Comparisons Old and New

[sgfan206]

First of all - oh wow. Has it actually been FIVE YEARS since I last posted anything in here?! Oof.

The release of Worlds II has reignited the thrill of discovery in NMS for me. I decided to start a new playthrough on the hardest difficulty settings (except for permadeath) and to really take my time in discovering new things. So far I have finished the Artemis questline, now I’m working on the Autophages one.

Upon discovering a portal on my world I decided to settle on, I wondered how the planets I’ve been on have changed since Foundation / Atlas Rises. Digging out my old screenshots of old times, I decided to check the portal coordinates I’ve wisely documented back then when (working) portals have first been introduced, to see the change after all these years - and mostly after the NEXT universe reset.

So, without further ado - here they are:

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01 - From deserts to anomalies

The first world we are rediscovering is one that has changed from a bright desert world into a otherworldy anomalous planet apparently devoid of any life.

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02 - From radiation to fire

In the same system, the second planet I decided to survey back then, it turned from a colorful irradiated one to a scorched and barren world.

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03 - From forests to nuclear wasteland

This world has been turned from lush forests of red leaf trees on white foliage to an absolutely blasted nuclear hellscape.

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04 - From flickering embers to uranium spires

Just as in the 2nd world, but the other way around. This one has molten down to a surface filled with spikes of radiated iron.

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05 - A relatively unchanged world

Astonishingly, this planet hasn’t changed its biome, instead the irradiated plants have seemed to been petrified, turned into hard stone after having mutated beyond recognition.

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06 - From ice to fire

This world has been turned absolutely upside down, from a cold and relatively barren ice desert into a planet littered with smaller forests of heat-resistant spires of leaf trees.

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07 - Deserts spring to fragile life

A pleasant surprise was to find this planet where its dusty wasteland was able to grow fields of grass, littered with small foliage among big boulders.

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08 - From fields of grass to pillars of glass

Quite a shock it was to see this world of orange grass with occasional single trees to be replaced by an eerie dead planet littered with pillars of - kzzt - glass.

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09 - A relic, preserved by the Galactic Atlas

A submission of mine towards the now distant release of NEXT, where I found two almost identical sculptures of resources, was almost ironically lost to me, since I never took a screenshot of its glyphs. Fortunately for me, the Galactic Atlas preserved its location for many to visit the location.

Unfortunately, it has been lost to the unpredictable fits of the Atlas. Molten the snow, replaced by nuclear dust.

A single traveller visited this location, leaving a message of their visit, no doubt disappointed by the unexpected loss of this marvel of procedural generation.

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And there you have it. Nine locations of old, revisited after almost 8 years. A return to the roots, if you will.

Strangely enough, on my old savefiles some systems from the Foundations-era are marked as “discovered 10 years ago by sgfan206”. Which is a pretty strange thing, unless I do have a warped perception of time. The ones from Atlas Rises on the other hand are appropriately marked as “discovered eight years ago by sgfan206”, as documented in this last screenshot.

On the new savefile however they are marked as “undiscovered”. There seems to be a discrepancy between different people’s savefiles in terms of discoveries that were made long ago.

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Whew. Almost five years since my last post, and now I go and plaster this giant pillar of a thread opening post. Which leads me to the question - do many of you have documented their planet’s glyphs from the era of Atlas Rises or even prior to that? If so, I’d really like to see how your worlds have changed in all these years.

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Oh, and … it’s good to be back after years of lurking. I’ll definitely keep you posted (in other existing threads) on my new discoveries in this new age of post-Worlds II.

Best wishes to all of you.

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Edit: Sorry for the night screenshots where you cannot see much. I completely forgot that changing the time of day was a thing to get day-screenshots.

[sheralmyst]

Good to have you back!
I wish I had catalogued my bases thru the changes. It is a lot of fun to look back.
Thanks for sharing!
I had one of my discoveries marked 10 years ago too…I know I tend to lose track of time when I am in the sim but…idk…could explain a lot though. I don’t remember my hair starting to grey…

[AdaRynin]

Thanks for this comparison! So it’s not just an illusion that so many of my old worlds have changed.

