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If you've heard of this, then you might already know, but this sounds like a pretty cool game. Not open world, but open universe. There are supposedly 14 quintillion planets to explore, not sure if that number is just developer speak for "really a lot" or is the actual number. You have a ship to fly around, and explore, land on a planet, and you can search around for cool stuff, other crashed spaceships, aliens, weird creatures, etc. You can collect loot and mine materials to upgrade your ship and weapons, etc.

Depending on how or if there's a story or if it's just survival, might be an interesting game. Also depends on how or if it's tied into multiplayer or not. But I'll be keeping an eye on it.

That sounds kind of fun.  I like exploring  :-X

sounds like Elite:Dangerous

We discussed this game briefly in another thread here (http://www.openworldgames.org/owg/forums/index.php?topic=3673.msg74438#msg74438) about a year ago.

The game has been in development for quite a while. As far as I can make out, there isn't any kind of story to it - not as yet, anyway. I don't think there ever will be. It appears to be a case of explore, upgrade and survive for as long as you like/can. The interesting thing is that everything in the game is procedurally generated as opposed to being predefined, not just the planets but any life forms that inhabit them, so that no matter how many times you begin a new game you will get different planets, climates and creatures every go-around. But given the truly galactic scale of the thing, you could never complete a playthrough of a single game in your lifetime - not if you want to explore every world. As in (hypothetical) reality, it would take centuries, if not millennia, or centuries of millennia, to do so.

14 quintillion planets is a crazy number. If you consider our solar system and galaxy to be "average", than that works out at:

(10 planets in one solar system) x (2 hundred billion solar systems in one galaxy) = 2 trillion planets, which looks like this:

2,000,000,000,000

14 quintillion looks like this:

14,000,000,000,000,000,000

Could there be that many planets in one galaxy? Maybe. Who knows? Maybe the scale of the game goes beyond the "merely" galactic. It's still a lot in anyone's numbers.

I'll be keeping tabs on this one too, it does sound intriguing.

I thought I'd heard of it before, thanks for the reminder, fragger. It does look interesting, and I'll be keeping an eye on it, hopefully it gets a release soon.

Quote from: Dweller_Benthos on April 12, 2016, 08:07:15 AMand I'll bee keeping

Are you unconsciously thinking of becoming an apiculturist out there in space? :-()

 :laugh:

Maybe, I've done bee keeping in Minecraft mods, so why not in this game too?

But yeah, that was the keyboard messing up, not me.

yeah, alright. :-()

Not sure if anyone has been keeping up on this one recently, but there has been a LOT of new info coming out, and the most recent footage is looking very polished and more "release ready" than versions of the game shown up to this point. This is my most anticipated gaming release in a long time and my 8 year old and I are pretty excited to get out there and explore.
The procedurally generated universe is shared among all players, however while you may stumble onto a planet someone else has been to, don't expect to run into other players often or even at all - the immense scale of the thing will make this highly unlikely.
There is a plot now as well, although not much has been said about it. The over-arching goal will be to reach the center of the galaxy- what waits for us there, only the devs know. However there will be a "trail of breadcrumbs" of sorts - clues and bits of lore that will gently guide us to that end.
Oh, and if you find something first, you get to name it. Planets, oceans, plants, animals- their handle gets updated globally so that if anyone else finds that thing, they will know who discovered and named it. My daughter has already called dibs on "diggety dug-dug-bug" for the first insect-type creature we find  :-X

Cool, glad to see you back, mmosu! Interesting that the game is shared, I wonder how much internet connection speed will effect it? Hopefully it's just for the download of names and other players' positions and such, otherwise, this will be another online game I can't play.

Will be interesting to see how it all shakes out  :-X

I don't know for sure if a persistent connection will be required. I do know that in demo footage you occasionally see an icon that seems to indicate server communication, but I don't know to what extent. I seem to also remember hearing about the possibility of an "offline" mode in which you populate a "private" version of the same universe- something akin to create mode in minecraft. If this is still a thing, I was under the impression that it was created for kids to play without encountering an animal named "dick-o-saurus" - cause well, it's the internet and that's gonna happen. However, if the feature is still there it could have utility for your situation D_B. It would be interesting to note that since you would be essentially operating in a parallel universe of sorts, you would never find a world that another player had already modified through heavy mining etc

The game is getting more and more interesting indeed. That 'searching for the centre of the universe thingy' really warms me up, just like the idea of a universe being explored by thousands of players at the same time. Very interesting. Hope for no server issues and 'unknown connection errors' and such :P

mmosu, any chance of you posting a link to some footage you liked?

http://youtu.be/D-uMFHoF8VA (http://youtu.be/D-uMFHoF8VA)

This footage was new as of last week, and this is new as of a few hours ago:

http://youtu.be/cUnKJyoyIIk (http://youtu.be/cUnKJyoyIIk)

IGN has been a nearly exclusive source of news on this

excellent, cheers  :)

Here's one more, a little discussion from the creator and lead designer on how a procedurally generated universe works

http://youtu.be/ueBCC1PCf84 (http://youtu.be/ueBCC1PCf84)

One line in the "Ice Cold Planet exploration" got me thinking.... "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away", by Philip K. Dick. First I thought that author was a joke; A writer named "Dick" doesn't sound too serious. Well, he is. He is reality, so I believe in him.

What he says got me thinking. I mean how can you know for sure that something doesn't go away when you stop believing in it? As a practical oneliner it makes sense. Take the tree along the road. You can stop believing in it and drive right through it; reality won't go away which you will find out. But such a line implicates a deeper meaning, like devine things or the 'why' of living. Many scientists claim to search and describe reality. They try to calculate and proove every movement and appearance until they are certain it's real. They claim to describe the truth. They believe in it. Until they find out that there's something underneeth that truth that describes why and how they were fooled by what they thought was the truth and they start believing in that 'new, underlying truth'.
Still the appearance that they once took for truth is there. The difference is that they learned something more about it; they know it's not the end of things.

When they discover molecules, they realise that all the colours we see, the visual appearance and behaviour of materials, is actually not reality, but being caused by a structure of protons, electrons and neutrons. Then they discover that these parts actually consist of some other parts even smaller. And still reality is beyond that phenomena. Wise people know that. Every part can be devided in half, or smaller. Energy is guiding us through the discovery of endless smallifications.
Which makes me realise: Reality is fake. It's a concept on which we hold on to in order to being able to act to the things we sense, ... or imagine.

Tell a schyzofrenic that it is not true that he has a chip inside his belly through which the FBI tries to control him so they can rape his sister; he will murder you.

So no, the tree won't go away. It will rubb its reality in your face. So better don't stop believing in it.

We live our lives based on what we believe to be there. That is no reality. It's our conception of what might be. The only reality is that we're not sure. And if we stop believing in that, we are gone.



Besides this little off topic philosophy, I think it's going to be a great game.  ^-^

Something along those lines that I have always found fascinating is the perception of color. Color, as we tend to think about it in our conscious experience of the world, isn't real! It's not a property of matter that's actually "out there". It's simply the way our central nervous system interprets the different wavelengths of light that happen to bounce off of the objects around us and onto our retinas.  :o ???... ???? ?

How do I know the blue sky you see appears the same to you as it would to me? How do I know that the red apple we're both looking at appears the same hue to both of us? Maybe if I could see it through your eyes I would find it actually looks orange! It's just impossible to know for sure.

Indeed Mmosu, that's fascinating :)

What is a massive game  :-X

Dogs. It's a fallacy that dogs see the world only in black and white. They do see colours, but their retinas or rods-and-cones or whatever are attuned to a different set of wavelengths compared to ours. Anything below what we think of as the "green" part of the electromagnetic spectrum looks like grey to a dog, which is why they have trouble seeing a red toy in long green grass. They see colours most vividly in the blue and violet end of the spectrum, and it's possible they see colours beyond the violet end that we can't. But dogs rely more on smell than eyesight, with a sense of smell greater than 10,000 times that of ours, so I don't think they're much bothered by their less-colourful world :-() Same goes for their hearing. They can hear higher (and lower) sound wave frequencies than we can, which is why there is such a thing as a "dog whistle" and why they know there is a thunderstorm coming before we do (I think they can also sense changes in the surrounding atmosphere and subtle electromagnetic fluctuations or something. My Maggie gets very agitated in a certain way that lets me know there's a storm coming before I sense it in any way myself. She's better than a barometer :-()).

"Colour blind" people have colour perception similar to dogs' - reds and greens can look the same to them due to a defect in their rod-and-cone composition. My best mate's father had that, so when driving he thought of the top light in a set of traffic lights as being "stop" and the bottom one as being "go". They looked the same to him.

In light of all that (pardon the pun) it's interesting to speculate on how a being would perceive reality if they could see in the x-ray spectrum, or in infrared, or even in the "radio" part of the spectrum. That may be theoretically possible - radio, microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, x-rays, Gamma rays... they're all part of the overall electromagnetic spectrum. It's only differing frequencies/wavelengths that distinguish one grouping from another. Take a radio signal, then keep shortening its wavelength, and eventually it will become visible light.

The world would look vastly different to people with radio eyes, and that in turn would probably influence how they thought about reality. Whose "reality" would then be the more "real" - theirs or ours?

Good point, we really all do just live in a simulated of what's actually "out there", all created by the way our sensory organs and nervous systems interpret the different energies in our environment. It opens the possibility of other sentient beings out there with vastly different perception from our own.
On the topic of No Man's Sky, the procedural generation of flora and fauna will hopefully yield lots of variety and surprises. I saw one thing where the dev team itself doesn't know for sure what we'll find out there in this "universe", and so they sent out virtual "probes" to sample virtual worlds and be sure everything was working ok. I guess what they found in some places surprised even them - giant sand snakes, fish that swim through the air, etc

Oh, and before I forget (and speaking of the aforementioned variety), here's some brief new footage, out just yesterday

http://youtu.be/CTRi2aEJrgQ (http://youtu.be/CTRi2aEJrgQ)

Interesting thoughts indeed guys. I wonder what way of world design they use. Did they find a formula to freely vary life forms matching given certain circumstances and other formulas to predict or combine these circumstances?

I heard that our nowadays wiseguys came to the conclusion that life only is possible with a specific match of molecules available in a place, and of course matching temperatures and amount of light etc.

I think that idea is kind of limited; imagine a world very hot, filled with loads of different types of metal and other heavy materials. And another key element (or moleculair structure) that behaves like water in our world does.... imagine some sort of fluid metal. It would allow creatures to appear consisting mostly out of metals and minerals that we would call stones, that can behave comparable to the way we (and the animals and plants etc.) behave on our planet.
Maybe there's life inside the sun. Behaving in a way that goes beyond our imagination. Maybe the milky way is part of something that behaves as a creature, trying to catch and feed itself with other surrounding creatures.
Maybe life itself isn't that special... it's just the visual appearance of what is and what does. Or goes.  :-D

I think it works much the same other procedural generation protocols do - there's a "bag-o-parts" to pick from and some rules to dictate how they're allowed to fit together. The rules must be fairly loose though, if the system has come up with some things that the people who created it didn't expect. I find this all very exciting - it has the potential to be a turning point in the gaming industry if it goes well. The around ten or so employees over at Hello Games are truly alone in uncharted waters  :-X

About dogs - I think mine might be a bit deaf, and blind.  But then again, what can you say about a dog that dresses like this and thinks she is fooling everyone.

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Uh, ok, thought you were gonna post a picture of your dog . . .  ;)

nice one, mmosu :-D

But seriously, what's Santa Clause got to do with this? I really thought he was putting up a dog pic! :-()

what worries me more is that mouse hanging from Santa's beard.

Ha! I didn't even notice that!! :laugh:

To get back on track, Santa trying to disguise himself as a dog notwithstanding....

I wonder what type of character creation will be available? I would imagine in a game where pretty much anything can happen, you should be able to go wild in creating your own character. Hopefully it's not just a couple variations on humans, and some really wild alien creatures can be created for the players to use as in game avatars.

that would be something new :-X

To my knowledge there is no character creation. In fact, that's one of the big mysteries about the game - what does the player look like? It's one of the many reasons players are trying to think of ways to beat the odds and find each other within the game. There's even a joke going around about there being a mirror waiting for us at this "center" we're all trying to find.

