It renders all it knows in your line of sight.

I don’t even know what you mean by that…

Again, wrong. The terrain is the result of mathemathical functions. The stuff distributed over the terrain, that’s based on templates.

4 Likes

Hello fellow Travellers!

I have read a lot of your ideas and some of them i really like. But with ships there should be no drastic Customization so hunting stays relevant
Also I’d Like to see word opportunitie s to Learn Languages and also more Ways to invest money. I am sitting on 4,2 Billion Units and there is nothing to get.

Traveller101

5 Likes

Honestly, I thought about that, and I think it could work as a late-game mechanic. Not in the typical vein of shipbuilding games like space engineers or Empyrion. Instead, have an actual supply chain leading up to it.
Finding crashed ships gives you some form of tech-points which you can “research” in a terminal to get ship parts, similar to how we unlock other tech right now.
Actually crafting ship parts requires all of the crafted materials, and possibly some new gizmos. No ferrite or chromatic metal or whatever. The basic resources are Herox, Aronium and the likes, and you need them in significant amount.
But you can’t just put ship parts together in your backyard. No siree, you need a factory. And that factory will only be capable to build the most common components and will always produce C-class ships. To get something better, you need to expand it with all kinds of specialist facilities.

I could see a system like that working.

6 Likes