In regards to the team working on NMS, I believe SM himself said that most of the HG team are working on something else and only a few are still working on NMS. The small crew seems to be churning out quite a bit still and for all we know the size of the NMS dev team fluctuates as needed. So that’s why I think they are prioritizing ports first.
As for universe hopping, I think is probably coming at some point. Much is pointing to it but we’ll see.
Edit: its possible that we can get new content still but probably on a much smaller scale. I do want to be wrong though. Like, badly.
Why? Because how else do you expand the universe beyond what it already is? Of course, do you just keep adding more of the same thing, or do you spread it out among the galaxies? …the universes? …the dimensions?
Question…
What could be so ambitious, complex and/or otherwise time-consuming, or what could be so important to the very heart and soul of NMS, than to provide any real reason to travel beyond a single galaxy? …spread it out.
Answer…
What could be more far-reaching than the ability to travel beyond all of them, and into a multiverse of parallel universes and underworld mirrorverses, except only for a reason to do so? …spread it out.
Licks finger to the wind: "Ah, yes. Coming soon!"
Reply #2:
Sean Murray said: "For a while now we’ve been working on something pretty ambitious in the background. It’s a small team but we like it that way.
“Similar to No Man’s Sky, it’s the kind of project that even if we had a thousand people working on it, it’d still seem impossible.”
The game was in “very early” development as of September last year but Murray reassured that, while No Man’s Sky is still receiving regular updates and isn’t finished by a long shot, the two games aren’t impacting each other’s development.
“No Man’s Sky is not being held back by the next project but neither is the new thing being slowed by No Man’s Sky," he said. "We’re lucky enough to be able to allow folks to move freely to work on what excites them.”
Quoting Sean…
NMS isn’t finished receiving updates by a long shot. HG moves freely between both games, and equally.
Ah that’s the article I was looking for. So it was a few working on the new project instead of the other way around. Apologies. Also, NMS isnt done in any way, I was just implying that they arent all-hands-on-deck on NMS now, yet are still able to produce content at a decent rate.
Speaking to IGN, Murray said the team at Hello Games is continuously coming up with new features they’d like added to No Man’s Sky, and each new update inspires more and more ideas.
He said, for "as many updates as we’ve done since launch and as many BUCKET LIST items we’ve checked off, our list of things we’re excited about never seems to get any shorter. The team are always coming up with new things that they want to do with the game: new content and features and areas for improvement.
"I’m amazed that the energy levels are as high now as they’ve ever been. We tend not to talk about what’s on that list publicly but suffice to say we’re not done yet by a long shot."
Murray explained its roadmap and development schedule as similar to a painting that never quite seems complete: […]
Going off the speculation about HG Dev placement, I remember an article written by Iain Brown (NMS’ Lead Server Engineer) for Microsoft regarding their use of Azure to deliver the expeditions and their development process. He highlighted the fact that they made a system which would allow their artists to completely control every aspect of the expedition and work on it without the need for a programmer, which would allow those programmers to work on other, more technical features, so I do believe that HG prioritizes newer tech and feature development via programmers, and leaves “repetitive” tasks up to designers, such as creating more variation.
The missions structures are clear example of this. Conditions, outcomes, requirements. The right UI and a lot of drop downs and they could generate any of the missions stories in game. No coding required except to add new elements that never existed before. With the new Story Structures being an extension on this, still makes me wonder if we will ever see community driven missions
Lol, I do hope HG designers don’t have to deal with the mess that is the backend MBIN for the missions… They’d need a from the ground rehaul if they wanted the mission tables to be community usable, or at least an official guide on using them. Any sort of official modding tool would be an amazing “4.0 worthy” gift though imo
nah, likely everything stores in tables and xml, and UI loading them. Then just select drop down values etc. Really wouldn’t be that hard. Time consuming. MBIN just serialized data after all. Aligned to be loaded directly and aligned to memory so can be accessed as virtual drive.
If a community tool came, it would likely be more limited in scope and conditions. To avoid the more complicated scenarios.
Official Scripting API would be revolutionary but I doubt they’d go so far. Even an UI visualizer or a more graphical, stable approach to modifying MBINs would be a good start.
Memory Based APIs are good, but tedious to add to and require updates for newer versions of dependencies or changes in a games engine, so they aren’t as reliable as an official solution. I’m working with Gurrenm’s No Man’s Sky API and it’s a phenomenal took, already allowing for much more complicated mods that possible, but something directly from HG (aforementioned scripting took/API would be much better.
Yeah, a baked-in scripting API could really propell NMS to another level. But it might not be very practical as long as they’re still updating the game this frequently and expansively.
do tell
"Ah, yes. Coming soon!"
% of team works on NMS, 50% of time.