The topic of types of creatures and their random generation holds a lot of interest for me.  The thought exercise of speculating about what widely possible environmental conditions there may be as in how hot or cold paired with the available elemental chemistry and as to whether there's even an atmosphere or not is quite intriguing.

As far as life thriving inside stars there was a science fiction novel I read almost twenty years ago that touched on non-hadron creatures (read that as matter not based on baryons with their 3 quarks or mesons with a quark and an anti-quark).  Unaffected by gravity they thrived on surfing photon pressure created in the star's core out to the outer corona and then basking in the varying attractive magnetic fields as they allowed themselves to slowly drift back into the core.  Living for many billions of years life was just one big beach for them and when one party star would finally pass beyond being a cool spot to hang out they would flit off to find their next groovy digs.

The whole how many variables for life are possible and what are the conditions that for those variables to become sustainably viable species generation after generation is mind boggling.  Which brings me to a comparison with snowflakes.

Through winters here where I live I spend a fair amount of time shoveling snow.  I find that my mind frequently falls to the old factoid that no two snowflakes are the same.  There's 39 types of solid precipitation with 35 of those being snowflakes and of the snow flakes there is a further 121 subtypes that those 35 types can be divided into.  We've all seen pictures of intricately lacy snowflakes that appear to the eye to be perfectly symmetrical though at the molecular level there's most likely nothing in the universe approaching perfect.

Of those symmetrical snowflakes almost of the undamaged ones I see are six sided.  It makes me wonder about the variables involved in their creation.  I know there's the obvious influences in snowflake formation.  Humidity, temperature, the air pressure and wind movement at the height the flakes are forming.  Even the flake's position within the cloud can affect its growth but the one thing that baffles me is how in a symmetrical 6 sided flake (six growing radial spars connected at the center set on a plane with a 60° spread from each other that the flake weaves itself upon) what is the factor of communication that takes place coordinating development so that radial sector 1 of a flake matches its opposite member (of the six sides) radial sector 4?  And so on 2 to 5 and 3 to sector 6?  It's also possible as a flake grows that the entire circumference of the outwardly expanding rim of the flake is added one entire layer at a time.  Since all sides are experiencing the same conditions they all form in near identical fashion as they adhere and are shaped by the previous layers of the ice rim.

That only leaves only one other factor possibly influencing flake symmetry and the individuality of each and every flake that I can think of.  For a snowflake to begin to form there has to be a seed particle of dust.  It makes me wonder if the flake's growth towards its final shape is set in motion by the shape and properties of the dust particle which then in its own turn leads my pondering mind to the question "Is it actually that there are no two identical dust particles?  If we were to seed a cloud with millions of laboratory created identical microscopic ball bearings of a hydrophilic (water attracting) material would we increase the chances of once and for all kicking that old "No Two The Same" bit of trivia's butt?  >:D


Sorry for that bit of divergence.  To bring this back to the diversity of species and conditions that can affect them I suspect it can often be the thing we least expect that will turn out to have the largest influence.

I would guess it also has a lot to do with hydrogen and dipole bonding between water molecules- there are only so many ways they can line up against each other in a stable, low-energy state. The interaction between water molecules at different temperatures was always a fascinating topic for me in undergrad chemistry classes - the properties of water are THE reason that life as we know it can sustain on earth

nice post :)

Good posts, you guys :-X Very thought provoking.

Sorry to contribute to the side-tracking of the topic here but if I may be allowed one or two more little side-shoves before we get back into the groove:

Yesterday I found a large stick-insect hanging off the clothesline outside. It struck me (well actually, this sort of thing has been striking me for a long time now): How could something like that come to exist? A creature that looks so much like a twig that it would be almost impossible to detect among the branches of a tree if it wasn't moving. Same with creatures like Indian Leaf Bugs. Things like this are airily described as having "adapted to their environment" or having "developed camouflage as a protection against predators". OK, sure. HOW? The bugs themselves didn't decide to do this.

I know how the mutation process works in principle: Enzymes w@&k their way along a creature's "blueprint", its DNA molecule, within the nuclei of cells, chemically rearranging or pulling out bunches of atoms and replacing them with different bunches (a DNA has billions of atoms in it, but all those atoms are of only four types). By doing this, these enzymes, which are themselves nothing more than protein molecules, effectively reprogram the DNA to better adapt the resulting creature to the exterior environment.

So how does that environmental information get transmitted from the world at large to the enzymes in the cell nuclei, so that they "know" which atoms to remove and which ones to replace them with in order to reprogram the DNA, so that future generations of the creature will be correctly adapted? Of course it doesn't happen between one generation of creature and the next - it takes time. But it works. Brown bears that migrated long ago to colder, whiter climates eventually turned white and grew an extra layer of insulating fat to deal with lower external temperatures. Were mutation a random or chance process, with enzymes replacing atoms in a DNA willy-nilly, the fur of a polar bear would be just as likely to turn out yellow with purple polka-dots as it would an environmentally-adaptive white.

Things don't just spontaneously happen, and systems don't invent themselves. The process described above is a systematized one that follows rules and is reliant on external information being transmitted from a macro scale to a micro one. Somehow. Since the adaptation process is a process, the transferal of information from macro to micro must also be part of that process. Nobody knows how that part of the process works, since there is no measurable or evidentiary aspect to it.

I've long been a follower of cosmology, which in my mind is defined as an attempt to incorporate life sciences into an otherwise purely clinical study of the physical universe (i.e. astronomy). The fact that there is life on his world proves that said life has the ability to manifest itself, whatever the process is that brings it about and makes it w@&k.

Since life on Earth apparently strives to manifest itself wherever and whenever it possibly can, in some of the unlikeliest places such as the highest reaches of the stratosphere and around deep underwater volcanic vents, and since there is nothing particularly unique about the Earth from an astronomical point of view, then I believe it would follow that life would strive to manifest itself wherever and whenever it can in the rest of the universe. If there is the slightest chance at all that life can bring itself about somewhere, it will do so. One could argue that life is not some flukey by-product of stellar evolution but is in fact the final goal of the entire process. Stars form to make the atoms to make the molecules to make the living things and the worlds for those living things to live on.

So I believe that the question of "Is there life out there" is a foregone one. I think the universe is in all probability teeming with it. It's all just too far away for us to be able to detect.

Well said, fragger - to think that this planet among all the universe is the only location of life is the ultimate form of narcissism (or more likely, ignorance).

Unfortunately, that kind of ignorance will be the death of us eventually. Young parents are refusing their children immunized against whooping cough, polio, and others.  It will not be until one of their children dies that they will "learn" their lesson.  These are also the same people that think we should treat our criminals better than they treated their victims.

Combine that kind of stupid with the right to vote and you have set the scene where sharp politicians can lie through their teeth to the stupid population (who believe them), become elected officials or "representatives", and then further their personal agendas.

All I can say is that I fear the arrival of an extraterrestrial superior intelligence to this planet - they might think it better to wipe the slate clean of stupid.

I'd appreciate that.

I'd say: He who doesn't wake up anymore was stupid enough to die. He who still walks will shape a different world's future.

Principles of microevolution dictate that changes in DNA (mutations) are indeed random. From there, it is the brutal, uncaring process of natural selection that decides whether or not said mutation will survive better than it's peers to ultimately contribute more individuals to the next generation of the effected organism.  From there, Darwinism maintains that this process, repeated millions of times over billions of years caused fish to sprout legs, crawl up on land, and eventually swing through the trees, build spears, discover electricity and land on the moon. The problem for Darwinian evolution is and always has been that this secondary process has never been directly observed (presumably because we don't live long enough to see it happening) nor has there been any irrefutable evidence found that it has happened. This is a sticking point that hardcore Darwinists are forced to awkwardly gloss over. Microevolution is an irrefutable scientific fact, Macroevolution/Darwinian evolution is full of holes and offers a dissatisfyingly incomplete explanation of the natural world. But good luck getting anyone with a degree in the biological sciences to be honest about that...

Quote from: fragger on April 23, 2016, 07:27:22 PM
So I believe that the question of "Is there life out there" is a foregone one. I think the universe is in all probability teeming with it. It's all just too far away for us to be able to detect.

I think you hit at least something hamer-like on the nail of that life-thingy. I think the same. After doing a whole lot of research in phylosofical approaches of life and the human soul I sort of founded my own principle thoughts concerning that matter. I'd like life to see as either a power, that manifests itself in every possible position in space and time, or as an additional dimension, somehow entwined with space and time.

Speaking of dimensions, energy, mass (the provable and so-far-logical stuff in the universe) and life; there's got to be something even higher that bonds all of these together. I refuse to say something holy. But it definitely could be approached like that.

Quote from: PZ on April 24, 2016, 09:34:58 AM
Well said, fragger - to think that this planet among all the universe is the only location of life is the ultimate form of narcissism (or more likely, ignorance).

Unfortunately, that kind of ignorance will be the death of us eventually. Young parents are refusing their children immunized against whooping cough, polio, and others.  It will not be until one of their children dies that they will "learn" their lesson.  These are also the same people that think we should treat our criminals better than they treated their victims.

Combine that kind of stupid with the right to vote and you have set the scene where sharp politicians can lie through their teeth to the stupid population (who believe them), become elected officials or "representatives", and then further their personal agendas.

All I can say is that I fear the arrival of an extraterrestrial superior intelligence to this planet - they might think it better to wipe the slate clean of stupid.

Let's not forget the humor in that fact about politics; they can call themselves "The Rulers Of The Stupid". Or even better; they can say "We Represent The Stupid".  :-() :-()

Not to list lazily back on topic, but here's some new brief footage on the creative process behind a procedural universe, and some of the challenges and surprises inherent in the process- basically a lot of what had been discussed above:

http://youtu.be/-JT0LMobgWk (http://youtu.be/-JT0LMobgWk)

24 hour time-lapse from the surface of a planet. This really highlights the fact that these are working virtual solar systems with actual rotating, orbiting planets and real day/night cycles rather than a "skybox" like most games have:

http://youtu.be/e18jOzi3fGw (http://youtu.be/e18jOzi3fGw)

This just keeps looking more interesting. The thing is, I can see this being an enormous time suck, it's bad enough, in a "limited" game like one of the Far Cry series, or Fallout or Skyrim, you might think there's a lot to see. But if they pull this off to where it plays the way it seems like it will, then I can see tons of free time disappearing down the black hole that is No Man's Sky. Even Minecraft, which is reasonably unlimited, and with mods can have an unlimited number of worlds to explore, doesn't seem to hold a candle to what they are trying to do with this game.

Free time? What's that? Just need to see the next planet, then explore it's entire surface? Oh boy....

Same thing is what I was thinking D_B... gaming sometimes just gets too damn good :-X :-D

Indeed a game changer, literally.  I find the current game worlds very large

The term "open world" is somewhat inadequate to describe this title ??? It's a whole galaxy of open worlds.

Yes indeed...

Have we already a clue what time means in this world.. err, universe? Is there fast travel, let's call it warp, and does it take time? Like; "Come back tomorrow around noon, then we will orbit around the planet of your choice, commander" :-D

Good thought, fragger - look how far we've come - from a "huge" open world of 50 square kilometers in FC2 to an almost limitless open universe in this new game.

I bounced around on some of the other YouTube videos for this game and this is indeed an interesting game.  With the combat involved I can see that there will be a real need for save points over being kicked back to the very beginning every time you die.  While I'm not so crazy about resource building and character development activities it's the various planetary life forms to be found that has its hook in me.


The thought of randomly generated ecosystems leads to a lot of possible speculation on the algorithms that would be used.  I guess first an environment would need to be established and then plants and animals that would live there.  One video said there were pure water worlds or maybe liquid covered might be a better choice of words as not all lifeforms mandatorily need be based on water or carbon for that matter.  Then there will be desert worlds too and ancient lifeless places with no life as the atmosphere has leached away into space  .


Do you create a set of various niche apex predators and project down the food chain for the lifeforms required to feed them or start from the other direction establishing a lush set of plants and microbes and from there generate each layer of the food chain that would feed on the previously set nutritional pockets of opportunity?

