Well my thought is that multiple bases would dramatically raise farm capacity earlier. Sure, you can currently visit other’s farms, but that generally requires a lot of travel or glyph gathering which pushes that later. And those 18 mil products require a lot of blueprint gathering and equipment construction, which also tends to push those much later.
You kind of point out the flaw in your argument yourself…to make farming work you need to spend a lot of time doing the quests for the NPCs…which you can’t finish until you have all warp reactor upgrades to go to every type of solar system, then you need to spend lots more time finding all the factories to get the really profitable recipes which require a lot of work to get to as you need every sub-component recipe…and that’s all before you even build any farm…in fact it’s a lot faster and easier to get the glyphs and go harvest the farms of others than it is to get to the stage where you can make really profitable farms…especially with the heavily curved growing times where you have to wait at least an hour for any worth while product.
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Not to mention with the portal unlocked early game, you could have your desired ship. An in a matter of days can have that ship battle ready within the first 10 hours of game play. One don’t need a base, just finish the base missions and pull up the coordinates for your favorite farm. I had to restart and at 18 hours have a freighter, a semi decent Hauler with Max Shields and all 3 beam impact upgrades. That alone makes pirates/ freighter hunting a sinch.
My point is, this game does really well with laying everything out for you really early on, and with the sheer size of the universe, hiding is hella easy. Unless you want to be in a war I think everyone is rather safe no matter what happens.
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Havok is just the physics engine (which in terms of game design usually just refers to kinematics). It has nothing at all to do with buildings being destructible or not. I do agree however that they are barely utilising it, but there’s… reasons.
Major reason being, it is a lot faster and simpler to just plug havoc into your game if you need it for anything than doing even that one thing by yourself. For example, you see Havoc at play in NMS whenever a creature falls over, a sentinel explodes and drops one of those annoying barrels that keep rolling away, or kick around a sphere at a ruin. I would expect it to also be used to help with the procedural animations for creatures, since I know they partly depend on a center-of-gravity simulation.
These things would have taken a fair amount of time to write from scratch, and offered quite some potential for bugs. So if you have a proven and performant library that can do these things for you, you plug it in and don’t care that you’re not using 99% of its available features.
This means that there is potential for extension of the games “physics” (again, it should really be called a kinematics engine, since physics extends far beyond that and might be misunderstandable with a game of the scope of NMS), but that has nothing whatsoever to do with cities. Nor is it any indication that they planned on using it more in the first place.
Last time I checked, HG hasn’t claimed any such thing. The official position is that Swain was hired to optimise the XBox port.
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Swain will surely be a big part in the update. Not just for optimization of the Xbox release. As far as the havok engine goes, it has several tools to make so many different things possible. Avalanches, mud/rock slides, having parts of ships and buildings fly a certain way that makes destruction look way more cinematic. Granted it doesn’t make the destruction possible, but it always gives it that touch other engines fail to do. I like that extra touch, and I feel havok should be used more…that’s all.
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It makes them easier, taking the whole messy physics calculations out of there. Now, in an environment where you can script events and design your levels accordingly, this does in fact solve most of your problems. In a dynamic environment where things are not guaranteed to always be in the same place, it already gets more complicated. In a procedurally generated environment where you don’t even know what things will be there and where they are… well, Havok doesn’t even get you there half-ways. It just takes over as soon as the systems you write yourself set up and trigger the event.
That’s the core problem with procgen. Any cool thing that takes a competent human a day or two to set up suddenly requires a generalised system that can take multiple developers weeks or even months. Sure, once you have it (and done a good job), you can use it everywhere without so much as batting an eyelash, but you better think about whether you really need this particular cool thing or if your time might not be better invested in other areas.
I agree that he’s probably doing more than that, though optimisation is by no means a secondary thing in a procedural engine. The only reason why we don’t see forrests as dense as in the trailers for example is that the PS4 would make a knee jerk. Things like RayRods mods clearly show that the engine is fully capable of producing them, it just can’t do it fast enough. So optimisation is a major key to unlocking more of its potential.