I had a file where I tracked an adventure… But was that before or after portal addresses were added? I have so many screenshots that I cannot associate with anything, I might as well delete them. (Except for the ones that become desktop wallpapers of course.)

One of my first requests to HG was a way to distinguish screenshots… Some I take because I want to keep records of this planet and its resources and find it again. Others, merely to document a bug. Others are just good one-off wallpapers, or a funny pet in a funny place, it doesn’t matter where. The last category would be UI screenshots (funny dialogs, my hoarded credits and treasures in my freighter inventory, etc.) where I don’t care where I took them.

The Discoveries tab is alas not helpful in finding anything, especially since old things have been reset (I also see “10 years old” worlds…), it’s great that you kept your own!

[toddumptious]

Of all the ways to come traipsing back in, this is certainly one of the greater ways to do it. Fantastic you still had all those screens and glyphs on file and could go visit for a check in via the portal network.

Great to see you back out there exploring Traveller, the new update has sent a lot of us ancient iterations back to the realm of wonder and discovery, I believe @Mad-Hatter and @Sir_oops have joined you on the increased difficulty replay, one of the abandoned variety too.

I did something similar recently myself. I lost my original launch day save when I started a new playthrough in the pathfinder update. Back when you could only have one save file (of normal, permadeath and survival, each).

I knew I had streamed footage from that day and still had the screens on my PS4.

I was able to use a signal booster I walked past early in the playthrough in my second system to get the Mac address, then used the pilgrim star app to convert to glyphs.

I had a screen of the galactic map star field where my very first starter system was and was then able to navigate my way back by lining it up in game.

I then did my best to chart the route I took through systems before taking that first black hole trip into the deep.

https://forums.atlas-65.com/t/return-to-yudinipikus-a-travellers-quest-for-home/

[AdaRynin]

Continuing a conversation about old new proc gen from a screenshot thread here:

Screenshots

There’s several edge cases that would come up here that could make things rather complicated. For one, you’d have to know when a base was created, otherwise the planet would just revert to its old self as soon as you build a base on it. That in itself wouldn’t seem too bad, but now you have other issues like imperfect knowledge. Effectively you’d have to guarantee that you know whether there’s a base on a planet before you even start generating the system, which will introduce additional latenc…

Many ask, why don’t HG let the old planets stay old and regenerate only untouched planets? I’m no expert, so someone correct me if I’m wrong.

As I understood it, proc gen is like math formulae. When I calculate the area (a=h ×w) of a 3×4 square here, and you calculate it over there, we will arrive at the same result, as long as both of us put 3 and 4 into the same formula. All blazillion rectangle areas in the world can be calculated reliably by anyone with the same one tiny formula.

Similarly, there are also 3D formulae describing hilly shapes and pseudorandom distributions and gradients and much more. The formulae include some variables for which colour/size/shape to choose. E.g. the colour variable expects a number from 1-16, then 1,2 makes the tree red, 3,4 orange, 5,6 yellow, and so on. (Oversimplified.)

The game uses these formulae to draw everything, and as long as the game puts in the same numbers into the variables, the result (the hills and colours and number of birds and the tree distributions and …) will be the same, whether it’s being calculated for a player here or there. It doesn’t even matter if they are offline. “3 and 4 are always orange.”

The easiest consistent seed numbers to use as variables are presumably the coordinates of a planet (plus galaxy?). So e.g. to choose a planet’s tree colour, they take the 7th digit of the x coordinate. (Very oversimplified.)

(And there is likely even a formula that determines the seemingly random distribution of stars within a galaxy, so that is also the same for each player, which probably uses the galaxy numbers (1-255?) as proc gen seed variable. Just guessing.)

And everytime HG adds more shapes, the formulae stay, but some old colours/shapes get replaced by new options. Suddenly, only choice 3 is orange and 4 is a new shade of pink. So half the things that were orange are pink after an update - it’s still using the same formula, just the list which number chooses which part/colour has shifted.