There's lots of fuel there for fanciful flights of imagination.  ^-^


How about a world where there is only one life form?  Something like a slime mold creature that goes through many dozens of various metamorphosing stages of life.  They could be born from spores released when an apex mature-stage member of its species reaches end of life.  With nutrition derived from photosynthesis and available environmental resources they start out floating in thick layers like algae on the surface of the bodies of 'let's say liquid' of their planet.  Even a puddle may suffice in some climates.

Once each spore has developed enough and stored the required nutrition to undergo metamorphosis it sinks to the bottom.  Depending on the depth of the body of 'liquid' or if deposited on a shoreline determines its next stage of development.  Wherever they end up there's a more mature of the species waiting to eat them.

Deep 'liquid" creatures may form something like coral reefs and develop into similes of the fauna that inhabit them.  Shoreline maturing creatures may heave themselves as far as possible onto land and go through several iterations of mimicking plant life until they become able to become motile and able to feed on non-moving creatures.

Possibly being eaten in every occasion isn't an end of life event.  In some situations where a portion of their stored nutrition is funneled off by a more mature creature simply forces them to regress to an earlier and possibly different line of maturation possibilities.  Which would also dictate stages of development in maturing creatures that they would only successfully transform into something that would be able to feed on the available in their immediate biosphere.

Some apex predators limited by their nutritional surroundings would be parasitic, then again maybe small and fast or possibly even very slow and very patient with lightening like reflexes to grab passing tidbits.  Then again in other richer climes there could be true monsters in size and voraciousness but in the end an apex creature sheds its spores on death where they and any nutritional value of their decaying bodies is carried by rain back into the rivers, lakes, and eventually the oceans for the following vigorous generations of the continuing cycle.

Sounds very cool Mandru :) :-X

I think the line along which the devs allow worlds to difer from one another is quite thin though. From what I've seen so far (and I haven't really looked deep into the material, or all the stuff they say about it) all worlds look more or less alike. What difers is the colours and forms of creatures. I'm pretty sure though, that all life that we will be able to meet is multi-tentacled, oxigen-breathing, other-life-forms-eating weirdoes in a funny variety of colours and appearances.

Thinking of an exploration game that is enough though to have a blast  ;)

Still... we might expect too much of this :-D

I agree with Binn. It's very easy to let imagination run wild in the face of something so potentially vast, to the point you end up disappointed. Though I will say that the half dozen or so worlds we've seen so far are all supposedly near the rim of the galaxy. This is an important piece of information, as the devs have said that things will become more...I believe the word was "unsettling" ...as we journey toward the center.
That being said, an ecosystem like mandru described would be pretty cool  :-X

Indeed :)

This game is definitely on my wishlist ;)

Mine too :-X

Thought this was a funny interview with creator Sean Murray.

https://youtu.be/VF2IGlk-Bdw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqmJ8k9uBB0 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqmJ8k9uBB0)

I'm liking this game more with each new snippet I watch.  :-X

It looks incredible. When Sean Murray mentioned naming a creature and that anyone coming along later would see that name, I'm assuming he was talking about MP. It's occurred to me that if a bunch of us get into this as single players (if there is a SP mode), none of us are going to have anything like the same experiences. In something like FC2 we could talk about the different ways we'd done, say, the barge mission or the dental clinic. But with this game, none of us are going to be even seeing the same planets. Might make for some interesting posts :)

RE that clip, when Murray handed the controller to the interviewer, I just knew that the first thing the guy would do was kill something. He seemed like that kind of dick ::)

Yeah, just the kind of gamer that keeps me from MP - a fool whose only purpose in playing is utter chaos without restraint of any kind.

Good thoughts about some of us playing in this universe - at times it seems like we would never get to see another player due to the sheer size of the universe, but at other times (if they expect you to see named animals), the probability seems high.

It would be cool if you could tag other players, and then either see what they are doing, or actually go to the same planet to see what they saw. The way I understand it, the single player game will still upload/download information about what planets you've been to, what you've named, etc, into a central database so that everyone else will see the same stuff if they happen to go to the same place. It might be possible to chart your course, then tell your friends, hey, go 130° this direction for 3 hours, then land on the third planet, northern hemisphere, big island with the volcano. That would be cool.

Wow, indeed D_B :) :-X

This game really stimulating imagination. I deffinitely going to get a copy as soon as possible ;)

If players get really good at giving directions, then it should theoretically be possible to do a trail of breadcrumbs and meet up, although it will be very difficult. The difference in 30 degrees and 30.2 degrees traveled over a LONG distance could have you off by a long way, for example. A coordinate system of some kind would make it easier but apparently there isn't one and that's intentional on the part of the devs - they want us to wander the stars quite literally

in Space Engineers, you can easily create a GPS position with X, Y and Z coordinates and leave it as a waypoint for your own use but obviously you can tell those coordinates to someone else. I actually met up in space with TerrZor and it was fun watching his space ship homing in on my position.

OK, I've gone and done it, pre-ordered No Man's Sky. That's the first thing I've ever pre-ordered. Hope it's good after all this hype.

 :o

Nice!

Will follow in your footsteps as soon as I have the dough for it :-D

I'll wait for a special offer. Saves me some dough :-()

I'm right there with you D_B, pre-order is locked and loaded  :-X
Just about a month to go  8)

Yep, which means Fallout will have some serious competition. The Far Harbor DLC comes out this week, plus I'm only about a third of the way through the main story, so......

meaning you're going to end up with say, 1,200 hours of gameplay before tossing it into the rubbish bin? :-D

Close to it, I think I've got 400-500 hours in right now, I'd have to check.

400. I checked. :-D

ohhhh, spying on me eh? I see how it is. Not sure even how you'd do that?

So now you see how it is, don't you.. :-() Well, just click on your own avatar to see your own profile. There and in your library steam shows the total amount of time for every game.

I'm going to break my standing rule about not pre-ordering games for this title and do it tomorrow. I'm just busting to check this thing out 8)

If it ends up stinking, so be it.

Ah, that's why, I never click on anything on the Steam window except to select a game and hit play. All those other tabs? Never look at them, except for the store. Looks like I played Space Engineers for 42 hours, didn't think I played it that long.

Fragger, the one thing I worry a bit about No Man's Sky is that it will be same old, same old after a while. Even with procedural generation, it could still be "Great, another barren desert planet with no resources" after a while. Let's hope not.

D_B, I can't just leave you with those 99 kudos of yours so I gave you #100 not only because it's cool but for your recent astonishing activity regarding the sheer amount of posts you generated. Did someone change your diet? As in, energy bars mixed with steroids? :-() During the last seven years, I don't think that I've seen you post that much in such a short amount of time  :-()

+1 :-X Don't stop now just because you're suddenly aware all that :-()

+1 from me as well  :-X

I think an alien has taken over D_B's mind, and is now trying to infiltrate our organization

 :laugh:

Let's make it 102 :-D Maybe if we give him enough kudos, he'll hold off on the infiltration.

D-B I've had the same thoughts, but still I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. Hopefully there'll be enough in the way of resource gathering, survival, and the alluded-to figuring out of the "lore" to be engrossing, at least for a reasonable amount of time.

Or it might turn out to be a steaming pile of cosmic caca... I guess we'll find out :)

D_B's the only one here who talks sense  :angry-new:  8-X

+1 from me also Sir D_B   :-D

Can't stay behind now, can I? Here's another slap on the back, keep it coming mate +1 :-X ^-^

Well I can't be left out of this, can I? Make it 105 :-X
In regards to repetitiveness, yes every world will be unique but not every world will be necessarily interesting. However, even barren worlds will have resources, and the harshest and most dangerous places will tend to have the most. Additionally, the economy is set up in a way that if you transport resources that are common in one solar system to another place where it's more rare, you'll be able to sell it for a better price. There will likely, as a matter of necessity, be trade routes that you'll establish for each area that you spend time in

Quote from: mmosu on May 18, 2016, 07:22:17 AM
In regards to repetitiveness, yes every world will be unique but not every world will be necessarily interesting. However, even barren worlds will have resources, and the harshest and most dangerous places will tend to have the most. Additionally, the economy is set up in a way that if you transport resources that are common in one solar system to another place where it's more rare, you'll be able to sell it for a better price. There will likely, as a matter of necessity, be trade routes that you'll establish for each area that you spend time in

???      ::)   :knockout   erm, english please.....

OK nexor, allow me to translate. :-D

mmosu is referring to D_B's comment,

Quote from: Dweller_Benthos on May 17, 2016, 08:10:50 AMI worry a bit about No Man's Sky [...] that it will be same old, same old after a while [...] it could still be "Great, another barren desert planet with no resources"

when he said,

Quote from: mmosu on May 18, 2016, 07:22:17 AMIn regards to repetitiveness, yes every world will be unique but not every world will be necessarily interesting. However, even barren worlds will have resources,

and means that he expects to find many planets but few that are interesting. He expects that even boring-looking planets will at least have resources.

Quote from: mmosu on May 18, 2016, 07:22:17 AMand the harshest and most dangerous places will tend to have the most [resources]

meaning no risk, no fun.

Then he said,

Quote from: mmosu on May 18, 2016, 07:22:17 AMAdditionally, the economy is set up in a way that if you transport resources that are common in one solar system to another place where it's more rare, you'll be able to sell it for a better price.

which means you won't make a profit if you try to sell the eggs to the same chicken farmer you bought them from. Sell them where there are no chicken farmers.

Quote from: mmosu on May 18, 2016, 07:22:17 AMThere will likely, as a matter of necessity, be trade routes that you'll establish for each area that you spend time in

That means you will need to remember how to get back to the chicken farmer for more eggs and remember where you got the most money for eggs.

Got it now? :)

haha, thanks guys! I'm one of those types of people (maybe I'm the only one of that type of person) that rarely looks at "extraneous" things. I read the words, hit the reply if the mood strikes. I had to hunt around to see this kudo thing, I wasn't aware of it too much. In general, on the left side there, I look at the name of the person posting and not much beyond that. I rarely even look at mine, hence why it still says I'm playing Revenge of the C-Team in Minecraft. Haven't run it in weeks. I suppose I should change that.

As for the post count, I usually check in once a day during mid-morning snack time at w@&k, I usually have a banana and some orange juice to tide me over until lunch. While I'm eating, I read the posts and respond to the ones that seem like they would be further enriched by some pithy comment from yours truly. The last few days though, I was here more often than usual for some reason. Might be w@&k was slow and I was bored.

And I'm definitely not an alien. Definitely. And if you say, "Well, that's exactly what an alien masquerading as a human would say", let me say that just by mentioning that, means I'm definitely not an alien. Definitely.

... and thanks for the translation, Art. lol

no problem :-()

See, no sooner have I said D_B's the only one here talking sense then Art goes and proves me right and starts blabbering   :D    :-D

I think that indeed you just proved yourself right :-D

I love this site    :laugh:

I may need some confirmation on this:

I went into my local gaming shop today with the intention of pre-ordering NMS, only to be told that the retail version of the game will be PlayStation-only, and that if I want a PC version I will have to go through Steam to get it. If I have to go through Steam I will, but I'd rather have a disk.

Does anyone know if that is the case, or did the shop person get it wrong?

If it's Playstation-exclusive, with a downloadable PC version to follow later, that screams PORT.