That said, I suspect Swain might also have been working on systems for generating procedural interiors for ships, buildings and space stations. That’s not inherently different from generating procedural dungeons, really.
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Yes. If you’ve ever watched the wildlife ambling around, you will see that they react to their environment in both life and death. They will step over rocks and walk around trees, climb slight inclines and slide down them in death.
It’s this realistic reactionary programming that Havok does, and essential in a game where the environment is not pre-determined by a human.
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That’s what I’m saying!
Unfortunately, you’re attributing something to Havok that Havok has no part in. In explicit, while I’m sure Havok does its share in the animations of the ceatures, it does not contribute to their behavior.
In other words, yes, that a creature slides down a slope when it’s dead is pretty much all Havoks doing, but that a creature doesn’t run into trees is not. At all. HG is running a coarse terrain analysis after it’s generated that produces a map of path nodes. The creatures select a pathnode to walk towards according to (I assume) a rough behavioristic state machine (for example, if they’re running from the player, they will choose path nodes that will lead them further away from the player, if they’re on the hunt they’ll choose nodes that bring them closer to other creatures, etc.).
While the behavior and pathfinding are standard problems in game design that have well formulated and proven solutions, the laying out of the nodes is not. This is usually done by the level designer, and HG had to write a system that could do the job on the fly. And Havok is not helping with that part at all.
And that then is really the crux of the matter: Havok can take over and do amazing stuff as soon as things happen. But the one that tells things when and where to happen is usually the designer. So to make anything happen, you have to write a system that does the job of that designer on the fly. That’s essentially the definition of procedural content generation.
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So while the creature is travelling that path-node, they encounter say, a rock, as I understood it, Havok’s part is that it helps them react and navigate that obstacle in a realistic way. Is that not right?
I remember watching a video demonstration of the Havok engine in action in The Force Unleashed. The dev was flinging stormtroopers towards a wooden wall and they were hanging and damaging it, reacting to their surroundings.
Granted that was a long time ago now so it’s probably improved a lot since then!
It is, but that’s mostly just affecting the animation.
There’s several things happening here:
- A stormtrooper is flung accross the room. This is a user-triggered event, upon which Havok is invoked and does all the messy math of making the trooper fly based on how much force was applied and in what direction, etc.
- The trooper hits a wall: An emergent event. This is basically all handled by Havok, as it at this time has full controll of all the assets involved.
- The wall is damaged: Mostly or all Havok. It will tell you how much force was applied, and it can even deform the mesh for you based on that.
So purely looking at the code while it is running, you could think that Havok basically does all the work here.
But somebody must have designed that mesh and implemented the object in code in a way that Havok knows it has to do that and how. So an artist created the wall mesh in a way that Havok can actually do something with it, a level designer put it there and gave it properties so it behaves like a wooden wall and not a wall of bricks (or a pocket of hot air, for that matter), and a coder designed a level framework that enables Havok to seamlessly interact with the objects placed there.
You’re not seeing all that work that designers did in that code, without which it would not have been possible.
But in ProcGen, that work needs to be packed into the code…
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Thanks for that, that makes it a lot clearer.
So to use my example of the animal walking over a rock; the devs would have coded that rock to be a solid mass that has to walked over, but as these rocks can appear anywhere, (unlike a traditional level or map that has been hand designed) the Havok engine is essential with this interaction.
Thanks again, you clearly have current programming understanding/experience! (Mine is a little out of date!)
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So what’s being said is havok would control where pieces would end up going? So if I were to make a building out of particals rather than objects and had the object fracture into what ever amount of pieces, havok would jump in and control the debris collision, gravity, motion, ECT?
Havok is utilised although very subtley, like dropping from a height into water, then arcing back up like a dolphin, then jetpack back up and down again, keep doing this and eventually you can move as fast as your ship 
it ALWAYS ends in my dying when I’ve flung myself ten miles into the side of a mountain but Booooy is it fun.