So if we say, “just let the old planets stay old”, what does that mean?

HG would need a list of all old planets that have any customisations. Then in all formulae, they would need to introduce exceptions: if: planet is on list of old planets, then: use formula with old choice ranges, else: use formula with new choice ranges.

Technically possible, but probably very annoying to maintain, downloading a new list every minute? The main advantage of proc gen is that it represents blazillion planets in a very compact format that works offline. Adding exceptions to that defeats its purpose.

Am I understanding this system correctly?

[jedidia]

@AdaRynin

HG would need a list of all old planets that have any customisations. Then in all formulae, they would need to introduce exceptions: if: planet is on list of old planets, then: use formula with old choice ranges, else: use formula with new choice ranges.

You wouldn’t do it like that. You would keep several versions of generation algorithms, and use the correct version. Which they’re essentially doing already. But yes, the problem is knowing, as it often is in an asynchronous context. Right now, they know: All purple systems use the new one. Simple. Not so simple if you need to know if a player has a base on a planet, because you need to know if that’s the case in every instance of the game.

[toddumptious]

In this hypothetical where they can retroactively update undiscovered systems with the new terrain gen… Since they already have all our discovery data, they could use that same system on the players end to make the decision of “discovered or undiscovered” system and then apply the correct generation. It wouldn’t require any new list making of player touched planets because that data already exists. Would simply just need to check the date of discovery and apply accordingly.

This would however, make connection to online discovery services a requirement for players. And I think that requiring an online connection to see the true state of the universe would be something Hello Games would be diametrically opposed to. It completely obliterates one of the games core principles which is, this universe is the same for everyone, whether you play online of offline, the same location on the same planet will have that rock or tree in that same place.

It also would take away the wow factor and reveal of the purple systems. A whole new world of exploration essentially opens up and rejuvinates the exploration flow for a player who may have just crossed the 100/200+ threshold and beginning to think they might have seen it all.

They already did a bang up job adding new terrain detail without messing up the underlying meshes, to existing systems, as well as updating them with a lot of new things and biome variance, not just in purple systems.

[jedidia]

@toddumptious

Since they already have all our discovery data, they could use that same system on the players end to make the decision of “discovered or undiscovered” system and then apply the correct generation.

You and me both know how reliable that system is…

[toddumptious]

Which is why it’ll never happen

I just pray LNF behaves better. I understand it’s been made with massively synchronous online in mind from the get go, whereas NMS was always planned to be asynchronous and compared to leaving messages in dark souls any time it was brought up to Sean, with the hope to open it up more post release…

which is why I’m still to this day, shocked by the confusion on launch day, all those haters clearly didn’t get the memo I don’t think I need to link to the July 2015 ign video where Sean talks at length about how it won’t have what people consider traditional multiplayer at launch, but it’s smething they’d like to explore post release, you guys know the score

I believe the inclusion and removal of multiplayer on the box was a Sony guffaw but that one little slip up, is what I believe set the stage for the launch day shenanigans, it sowed the seed of “the Devs are lying”.

It’s also why I get irked when I see people say, greatest redemption arc in VG history etc etc, no it wasn’t. You’re all historically wrong. I blame trump mania and Brexit lunacy warping how people online dissect and disseminate the news they read , 2016 was a hell of a year for online vitriol

It was also a weird period where some big media companies bought up the old guard, and rooster teeth started producing the E Hollywood of video game news. It was just rumors, bitching and hearsay presented as the truth, fox news style. I felt so bad for Gus, you could see he was in hell chasing the click bait that got the most views, rather than the actual true critiques of the games they discussed. I can’t remember the name of the show, but it spent weeks just trashing HG on hearsay, even showing the photos of their empty studio and perpetuating the whole “took the money and ran” thing. When in actuality, Scotland Yard suggested they don’t go to the office due to the volume of threats the studio was recieving