I picked up this part of an article on Wikipedia fragger

Hello Games prepared a six-planet demonstration that would be used for the E3 event and subsequently used to showcase the game for the media while the full version – nearly always in a constant state of flux due to the procedural generation approach – was being developed.[30] The game was announced at E3 2014 with plans for a timed exclusive release on the PlayStation 4,[41][42] and would have later been brought to Microsoft Windows.[43] However, speaking to the media at the E3 2015, Murray stated that they now plan to release the title simultaneously for both platforms, though did not specify a release date.[44] Murray stated that unlike more traditional games, where completion of the fixed number of levels and other assets can be treated as an assembly line and schedules projected from that, the interconnectivity of all the various systems within No Man's Sky requires them all to be working together to make the game successful, and would only feel comfortable on assigning a release date once that is completed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Man%27s_Sky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Man%27s_Sky)
On another site I found it looks like it will not be available on disk for pc, looks like we'll have to wait and see
http://www.no-mans-sky.com/about/ (http://www.no-mans-sky.com/about/)

Okay, thanks for the info nex :-X

Welcome   :-X :)

That definitely sounds like "I'm going to wait and see how the pioneers like the game..." :-\\

yep.. plus waiting for a special offer in case the pioneers say it's good

 8-X

It's ok Art, I'll be waiting for you at the center  8-X  ;D

 :-X :-()

Quote from: fragger on May 18, 2016, 11:38:46 PM
I may need some confirmation on this:

I went into my local gaming shop today with the intention of pre-ordering NMS, only to be told that the retail version of the game will be PlayStation-only, and that if I want a PC version I will have to go through Steam to get it. If I have to go through Steam I will, but I'd rather have a disk.

I also prefer having the disk, but looking at the price of new games lately, then getting it via Steam is starting to make sense   :-\\

steam special offers are really worth looking for. Somewhat recent games for like $5, your local dealer can't beat that. Or 20 to 50 and sometimes 80 percent off for recent games.. something you really have to take on board as the money you can save taking an offer like that can be spent on the next game..  :)

I must admit, I don't feel as badly towards Steam as I used to. But that was more due to my lousy former ISP.

Even so, they still owe me a game for wiping Deus Ex: Human Revolution off my PC \:/ I was done with the game anyway, but that really isn't the point...

A principal stronger in me than my dislike of Steam is avoiding using a credit card over the internet.

So a NMS purchase through Steam is out of the picture unless there's an option to arrange payment through PayPal.

Just checked on Steam, ZAR 599.00 Bloody hell!!!!!!  :o

Quote from: mandru on May 23, 2016, 06:21:47 AMavoiding using a credit card over the internet

That has been my concern. You'll be surprised to learn that valve/steam came up with an even a simpler method than paypal.

Check your local dealers (yes, local, physical, as in real shops) for steam cards. Hell, I can even buy them at my local supermarket. It's a prepaid card system. You buy cards for say 10, 20, 50 or 100 dollars just the same you would for a mobile phone. The person at the checkout will have to activate that card (for that matter there is a bar code on the back of it) when you buy it and at home you scrape off some sort of rubber layer that covers your steam redeem code. Go to your steam account, there is a "steam wallet" that you can load up with that redeem code. After that, you'll see the amount of money on your screen all the time when looking at your steam account.

So you get a 1:1 payment without anyone on the net using ANY personal data of yours.  :-D That's how I buy my games on steam.

I think my Steam account is just linked to my Paypal, I don't know, I click the buy button and the game is mine.... who knows where the money comes from? hehe

hehe  :-D Yeah, that is also possible. They're good at getting our money, aren't they :)

I agree about the spectacular deals.  Quite some time ago I saw Assassin's Creed Revelations on sale for $4.99.  It is still $18.99 at most places I checked.  I just happened to play a couple of hours in AC Brotherhood yesterday and recalled why I liked the Ezio games so much.

The Steam sales are dynamite, and it is worth checking on a regular basis.

Totally agree on the subject of Steam sales. And indeed, there are more ways to pay Steam for purchases. I use something that's called iDeal, a European (I think) way of according internet payments directly from your local bank using the Bank's security measures, which are good. I don't trust Paypal since someone once managed to create a paypal account on my wifes name linked to her bank account or credit card without her knowing. We found out and luckily the bank secured the expenses, but Paypal? No thank you.

We only have a direct Credit Card payment facility from here, and I don't think I'm gonna pay 600 bucks for a game  :o

Quote from: Dweller_Benthos on May 23, 2016, 08:09:15 AM
I think my Steam account is just linked to my Paypal, I don't know, I click the buy button and the game is mine.... who knows where the money comes from? hehe

Every time D_B buys a game some kid in China is like "What the ¥£€$?!!!"

Yeah, that would be nice, but no, it's my Paypal account.

 :laugh:

 :laugh:

Quote from: nexor on May 23, 2016, 02:14:54 PM
We only have a direct Credit Card payment facility from here, and I don't think I'm gonna pay 600 bucks for a game  :o

Well, I keep having to use the converter for your ZAR amounts but we pay almost the double here, on Steam. So I don't think you're charged that extraordinary ;)

Steam price is $59.99 USD, which currently converts to about $83.43 AUD. That's about normal for a new major release game here, typically they go from between $80 to $100 AUD in the shops.

My preference for a physical product is mainly due to the fact that a game download uses up a substantial chunk of my data allowance, so I end up sort of paying for it there as well. But I don't think I'll have a choice this time around - I'll have to go through Steam if I want to play NMS.

I always forget that some products cost drastically different amounts in other parts of the world. Out of curiosity, what's a gallon of gasoline going for in all of your corners these days?

In Australia petrol is sold by the litre (1 U.S. liquid gallon = approx 3.785 litres). it varies widely and fluctuates a lot. Generally, on average, we pay around $1.40 AUD per litre, which converts to about $5.30 AUD (or $3.82 USD) per U.S. gallon, according to present currency conversion rates.

There is, ostensibly, a weekly "price cycle", and even then the prices vary widely. We'll be paying $1.25 per litre one week, $1.50 the next, then $1.35 the week after that, and so on. And it's not uniform - I can go to a Shell station just up the road from home and see regular unleaded being sold for $1.32, then I'll go a few more kays up the road and see the same fuel being sold for $1.39 - at another Shell! It's nuts. There is a "regulatory" board, the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) which keeps a check on these arbitrary fluctuations, but it's a toothless tiger. They can monitor prices but they can't do anything to actually regulate them. In other words: they cry foul about gouging and profiteering while the petrol companies just ignore them and do whatever they damn well please ::)

doing all the conversions, about 5.5 USD

Bargain here - $2.20/gallon.  They raised the price because of summer travel.  Was $1.92/gallon 6 weeks ago

In Holland it's about the same price as in Germany, few cents more. We pay a lot of taxes here :angry-new:

Excellent answers, you guys even did the math for me  :-X
Of course what I see locally is similar to PZ. I suspect we'll see a bit of a spike in the next day or so as we're entering Memorial Day weekend, and many Americans will be traveling as a result. However, it still never ceases to amaze me how many factors affect the price of oil. Hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico? Gas prices go up. Next summer, very similar storms in practically the same place - nothin'  :knockout
I never found any confirmation of this, but I heard that the dip in fuel prices America saw last summer was in part due to the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia releasing a large quantity of oil into the market to drive the price down. Supposedly he did this to screw over a rival whose personal economy was more dependent on oil prices than his own, not to benefit vacationers in the United States  :laugh:

some people are so rich that they can dump prices. Pun intended. :-D

Many ppl mentioned the summer and holiday as an effect to raise prices "because all the middle men go out and drive large distances spending their extra holiday savings". I personally don't believe that that's true. 50% of oil and gass consumption is gone during summertime because all factories AND forensic traffic is belly up. So there's no high demand that will raise price. It's just what ppl make out of it trying to understand the most tricky market there is.

I think you're close to the truth mmosu, stating that it's probably a conflict between oil producing bandits in the middle east. Or maybe the oil producing bandit calling itself the USA has a piece of the pie :-D

I just can't imagine being so rich and powerful that I can affect the world economy on a whim or as an unintended side effect of taking jabs at someone else.

neither can I.

Erm, I didn't mean I couldn't imagine you being that rich (although indeed, I can't imagine that, either) but me being that rich. I mean not as rich as you (which doesn't mean that I can't imagine you being rich) but being as rich as those guys you can't imagine being as rich. Not them as you but you as them.

Damn, this is getting complicated now. :-()

Too early in the morning for me :-()

Imagine what will happen when fossil fuels start to run out in about thirty years or so. Then will get interesting then :-\\

In SA petrol is also sold by the litre, at this moment we pay ZAR12.44 p/l for 93 octane which is about $3.00 USD p/g
and ZAR12.74 for 95 octane which is about $3.09 USD p/g
Diesel is ZAR10.58 which is about $2.56 USD p/g
The petroleum price is adjusted once a month

Quote from: fragger on May 26, 2016, 03:36:00 PM
Too early in the morning for me :-()

Imagine what will happen when fossil fuels start to run out in about thirty years or so. Then will get interesting then :-\\

Of course I'm a pessimist when it comes to human nature, but I suspect that the alternative fuel sources will "magically" appear once fossil fuels disappear.  The money hungry assholes of today will not give up their profits on fossil fuels as long as they are available.

I think you're right, PZ :)

Oh and I like it when you talk dirty  :laugh:

Quote from: fragger on May 26, 2016, 03:36:00 PM
Too early in the morning for me :-()

Imagine what will happen when fossil fuels start to run out in about thirty years or so. Then will get interesting then :-\\

Mad Max :-() :-() :-D ^-^

Quote from: nexor on May 26, 2016, 10:52:39 PM
In SA petrol is also sold by the litre, at this moment we pay ZAR12.44 p/l for 93 octane which is about $3.00 USD p/g
and ZAR12.74 for 95 octane which is about $3.09 USD p/g
Diesel is ZAR10.58 which is about $2.56 USD p/g
The petroleum price is adjusted once a month

What sort of transfer rate are you using Nex? If I insert that into google transfer calculator I come to totally different amounts. I think I'd like to live in SA when it comes to diesel power :-D

Oh and btw; in Holland the prices change every day. Once a month is quite an amount of control by the state, I suppose?

The way I worked it is, 1 us gallon is 3.78541 Litre at ZAR 12.44 per Litre that makes it
ZAR 47.09 for 1 us gallon, ZAR 1.00 is $0.064, which means ZAR 47.09 is $3.00

complicated

Quote from: Art Blade on May 26, 2016, 01:24:59 PM
neither can I.

Erm, I didn't mean I couldn't imagine you being that rich (although indeed, I can't imagine that, either) but me being that rich. I mean not as rich as you (which doesn't mean that I can't imagine you being rich) but being as rich as those guys you can't imagine being as rich. Not them as you but you as them.

Damn, this is getting complicated now. :-()

That was awesome  :-X :laugh:
I'm hopeful that the forces of capitalism will force alternative fuel cars to the forefront long before the oil supply runs low. You want to gut terrorism? Fund technology that breaks the Middle East economic grip on the industrialized world - when the money runs out, well, guess they'll have to go back to being goat farmers. Sorry if that's not politically correct, but it's the way I see it.

Oh, also some bad on-topic news:  The rumors that started swirling earlier this week have been confirmed - No Man's Sky has been delayed until August.

Quote from: mmosu on May 29, 2016, 08:40:02 AMThat was awesome  :-X :laugh:

:laugh: I'm happy that you enjoyed it, it was tailored specifically for you  ^-^

No surprise on the delay. In fact, the only surprise would be a game that actually released on time  8-X

Quote from: mmosu on May 29, 2016, 08:40:02 AM
Oh, also some bad on-topic news:  The rumors that started swirling earlier this week have been confirmed - No Man's Sky has been delayed until August.

I'm actually not too sad about that, as I still have a ton of stuff to do in fallout 4 before I get distracted by NMS.

better late and playing a finished game than early and rendered a paying beta tester.

That's quite true.  Release on time would only give me an excuse to quit playing even earlier than I already do.  8-X

Quote from: Art Blade on May 31, 2016, 10:02:31 AM
better late and playing a finished game than early and rendered a paying beta tester.

I completely agree. Destiny had issues like this at release. It was clear during vanilla that the game had been pushed to release too fast and there were definitely issues. The "paid beta" complaints were heavily thrown around. Luckily after four expansions the game has changed quite a bit for the better, and it's not only headed in the right direction now, but there's still a loyal hardcore community playing it a year and a half in.
My problem now is that NMS was going to fit nicely in during the summer lull in Destiny before the Rise of Iron expansion hits in September. Now the timing is all wrong (for me) and I'm not sure how I'm going to handle it. Guess my Saturday night raid group is just going to have to be understanding when I have to blow them off to explore the next planet  :-D

Quote from: mmosu on May 31, 2016, 05:31:53 PMis just going to have to be understanding

lovely.  :-X :laugh:

They'll understand, mmosu. Or they'll get into NMS themselves and come looking for you :-()

I'd like to see them try to find you...