It’s also why the jetpack melee trick works. Our player character is effected by the games physics and has its own inertia and weight. I’m not a physics person at all so I hope I’m describing that right though I may have misused the word inertia.
As for the more complicated things people are suggesting, I was gonna say what you said but you did it so much better. The game needs to be able to do everything with lowest common denominator in mind, consoles etc. I think rendering everything on the fly with no baked art assets to draw from l, using just math and super shapes to draw plants and wild life etc and also painting textures this way too, leaves very little room for much else to be going on. Sometimes I’m amazed with how much the game can do. Unfortunately it just can’t spare the processing power to do things like real time collision detection on things breaking apart etc.
But by all means HG, prove me wrong. There’s always the wonderful modding community and the things they can bring to the game on PC, hello games would be rude to steal all the fun from them
As pointed out, the game is entirely procedural and a lot of work has already gone in to just figuring out how to render worlds when one chunk has no idea what’s in the chunk next to it until you actively call it into being for possibly the first and last time it will ever be rendered for anyone.
No mans sky isn’t like a lot of other games, even most procedural games have art assets and models prebaked to drop in.
Oh missed the chance to toot my patriotic horn, just like Sean Murray, Havok was also made in Ireland
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You wouldn’t use particles, but yes. If you design your building accordingly, Havok can make it explode in quite spectacular ways. Trouble is, it takes a lot more effort to design a building that way, both for the artists as well as the coders.
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So what I originally said is correct. Havok is what makes a destructible building what it is. Otherwise the pieces end up getting stuck into each other, model’s fall through surfaces ECT ECT…
The modeling process takes care of everything that havok doesn’t when it comes to what the player See’s, everything from movement, falling, laser path, the behavior of the trail left by flying ships. It makes sure the actual world around you functions accordingly.
the only part of A.I. that uses havok is the actual path generation (how is a sentinel or dangerous animal going to get to you; will this laser even hit? I’m only shooting if nothing is in between) everything else is done by the other tools. As far as cities generation and destruction go it’s a split job. But havok is going to be in charge of what we see happen. From being a big fan of havok games since mercenaries, this engine is not being used nearly to it’s potential. . . When used possibilities are endless.
I really don’t think Hello Games want destructible player bases to be honest…that would create a ton of other problems especially with open multiplayer…some of the advanced things you build are really resource intensive and can take dozens of hours…I don’t think they want those things destructible by others. And the rest of the buildings around won’t likely be destructible because everything else regenerates over time…that and they’re made of the same stuff as our bases. So yeah…you’ve got the wrong game is you want destructible buildings.
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Even if you’re just defending pregenerated cities. A bunch of Repetitive objects with different skins. Player bases don’t have to be destroyed at all. But defense missions would be possible. They already have the conflict system, why not build on it. To be honest we are probably far from cityscapes, but it is definitely a goal to be worked on. Some people suggested biodomes and such. But we should at least see shattered Windows, burning crops, fantastically bright explosions that make your banners flop around, objects around the base/building get blown around. Instead of the anticlimactic reaction of a plasma grenade making a crater, make it more flashy, sentinels actually break instead of poof and leave a barrel, them little rocks that give you x5 iron should be kicked around like an aluminum can while large ones leave particals when destroyed. They really would benefit from the time used, and I really don’t think it would take much extra work.
Yeah but then what happens if you don’t make it back to your base in time? Plus they very specifically said they absolutely do not want players to feel anchored down by their bases at all…this isn’t game where we’re meant to just settle down permanently in one place…we’re intended to be free to explore…so base defense missions wouldn’t work because they’d be a constant disruption to take you our of what you’re doing to go babysit the base.
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Damages don’t have to be permanent, plus I’m taking about defending cities. Either way it’s rough draft. This game has great textures and needs sprinkles is all.