One of them already is, and we've been talking about it quite a bit over the last couple months.  :-X

The interesting thing is that the two games are very different - NMS seems like it's going to be a very zen solo experience, while Destiny is highly social and collaborative by nature

I like zen solo - reminds me of FC2  ^-^

 :-D :-X

Isn't "zen solo" Han's little brother?

hehe, and "zen ith" was their big brother  :-()

 :laugh:

Wasn't Zen Solo killed by his son, Kylo Zen?

 :laugh:

Ah, Kylo Zen! Yes, he killed his dad.

I think it was a zenseless act. One Zen less, actually. Well, Darth Zen got killed by his son, Zen Skywalker. As if a death zentence was threatening all Zen fathers.

 :laugh:

This was a long but fun discussion about where NMS has the potential to go down the road:

https://youtu.be/6oeubLgne7E

In the news drought following the delay announcement, there hasn't been much new footage to show of the game. However, here is a clip of a concert from 65 Days of Static at E3. They are the group that created the procedurally generated soundtrack to the game:

https://youtu.be/OvI8l4bBHq4

The clip is fairly poor quality, but we do get some glimpses of game footage on the screen behind them. As well as a shot of a previously unseen "dust planet". Hopefully some higher quality footage of this event will emerge  :-X

This game really has my interest piqued. I can't wait to see it released, thousands of people playing, and reading about the adventures.  :-X

Me too PZ, me too  :-X

Some more grainy smartphone footage is starting to emerge of the concert, here is some that actually shows stuff:

https://youtu.be/rY8LZ4wHlpg

A few more very short clips:

https://youtu.be/6KtkoZa_4eg

All of the new footage is in the first 2 minutes, the rest is talk of what's coming up on this guy's YouTube channel while already-seen NMS footage plays in the background.

I appreciate how they've managed to hype this release without actually showing much. There should still be lots left to surprise us once we've actually got our hands on it.

Maybe they're not showing much because there's some serious flaw with the game that they're having trouble getting around, and hence the release delay :-\\ I hope that's not the case - or if it is, I hope they can figure it out without doing a Duke Nukem on us.

patience is a virtue, I hear :-()

I'm patient. I just hate waiting for things to happen :-()

hehehe :-D

I hope it's nothing serious too, but I did hear about a legal issue that could have at least had a hand in the delay. There's a company in Great Britain called Sky Broadcasting Group that apparently believes it owns the word "Sky" itself and likes to sue anyone and everyone that gets within a country mile of the word.

Well guess what happened  >:((
Supposedly the thing just recently settled and the title remains unchanged, but the timing of it all is interesting to say the least. I guess these guys took on Microsoft a couple years back over Skydrive, which is why that service is titled differently in some countries, and that's not even the most ridiculous legal battle these jerks have started. Sounds like Sony and Hello Games may have fared a little better then some, but it could explain the delay. It would have been hard to re-title after the first batch already shipped  :D

That's outrageous. So now they can claim to "own" common words? I can understand made-up brand names and such, but words in everyday usage? Where does that end?

That idiocy should be stamped out immediately.

 :-X

Quote from: fragger on June 25, 2016, 07:20:20 PM

That idiocy should be stamped out immediately.

Couldn't agree more. A classic case of a company that is operating from a scarcity mindset, ie "the only way to win is to make sure everyone else loses". Pathetic.

 :-X

It's official! No Man's Sky has been certified gold (release-ready) by Hello Games, which means the August release date stands and we are just about exactly ONE MONTH away from release!!! :-X :-X

See below for a really cool pick of a very tiny but very happy and relieved design team:

https://youtu.be/gnKzBuA1dHA

 :-X :)

Cool 8)

My ISP recently upped my monthly data allocation to 50GB per month (up from 10, which was quite generous). So I'll have plenty on hand when it comes time to download NMS from Steam.

Apparently the program download size may only be about 5-10GB. This is because of the procedurally-generated nature of the game, since there won't be the usual humongous amount of artwork and graphic content which is responsible for the large sizes of most modern downloaded games. If you think of a game like GTA V where there are tons of image-based textures, like signs, billboards, logos, storefronts, clothing prints, and then all the architectural textures like bricks, patterned cement, woodgrains, "waffle-plate" metal, etc etc etc etc etc - all that image-based graphical data adds up to a lot of GBs. Most of NMS's graphical content is not so much images as it is algorithms. There are still textures of course, but certain texture types themselves can be procedurally generated (as long as they don't contain anything pixel- or shape-specific, like text or pictures). 3D modelling programs w@&k like this, you can have image-based and/or procedurally generated textures on objects. Some textures can even be of both types combined, such as a reflective metal surface with text on it, so that the text will be reflective as well as the surface it's "painted" on. But as soon as a texture has image data in it somewhere, the size shoots up. The reason is not only due to the image itself, but also because the program needs to be told how to apply the image to the object, which requires an "object-map", also known as a UV map (think of a cereal box unglued and flattened - the program need to know how to stick which image onto which face of the box and which way each image needs to be orientated). So the mapping data further adds to the storage size of the texture. Procedurally-generated textures don't need object mapping, just the numerical data of the object and scaling/orientation info. It's all just math.

Demo

[smg id=8885 align=center width=600]

I saved each cube as a separate file. The cube with the image-based texture was 278Kb in size, the one with the procedural texture was 46Kb. This shows how economical procedurally-generated textures are. But if you want something like a tee-shirt with a logo on it, you need an image-based texture. From what I've seen, there isn't a lot like that in NMS.

Sorry for the digression. I don't need much excuse to talk about and play with 3D-modelling stuff :-()

Anyway, I'm looking forward to checking out NMS :-X

Cool  :-X
Had never thought about at least half of what you discussed there, but it makes complete sense. I have a physical copy pre-ordered, so I imagine any downloading I'll have to do on day one will be even more minimal.

Thought this was a funny discussion of what the extremely rare event of encountering another player could go like:

https://youtu.be/-EkUf_-Ve7U

I think I'd be more like, "it's bloody moving?!" and kill it. Not so much as getting to know what it was -- as long as it moves, it poses a threat. If it's a player, then it poses a serious threat. You know my motto, "whatever it was, it's dead now." >:D

Dunno what happens if you die in NMS. I assume you just have to start all over again.

Personally, I like the idea of the game world - er, galaxy - being so big that I may never encounter any other players. I'd hate to have been playing for a while only to have some prepubescent little douche shoot me in the back and make me start all over again. Conversely, it would be fun to get together with a friend and explore and trade and so on together, but it appears that the game is not structured to support such play.

I guess if I'd invested a lot of time and effort in the game and then encountered another player I'd have to shoot first, just in case. I figure that the odds of the other player being a mug are probably high enough to warrant me being the mug who draws first >:D

Hope I don't end up running into either of you! :laugh:

As far as what happens when you die, I believe you respawn at the place you last communicated with the Atlas. That's the floating diamond shape you see in all of the marketing material - it's somehow central to the plot, although we don't know how just yet. Consequently, any discoveries made between your last upload to the Atlas and your death would be lost. I also believe that if you die in your ship then you lose it and will have to find/purchase a new one. Bad situation yes, but not as bad as starting over.

hehe mmosu, just don't be so ham-fisted as to fly by my ship with your gun ports open by way of greeting  :laugh:

Deaths? In my opinion, having to start over is the worst of all game concepts. Given that weapons are in the game, violent deaths for whatever reason will happen, too. That's why I don't think that death is going to be ruinous. It would also prevent players from risking much and as such it would be against the game's principle of going places where there might be potential killers ("animals") and thus prevent players from exploring happily and freely.

I didn't really mean "start all over" as in start right from scratch but from where you saved last. I didn't word it very well. I wouldn't think they'd make you start over with nothing. At least, I hope not...

There's quite a few videos of NMS on Youtube now, and much else online, but I've decided I'm not going to look at any more until the game releases. I've looked at about half a dozen clips, but that's it. I want to experience it first hand, for better or for worse, without feeling as though the novelty has already worn off.

I'm so curious to see how this game will go. Will it be the greatest thing that's ever happened to gaming, or will it be a snoozefest that falls flat on its face? It could go either way at this point. What does amaze me is how many commentators on Youtube are already passing judgement on the game before they've even experienced it ::)

Personally I'd always hoped that someone would come up with a game like this. Many years ago I thought about how cool it would be if there was a game where you had your own spaceship, a whole galaxy to explore, and the freedom to do so. The question is though, will it actually be fun? Will it put me to sleep or deprive me of sleep? I can't possibly have any clue about that yet, but I still can't wait to find out which it will be :-()

alright fragger, your "start over" only reminded me of DayZ in which you did have to start all over after your avatar's death. And I hated it. :-D

I'm sure I would have hated that too ????

That's the million dollar question right now - will it be fun?
I think it will though and this is why:
1) Hello Games is a very small, extremely talented and extremely passionate studio
2) they have maintained complete creative control over the project from day one, despite being financially backed by Sony itself (a company that, I feel, is pretty good at recognizing genius when they see it - just look at their multi-decade spanning partnership with Hideo Kojima)
3) they have played their cards SO close to their chests so far, which could be cause for concern, but in my view should be cause for even more confidence given point 1&2. They've got something REALLY good and they know it.
4) this game had been hatching in Sean Murray's head, in one form or another, for most of his adult life. It is truly his magnum opus in every sense of the expression, and he seems to be a hopeless perfectionist. I hear the guy actually sold his house to gain the working capital they needed to jump start the project and get Sony's attention - that's the kind of commitment I can really get behind.

Aaaannnnd on that note . . . new trailer!! WooHooooo!!!  :-X ;D

https://youtu.be/gnSwxSjy0kY

(Slaps hands over eyes) I don't want to look... I don't want to look... (opens fingers a crack) Damn, I've got to have a look... Wow!

Good points mmosu. NMS is obviously a labour of love, not just a financial exercise. You get the impression that if money was no object, Murray and co. would still want to go ahead and do it, much like Peter Jackson and his Lord Of The Rings films. When someone is realising a long-held dream and they have the creative control to bring it about the way they've envisaged, and when passion, commitment and TLC are driving forces rather than a lust for the almighty buck, the result is usually something pretty special and not just more rehashed same-ol' same-ol'.

A big reason that Sid Meier's games have always been popular is because he and his friends have always made their games for themselves to play. They realised long ago that if they came up with an idea for a game that they would like to play themselves, then went ahead and made it, lots of other people would like playing it too. That's probably the case with Sean Murray and NMS as well - it's a game he's always wanted to play himself, so it's not so much a commercial product as it is wish-fulfillment.

same goes for all GTA. Their philosophy is, "we create games that we like and if we do, others might as well." Looking at how few advertisements were released for GTAV yet everyone who liked the franchise was already waiting impatiently to get their grubby mitts on a copy.. in only three days after its release, the game sales were over one billion dollars which was a record -- the fastest selling game in history.

However, one can only hope that NMS manages to pull off what Elite:Dangerous didn't: to stay entertaining. Elite sports a whole universe with something like a quintillion stars and planets and such but it got boring due to.. barren worlds and self-repeating mission concepts. Find, buy, fly, sell. And back. Or pirate around other ships within a comparatively small part of the universe. Once you were outside the populated area (aka known inhabited universe) there was nothing but barren worlds. It is possible to travel 800 light years with solar scoops for energy refills for your ship but you were screwed if you cracked your windscreen that far out in space..

We shall see in a few weeks, I guess. I'm really thinking this is a very high tech version of Minecraft, in space.

I think that's probably a pretty good comparison D_B. You know on day one some knucklehead is gonna try to drill all the way through a planet just to see what happens  :laugh:

Oh, and sorry fragger - just as I hit the post button the thought occurred to me "he did just say he didn't want to see any more..."

:-()

Here's a frame-by-frame version of the same trailer for anyone who wants a closer look, but Art might have to translate for most of us  :-D

https://youtu.be/F-EYzzwiLAQ

OK mmosu.. hehe. I don't want to create a transcript of some 23 minutes of potential bullshit  :-() but for you just at least this much: the guy thinks this was the "explore" trailer and that perhaps every week one more trailer will follow, namely "fight," "trade" and "survive."

Quote from: mmosu on July 15, 2016, 12:51:04 PM
Oh, and sorry fragger - just as I hit the post button the thought occurred to me "he did just say he didn't want to see any more..."

:laugh: No worries. Don't let me stop you posting links! It's my hang-up, not anyone else's :-()

@D_B If it turns out to be Minecraft in space, it should be right up your alley ;)

I haven't scrutinized all the videos, heck, I haven't even watched a lot of them, but it appears that a lot of the Minecraft concepts are in this game. Start out with nearly nothing, then gather, build, explore, gather, build, explore. After that it's upgrade everything to explore some more.

they may have "copied" the game principle but at least the graphics seem to be a tad less pixelated.

There are plenty of games out now with almost exactly the same concept, and it was hardly new when Minecraft did it. Some look exactly like Minecraft, with the blocks, only with higher res textures.

"Fight" trailer:

https://youtu.be/FqrOeqGTRJM

Also thought this was cool, several vids of the galactic map strung together. What unique adventures wait for us out there in the void?  8)

https://youtu.be/6GdcpZpp7gc

"Trade" trailer:

https://youtu.be/eRjDumWb3IA

That galactic map video made me think of the title of an Issac Asimov book: "The Stars Like Dust".

I know I said I wasn't going to watch any more clips, but that was a short one so to heck with it :-() I'm glad I did, that was pretty cool.

Release date in Oz will be 10th August (I think it's also the 10th for Europe, and the 9th for the U.S.). Two-and-a-half weeks to go! Price here will be $79 AUD, which is actually pretty reasonable by our standards.

I've read where you can play offline if you don't want to run the risk of getting shot in the back by some online jerk, as highly unlikely as that chance may be.

Quote from: fragger on July 24, 2016, 04:48:05 AMI've read where you can play offline

I don't understand.. sounds as if you can't play offline just anywhere?

Oops - communication breakdown :-()

What I meant was that I read an article somewhere on the net that said you can play offline. I didn't mean there was only a specific area of the game where you could play offline. I should have worded my post differently - I forget sometimes that not everyone here is a native English speaker :-[ Sorry about that mate :)

It's a bit of a quirky expression. If someone says "I read where rental prices are going up" it means they read somewhere that rental prices are going up. Same if they say "I saw where..." or "I heard where..." The "where" just means that they got the information from an unspecified place or person.

It's one of those things that I sometimes say without realising that a non-native English speaker might interpret it differently - or should I say, more sensibly :-()

That's a great example actually, as I had to read your post a couple of times to even figure out what an alternative interpretation of the phrase could be. The longer I live the more I realize, English is frickin weird  :laugh:

thanks :) Also interesting how I hadn't come across that expression before in all those years or, more likely, I never identified it as such. The example given above, "I read where rental prices are going up," could be understood as "I read an article that informed about in which part of the town rental prices were going up (while in other parts they remained as they were)"

English.  We don't always understand out own awkward turn of phrases.

Person A: "You're always so gloomy."

Person B: "I've not smiled since my wife died"

Person A: "Why did you smile when your wife died?"

 :laugh:

How about this one:

Let's eat, Grandma!

Vs

Let's eat Grandma!



Punctuation saves lives...

Here are some screenshots and short videos taken at a Japanese event where people got some hands-on time with the game. The galaxy looks a lot more fleshed out than when last we saw it:

https://youtu.be/JwEmpBlm2J0

funny English examples, guys :)

Quote from: mandru on July 25, 2016, 08:03:46 AMunderstand out own

Sometimes we need to identify a typo and find the correct word to replace it with in order to understand. :-D

Unfortunately, even "better" newspapers are riddled with typos, missing words and that sort of thing.. no problem here on our forum but geez, professional journalists.. where are the editors these days or have their workplaces been rationalised?

 :-[

c'mon, mandru.. typos have always been the salt in the soup here at OWG -- and I don't mean only yours. So.. cheer up, old bean  :)

 :laugh: :-X  ... after all, I am THE "boar" pilot!

I was actually thinking about that boar/boat typo :-D Obviously, R and T are so close together on the keyboard, mixing them up leads to funny or awkward statements. ^-^

I do it all the time!  :laugh:

Rell me abour ir

 ::)   :-D

Huh? Whar ate you ralking abour?     ;D


"Survive" trailer is out:

https://youtu.be/NMA3Xndh8Jo

 :)

The game looks like a true explorer's paradise

So this will be my final news update before release. The reason is that some advance copies are already out in the wild and spoilers are literally pouring out into the internet. Rumor has it there is even a player that has discovered a glitch that allowed him to already reach the center. Hopefully this glitch will be fixed with a day one patch, but as of right now my advice is DO NOT search for ANYTHING, and I mean ANYTHING related to NMS, as there are apparently pictures of the center plastered all over Reddit right now. Hopefully in the end this will be a good thing, as it may give Hello Games time to correct the issue before it ruins the game, but in the meantime I will be taking my own advice and going dark to new content - I haven't seen TOO much, but I have accidentally seen more than I wanted to and it's time to stop. I hate that it has to be like this, but it's for the best.

Wise.

Yeah, me too. Luckily, I'm going on vacation next week, and will be pretty much off the Internet for all intents and purposes, except for brief intervals on certain evenings when I'm at someone's house who has Wifi and I'll check on e-mail and stuff like that. So "going dark" won't be so hard, but up until then, I'll just not look at stuff.

Release date on Steam pushed back a few days to August 13th. I presume that's not just for Australia, but for everybody. I hope. I don't want to be the last one into space :-()

here it's 12th of August. Then again, you're going to be only 16 hours late, not days.

I can't wait to see OWG explorers posting pics of their adventures.  :-X

Me too, and the amazing thing is they will all be of unique places that none of the individuals viewing those pictures will likely ever see for themselves.

Patch notes for day one are out and, as I had hoped, they contain a fix for the exploit that I had previously mentioned. Apparently there was a "warp cell" glitch that allowed players to make warp jumps >256 light years at a time and that was how they reached the center so quickly. A number of other features were in there as well including branches to the way the story progresses, redistribution of "alive" and "dead" planets/moons, tweaking of the atmospheric effects and planet rotation (leading to more dramatic and interesting skyscapes) and also economy changes, to name a few.  They said that some of these features will continue to develop as the game matures, and they also teased some things that will be in the next patch, including improved anti-aliasing, shadow effects, and a new and improved cloud-generation algorithm. 

Patch notes have never gotten me so excited before. Tonight my daughter and I (she's just as excited as I am) will be attending the release event at my local retailer (something I've never done for another game) and then I'm likely to be in my bunker for a little while  :-D
See you starside gentlemen!

enjoy, guys  :-X :)

Enjoy the show, mmosu :-X

There is at least one vid on Youtube showing the centre of the galaxy, which I stubbornly refuse to watch - not just for the spoiler aspect, but on principle. These pathetic attention-seekers that have to show off with a "look what I did" don't care that they might ruin it for others. Those others that are silly enough to watch the video, that is.

T-minus 4 days and counting ^-^

Thanks guys. I won't say much here so as not to spoil anything, other than to complain that my starter planet is a toxic green hell scape with few resources  :D

rent it out to scientists as a greenhouse effect research site and grab government funding. :-D

So mmosu, are you actually into the game or were you just playing a demo or something at the launch?

One thing I've been wondering is whether you can land anywhere on a given planet, or only in a predetermined area of it - like do you hit the "landing" key or something and it automatically takes you down to a preset area of the planet that has been created for that. If you can fly all around a planet and pick any arbitrary place on it to land in, any place at all, that would be impressive indeed.

I'm into the full game as of 12:30 am launch day  :-X. The day-one patch took a whopping 8 min to download (it's all just math after all).
You can also land anywhere once you get your starter ship working. For example, I located an outpost and cave system with better resources within walking distance of the place I started from. Once I got my ship repaired, I flew it over to that location and landed it there, creating a more advantageous base of operations (ship, shelter, and mining all within short walking distance). I will be leaving this planet soon, but I first wanted to get stocked up on plutonium, which I can use to power my current equipment. No warp fuel yet though, so I won't be leaving this solar system just yet.

Cool! Well, I haven't been following this topic that much and it looks like you guys are excited about this game.

The only thing that seems to be dissapointing is the lack of player vs player interaction. This feature was not/never properly announced and people expected that  8-X I guess the hype train ruined it... Personally, I haven't shown any interest in this game ;)

mmosu, I hope you can reach the end of the map and tell us what space looks like outside from space!  8)

Thanks mmosu, that's awesome :-X And thanks for your restraint :) Very thoughtful of you to not go waxing lyrical before the rest of us get a look-see. Especially we poor easternmost antipodeans :-() We may be ahead in the time zones but paradoxically we always seem to lag behind in the release date zones...

OWGKID, nobody will ever reach the end of the map, or rather get to see it all, because the map is genuinely galactic in scale. Nobody will ever even come close. Some players may eventually reach the centre of the game's galaxy, but nobody will ever map the whole thing. Someone worked out that even if you discovered a hundred new planets every ten minutes, it would take you well over a million years - of real time - to visit them all. There is an estimated 18 quintillion (18,000,000,000,000,000,000) planets in the game. I don't know if there is any percentage of those that are gas giants and therefore not land-on-able. I haven't heard any mention of that, but I get the impression that it's a gas giant-free galaxy. Unless of course there are gas giants with moons that you can land on, which may be the case.

As far as multiplayer goes, I think the devs have made it pretty clear all along that it's not a multiplayer game in the usual sense. Everybody will be in the same game world, or rather galaxy, but it's so vast that even if there were several million gamers online at once it's highly unlikely that one player will ever encounter another. Some people can't seem to get their heads around that, and if they expect to be interacting with their online friends on a regular basis then they haven't been paying enough attention to what the devs have been telling them.

There is a single player mode, but due to the immense scale of the thing, there will be little or no difference between multiplayer and single player modes.

Well, it is possible to do that that in Minecraft and the world became distorted when you crossed 12 550 821 X/Z value as seen here. Minecraft is ofc much smaller than NMS ;)

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I guess if someone manages to make a trainer on NMS PC, that teleports you around, the world boundary could be at 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 meters/light-years ??? Being a 64-bit game (and 64-bit integers stops at this number)  the world probably stops regenerating beyond this point.

Cheers guys  :-X
I'm actually still on my starting planet - my eight year old made me promise to not leave until she could be there to see it, she wants to be there the first time we fly into space  ;)
In the meantime, I've upgraded my multi tool, repaired all the major failed systems on my ship, and have amassed ~800,000 in credits (which apparently isn't that much, I hear ships cost millions).

I watched a few minutes of several YT vids of PS4 people who already got the game just to see what the start looks like.

And I thought to myself..

..what the hell..

and (still) pre-ordered it just now.  :-D


Fragger, on steam it reads, "The worldwide release date will be August 12th in all countries. "

Maybe not in Oz as it always has been part of a different dimension of time and space... 8-X

Oh nice :) Going to my friend tomorrow and give it a try. Hopefully, I may get convinced to buy it ;)

Apparently, flying through a black hole crashes the game on PS4  :laugh:

Quote from: Art Blade on August 11, 2016, 08:09:54 AM
Maybe not in Oz as it always has been part of a different dimension of time and space... 8-X

:-D We're just "special"...

Just checked on Steam, still says 13th.

I'm guessing that the 12th is the daytime release date wherever Steam is based in the U.S., which will translate as the 13th here because there's an average of about 14-15 hours between U.S. time and ours. I say average because both countries span several time zones. Perth and New York are closer together in time than San Francisco and Sydney are (12 hours vs 17 hours).

So it should be the same release time for us all.

Quote from: OWGKID7891 on August 11, 2016, 09:05:52 AM
Apparently, flying through a black hole crashes the game on PS4  :laugh:

:laugh:

There's got to be a snide joke there somewhere but I'm too tired to think of one :-()

 ^-^

there's one more reason why I wanted to get the game: to be part of one massive OWG movement. There hasn't been a game in a long time with that many of us starting out at the same time. :-X :)

Me too, I'm hoping it becomes a bit of a reuniting thing here. Not that we've fragmented as a group, but I miss when we were all enthusing about the same game - the one that brought us together in the first place.

Of course, it could turn out to be a massive fizzer that we'll all be bored with in a week. We won't know until we know, although mmosu has gotten a bit of a head start on us :-() Considerately. he's remaining nebulous about it (nyuk nyuk) until we all get to have a go.

Oh, and it's killing me!  :'(
I've been on 3 planets so far, the second of which was a lifeless rock with a negligible atmosphere but abundant minerals. The clear, gasless sky however, gave me a clear view of my next conquest, which turned out to be a frigid snow planet with vast pine forests and strange "birds" with insect-like heads. One thing that's been very cool is seeing how pulse jumps (an engine power level in between "boost" and "warp") can shrink a flight that would take several hours under normal propulsion down to about 30 seconds  :-X.

Well, you won't have to hold back much longer, mate. About three hours from now and at least one more of us will be moving to the pad 8)

We'll see how it goes. I know it's "only" a 6Gb download, but there'll possibly be so many people trying to download around the same time that it might take longer than expected. Or maybe not, I believe Steam has a pretty hefty server system.

I'm glad I'm not still with that crummy ISP I used to be with or I'd be waiting another week for it to download :-\\

It'll be around 3:00am my time and it's midnight now, so I'm going to make some industrial-strength coffee and wait up for it. I'm like a kid on Christmas Eve, too excited to sleep :-()

downloading.

ONLY 2.5 GB  ??? :laugh: just some 8 minutes download time. 5.9GB download speed.. works..

word of the wise: don't STAY on steam if it hasn't got the download option. Instead, exit and rejoin - until eventually you'll see the download button.

GOING TO START IT UP!!  ^-^

yesss  :-()
[smg id=8898 type=preview align=center caption="I'm in"]

Just downloaded, only took about ten minutes.

Going in...

hehe fragger, that was probably the fastest ever download of a whole up-to-date game for you  :-D

While I was composing my last post and uploading my screenshot, I had my game alt-tabbed out in the background. I couldn't get back into it so I had to quit it from the desktop and I started over. That sent me to a new world to start over as I hadn't created a restore point yet.

Getting in and out of the ship creates such a restore point.

OK.. this time I renamed the planed before uploading to "second chance" and got 2k units for it. The first time I had 5k so I checked uploading the (star) system and got 5k on top but I should have renamed that first.. now it's the generic name. Well, what the heck, it's not as if anyone would actually go looking for it anyway  :-()

I changed some of the graphics settings and that caused the stupid and well-known message.. "for the changes to take effect, the game needs a restart" or some such. Damn. Out again but I did create a restore point first.

One thing I noticed that I found annoying: the mouse pointer doesn't seem to stay on fields on the menu that I want to check, it drifts around. I then used my XBOX controller and oh wonder, it stayed on those fields. I also had to invert the controls (hate to pull towards me and look down.. I need flight control settings as in Pull = Up hehe)

OK, going in again.

No launch for me.

Can't get past the title screen. That comes up, then it winks out and goes back to desktop. Steam says "Ready to play" in the library, so it's not updating or anything.

Tried twice, no joy. Cold-booted and tried, still no joy. Tried launching from desktop icon and from Steam, no luck either way. When launching from Steam, after the title screen winks out I see "Running" in the library for a couple of seconds, followed by a subliminal flash of a word that looks like "Synching", then it goes back to saying "Ready to play".

Tried both online and offline launch, no luck either way.

(sigh) I don't feel like fucking around with it at this hour. Going to bed and try to get it sorted tomorrow, maybe see if anyone else is having this prob.

it needs a 64-bit OS.. do you have one? I suppose you do.

Well, maybe it's the "online" thingy.. were you online or offline?

Whatever it is, it's damn annoying you can't play it and don't get a proper message why it doesn't w@&k. Good luck, mate

Yeah, not sure what to say about that. I definitely doesn't appear to need a persistent Internet connection to play. Hope you get it figured out fragger  :(

I actually made it to a nearby space station and upgraded my ship to one with more cargo space. Here's a tip - try to keep a full stack of plutonium and thamium-9 both on your person and in your ship. With those resources you can keep your life support systems, multi-tool and drive system on your ship fully powered, and with those three things operational, it'll be hard to find yourself in trouble. Also, don't forget to scan and catalog all plants when on a planet. It's easy to forget about them since the animals are more obvious, but uploading discovered flora also gives small rewards that can add up if you do it enough.

thanks for the tips :)

I suppose Plutonium is more "cost effective" than Carbon, isn't it?

And I found something I renamed and wanted to show you.  :-D

[smg id=8899 type=preview align=center caption="head banger"]

I am too scared to try to fry those annoying surveillance drones. Do they grow back or something like that, as in would that call an army that will annihilate my poor existence?

So far, I wandered around and nearly got lost in a bloody cave. No mini map with a dotted line to show me my way out, hehe. I found some site with modules to walk in, like an abandoned science lab if a small one. Found some transponder of sorts that I used my bypass chip(s) on and unlocked points of interests such as a monolith, a shelter, some observatory and an operations site.

Going to explore the planet I'm still on before going anywhere. :)

Ha! Good one  :-X
Yes, plutonium seems to be more cost effective, and harvesting it doesn't attract as much sentinel attention as walking around vaporizing plants for carbon does (they really don't seem to like that  ::)). Destroying sentinels ups the "threat" level and calls in heavier artillery if you keep it up, but if you're near your ship you can just fly away and leave your troubles behind. Also, thamium seems even more efficient, but it's harder to find on the surface (of the planets I've been on at least). However, it seems like the best place to find thamium is from blowing up asteroids- so far they seem to be made of mostly either thamium or iron. Iron itself is useful to help in exploring planets, as you can use it to manufacture bypass chips, and bypass chips can be used to hack beacons for info on the locations of outposts and alien monuments.
Currently I'm on a moon that is tidally locked to it's planet. Since the planet always appears on the same side of the sky, and can be seen looming over the entire horizon, it's a useful tool for reorientation when I get turned around. Before I leave I plan to fly further over the horizon and see if I can find a place where the planet fills the whole sky (it's frickin' huge)

Thanks mmosu :)

to fragger: check out the link for some help regarding your problems. I think they're really busy and trying hard to help people with troubles.
http://www.no-mans-sky.com/news/ (http://www.no-mans-sky.com/news/)

However, I just had a new download of some 18MB on steam but don't know yet what it was. I don't even know what version I'm on. What really worries me is some weird information on said link telling people to FIRST update to 1.03 and THEN play the game or delete the savegames so you can start fresh in order to get the new stuff into your game. They say that they won't do it like that again -- nice, but do I have to start over from scratch? Damn.

I don't think so, that sounds like the patch that went up the day before release. I had to download and install that after installing the game but before launching. Of course, since I'm on console that might not generalize to you guys.

It's all good guys, I got it sorted. Updating my video card driver seems to have done the trick :-X

So yeah, I'm in. All I can say so far is man, this is fantastic. Bit of a learn at first, the game doesn't exactly hold your hand. Once I got some basic stuff figured out, I got stuck into exploring. The jet-pack is handy for getting around (once I learned not to let it run out of gas when I was up too high...) I got started on a hot and very rugged planet with some pretty bizarre-looking alien flora. I hand-fed this animal that was like a cross between a big cat and a lizard, and now he likes me (he has a little smiley face floating above his head and he follows me around when I'm near the ship).

I flew into space and there was a space station up there, which I landed in and did some trading. Flying around is a blast :-X Full control, no pre-programmed stuff (except for when you fly into a station). Flew all the way from orbit back down to the surface, then flew all around the landscape - total freedom of travel. There's stuff to be found everywhere and it all looks terrific.

Sleep-deprivation, here I come :-()

Ha, yeah, pretty much! :laugh:
Glad you're finally in fragger  :-X

Yay, fragger!  :-X :)

Quote from: fragger on August 12, 2016, 04:40:59 PMI flew into space and there was a space station up there, which I landed in and did some trading.
...
Sleep-deprivation, here I come :-()

Funny you should mention that trading. I did the same, albeit likely a bit more excessive than you guys  :-()

[smg id=8900 type=preview align=center caption="done some trading"]

I had some problems with the game I was on while posting previously, I couldn't for the life of me find the last bloody element to get the ship engine up and running and I really spent like three hours searching for that stuff on that fricking planet :D

Then I thought hell, let's try and just start over from scratch, making sure the new patch was included so I didn't have to worry all the time and forever about missing out on something by not starting over fresh.

I found the savegame location,

HD:\Users\yourname\AppData\Roaming\HelloGames\NMS\here some random gibberish folder

deleted the whole folder (after making a backup) and started anew.


On the new planet, I found all the stuff needed (diving through acid rain) within like 30 minutes  ??? ::) OK.. at least I am up and running despite losing a lot of progress. The new world was horrible, though. ACID RAIN ffs, it ate through my space suit within minutes so I had to run back and forth between my ship (to regenerate my acid protection) and the stuff to collect. Then I took off and found that space station.

In case you want to start over (or use a backup in case you want to experiment) make sure the cloud save is disabled before starting the game, else steam will slap your old save back onto your disk. When I was done with my current nice trading, I quit, enabled cloud saving and started up the game and quit again. That caused steam to fetch my current save and now all is good  :)

I didn't forget this time to rename and upload my planet and system  ^-^

[smg id=8901 type=preview align=center caption="and some naming"]

I've been playing all bloody day :-D I'm finding this game to be both relaxing and absorbing.

I had a false start... I had to tweak the graphics a bit to get a decent frame rate, and the game needed to be restarted for some of the changes to take effect. Since I hadn't yet done anything to trigger a save, when I went back in I started on a whole new planet. The first one was that hot, deserty planet I mentioned, but since restarting I'm on a snowy one with a lot of red rock, clear lakes, and very colourful flora like the plant life in Avatar. I haven't even left this planet yet, except to go into space, mine some asteroids and visit the space station a couple of times.

I've been naming the animals I've found. Among the names I have so far are an Octocrab and a Uniroceros :-() Some life forms are dangerous. I was poking around a big rock when this thing like a leathery tentacle shot out from behind it and whacked me one. It was actually a form of plant life, like a non-ambulatory trifid. I also got stalked by a creature like a big skinny velociraptor which followed me for a while until I gave it the slip by jet-packing over a steep-sided gully. But most of the animals I've encountered so far have been harmless. There are some weird and wonderful things out there, and it's interesting to watch their behaviour. I like how there are both adult and young animals, nice touch.

I've found seven of the thirteen life forms which inhabit this planet. It seems I'll have to explore to find the others. And I do mean explore - it's a whole frigging planet! The devs weren't kidding about the scale ???? And I thought Just Cause 2 was big... I've traded up to a heavier-duty multitool, expanded my suit's carrying capacity and upgraded my jetpack and stamina.

While I was in orbit there was a dirty big asteroid full of iridium. I blasted and then flew my way right through the middle of it, mining as I went 8) The game looks amazing, and the travelling around in the little starship is great fun. Pity your guy doesn't move a bit quicker on foot though. A walk is like a dawdle and a sprint is like a walk...  I've noticed that you can't crash your ship into the ground, there's a kind of avoidance system that prevents it from happening. It also means you can't fly into caves.

I'm staying out of trouble so far, not shooting up any animals or other ships. I don't think I'm geared up enough to get into a tussle with anybody yet - if I ever want to.

Really enjoying it so far, can't wait to get back into it :-X Got some screenies, I'll upload a few later.

Another thought that occurred to me while I was playing was that there will probably be a lot of people who won't like this game. I can see already that it's a game for cerebral players - it will be too slow and methodical for the instant gratification types, the ones who like to zap each other in games like Halo and Star Wars Battlefront. They'll never find one another, let alone be able to blast each other, in this one. I can hear the choruses of "Boring!!!" right now, even thought there's no shortage of stuff to do. Kind of like FC2.

There's nothing to stop you plugging the wildlife and attacking other ships of course, and I might even have a go at playing Luke Skywalker myself sometime down the track. But it's really not where the game is at. This is primarily for those who like to explore, who like to wheel and deal, who like to think, and who appreciate eye candy for its own sake. What I've seen so far does have an exotic and alien beauty to it.

I can't wait to see what else is out there, but I want to see how much I can wring out of this first planet. I've got a 53% complete showing on it. I think that's the percentage of native life forms you can find, seeing as how I've found seven out of thirteen which is sort of about 53%. It's not a percentage of the planet's surface explored, that's for damned sure. I haven't even scratched that :-()

sounds all too familiar and I think you hit the nail on the head with what you just posted, fragger.  What I find both interesting and amusing is that at least you and I had quite a few experiences that are virtually identical. :)

For instance, having to start over without actually intending to do so, graphics changes that required a restart of the game, starting over on a different planet.. I too saw animals with kid versions walking around in close proximity to one parent and, that surprised me the most, I too got whipped by some plant. It looked like an egg-shaped rock had one tentacle sticking out. It looked like an elephant's trunk and it was floppy and curled up somewhat but when I approached it without yet realising what it was, I was literally gobsmacked when it lunged at me and made my screen turn red a bit -- it hurt. ??? :)

So far the inverted controls are fine when using the controller UNLESS it comes to flying. The only thing that works as it should is up and down but the rest makes me go bonkers. As if everything was completely twisted. So, if I revert to non-inverted, Down is UP and vice versa, which is horrible regarding intuitive flying (or looking) but maybe that will help get the rest of the roll and pitch stuff to w@&k as I intend it to. Weird.

I like what you did, feed an animal. I saw in the description of one I "photographed" with the scanner what its diet was and I was briefly considering feeding it but I was too low on that specific diet resource to actually try. I might some time, however :)

There is something else, the space station. In my case it showed up after flying around some and it was about 10 minutes away at booster speed. Warping made me go into an animation like Han Solo's Millennium Falcon pumping up for a speed of light trip. Then I found myself fumbling with some galactic map and some random key got me back down to the space with planets and asteroids that I had been tumbling around in seconds ago. And I overshot the space station. Well, kind of expected that. But do we really, REALLY have to dodge a bazillion of asteroids (including bumping into and breaking through the odd ones) getting to that station? Is there no easier way? I found myself clamping my controller and dodging moving and stationary objects as if trying to break a record. For bloody TEN minutes real time. I used up quite a bit of yellow resources (no, not yellow snow) to repair my ship's shield that had amassed a nice bunch of dents and cracks due to collisions.

Oh and during my first attempt I had a little fight with those sentinel drones. They didn't like me to force open a reinforced steel door of some lab. First I killed two sentinels, then the elite force sentinels made an entry and tried to fry me in my suit. In the end I got killed once (causing in this game's symbol to be placed hovering over my dead body like a floating tomb stone and waypoint marker) but was able to retrieve my inventory by I think interacting with that tomb stone of mine. And I killed a few drones during that attempt. However, having had to start over, during this attempt I decided not to force my way into anything (at least for now) but to behave. If it's locked, it's locked. Maybe months from now I'd blow up the whole planet but that's not really in my nature. :-D

And yes.. brain-challenged players are already asking their money back. Because the game didn't start properly at the first go. And I came across some complaints regarding "boring" of sorts. Well yes.. that's not going to stop us, is it  :-()

Nice start Art :-X I watched my friend playing it and it looks like fun :) Considering the game's performance issues, I'll wait until I buy it.

thanks :)

I'm just glad that I don't have any performance issues. Actually, I didn't have any serious issues -- the few hiccups I mentioned before weren't really bad except perhaps that one bad start when I couldn't find one required collectible at all. That may have been a bug because apparently people run around for a bit and then take off which essentially is your first objective. I did just that after a new start.

Well.. I reached the maximum milestone regarding trade (Magnate) and I got some 2M units on my account plus I got a "Jirishim S97" star ship which I already bought off a trader for some 1.5M units.

What I don't know is: Buying a new ship, do you really just leave your "abandoned" (old) ship behind and.. will it stay there as a fallback or will it disintegrate? I would have loved to actually bloody SELL it. Now I am sitting in my new ship with my old cargo (and next to no fuel because I can pump fuel in but cannot pump any fuel out  :D -- any "new" ship comes with empty tanks any my fuel stayed in my "abandoned" ship :D ) and my old ship sits on a landing platform in the space station and apparently it is there just for the taking if anyone considers it better than their own current ship. Damn.

OK then, I can now answer my own question. If you buy a new ship, your old one will disintegrate. Not instantly but it will be gone when you reload your game.

[smg id=8902 type=preview align=center caption="home base"]

I went back to my base planet and I consider it "w@&k" going back for about 15 minutes real time flying through asteroid fields. On second thoughts, scratch "fields" as asteroids are just bloody everywhere. At least most of them are composed of stuff that you actually need to keep your life support and weapons up and running.

I need more inventory slots. I need a bigger ship.

Oh one thing I wanted to show to you guys.. while trading, I came across this ???

[smg id=8903 type=preview align=center caption="expensive stuff"]

Which reminds me. When you start your career, you are given a choice as to whether or not you want to pick up that red sphere, Atlas. The first time I declined, but having had to start over, I reconsidered and picked that red orb thing up.

What did you do?

I picked it up. I figured whether the Atlas is benevolent or not, I could use some guidance. No idea what consequences that choice will have, but it's done so I'm not worried about it.
Fragger, in regards to your comment about walking speed, there's a jet pack trick going around the internet that people are using to speed up on-foot exploration. What you do is start sprinting, melee, and then immediately hit the jet pack boost and BAM! PHYSICS!! It seems that what ends up happening is that the vertical thrust of the boost gets cancelled and only the forward boost remains, propelling you forward on the ground. It takes some timing, and I haven't completely got the hang of it, but it appears very effective once you do. At this point I don't think it's clear if this ability is an exploit or an intended mechanic.

Here's a good video explaining it a little better than I did:

https://youtu.be/qUitg1RhXlM

thanks for the tip :) And regarding the red orb, I had the same reasons.

Where was the red sphere? I must have missed that.

I got in my first space battle, but I didn't start it. I was flying to one of my planet's moons and a hostile ship jumped me. It was actually pretty fun, a twisting, turning hairball in space. I tried to outrun him by going into Pulse thrust, but he hit me and the drive disengaged, so I had to fight. I made him pay for it though as I had a couple of heavy-duty plasma cannon upgrades >:D

One thing I reckon the game could do with is a head-turn control of some sort when you're flying. If they could have modelled the flying controls more like the gyrocopter in FC4 it would have been superb. Since your ship can't hover and has to keep moving forward (even though you can speed up and slow down), it would come in handy to be able to look around while flying.

Art, I had a similar thing with breaking down reinforced doors and having to deal with the sentinels. They're tough little blighters, I had to keep jumping in my ship and flying away until they cooled down, then I'd come back and try the door again. In the end it was worth it - there was a terminal in there that gave me the formula for making my own antimatter, which is needed to get the hyperdrive working. You can buy the antimatter through a trading terminal but it's pretty dear. Mind you, you still need suspension fluid to make the AM - and unless there's a way to manufacture or produce that yourself, you have to buy it. It's not as expensive or scarce as the AM though.

I haven't met any traders yet that could sell me a ship, so I'm still stuck with my original one. I've met two alien races, the Gek and another one that starts with K. The Ks are the ones with robotic-looking heads, the Gek are kind of reptilian or frog-like. The Gek appear to be tied in closely with that Atlas business, and I get the impression that their race is extremely ancient. They are traders, but the Ks seem to be more ascetic, scientific types.

Animals can prey on one another, I've seen a carnivore run down a sort of gazelle-like creature. I swam around in a lake for a while but didn't see any animals in there - until a while later when there was another lake with a giant eel-type thing in it who it seems really wanted a bite out of me as he followed me around the shoreline. The description said something like, "Highly aggressive".

So the life forms certainly aren't all benign.

the red sphere was sitting in a pod next to your crashed first space ship

Even the most infinitesimal chance of running into a player -vs- player situation utterly kills this game for me.  >:((

I would have loved to get in on a game at ground level that all of us were once again excited about, enjoying, and sharing.  :(

That said I'm cheering on you hapless explorers who are willing to take the plunge.

I came across this list of tips that while not entirely comprehensive it seems to have many useful pointers and as far as I can tell tries to avoid spoilers.

http://imgur.com/gallery/pV9Yl (http://imgur.com/gallery/pV9Yl)

*** Sorry about the crude comment in the tip about zooming.  I pulled this off a site that has no language censorship and posters who adore crassness ***

Good luck and happy spacefaring.  :-X

How are you guys getting those factory doors open? I don't seem to be able to damage them.  ????

I got a prompt that told me I had to use an upgrade for the multitool, the name of which escapes me for the moment, starts with a B. It's an alternative fire add-on, I'll get the name for you next time I'm in the game. Also, I think you have to target not the door itself but the big fat cylinder that's stuck on one side which I think is part of the locking mechanism. Maybe - all I know is I peppered everything on the door and that cylinder was the last thing I hit when the door finally blew open. Even so, I hit the whole door quite a number of times before it went.

mandru, I really don't think you'll have to worry about that ever happening, the odds against are - well, astronomical. But there is that infinitesimal chance, like you say.

Something to consider though is that the nature of the game won't appeal to those who play dirty. If they know there's only a one-in-a-zillion chance that they'll ever get to flame someone, and that will be the only single chance they'll ever get, they'll stay away in droves. It wouldn't be much fun camping out to snipe a respawner when there are 18 quintillion places in which a spawner might appear. So I think the only people who will be playing NMS will be folks like us who will, dare I say, take it seriously.

Incidentally, you can play offline, so if you're really bothered about encountering that one outrageously lucky troll, there's that. As far as I know, the single player game isn't like a cut-down version or anything.

But thanks for the good wishes mandru, and for the tips link :)

* * * * *

Okay, on to some general reporting and piccies for those who aren't playing, or aren't playing yet, but might be interested.

The world mechanics are quite remarkable in this. I don't know if the planets are "full-size" as it were, but they're still pretty darned big, and as play areas in a game, they're truly enormous. Maybe they vary throughout the game (some planets in our own solar system are pretty small too, as planets go). And every inch of their surfaces is accessible - you could fly your ship all the way around a world at low altitude, if you're so inclined. It's so cool to drop down from orbit and watch the terrain becoming more and more defined, until you're in among it. I can't tell if the planets actually rotate, but they do go through regular day/night cycles and they appear to have differing gravitational fields. There is all kinds of weather. I've been to three planets so far (I just had to get an inkling of what else was out there :-()) and they've all been radically different from one another. One was so hot, dusty and windy I called it "Dustbowl" (you do get to name a planet if you're the first one to visit it, which you very probably will be). Every so often a massive dust storm came along, and I needed to get into my ship or into a cave or shelter of some kind until it blew over or it would rapidly damage my suit. I'm currently on a very lush, very rainy, verdantly green world.

Only thing is that as far as I can tell at this early stage, whatever sort of terrain a planet has is just that. Earth has forests, deserts, savannas, jungles, snowfields - but each planet in NMS seems to have one predominant terrain type and that's it. It'll all be snowy, or all rocky, or all grassy, and there might be bodies of water amongst it, but not much else. That may not always be the case, it is early days for us.

One thing that's sorely missing is some sort of compass-type device. You can't really tell which way up a planet is, so to speak, so it's very easy to get disoriented and end up moving around aimlessly. There are indicators that always tell you where your ship is when you're on foot or where important things that you've found are, and at any time you can do a "scan" that will reveal where certain things like resources and structures are in relation to your position, but often I've had the experience of seeing something of interest from the air but then lose it again due to a lack of any direction-finding or place-marking tools. There are no maps of planets, but that's certainly understandable.

I'm very impressed with the living things. I have a belief that life elsewhere in the universe is probably, generally speaking, not much different to what it is here. There would no doubt be exceptions, but most warm-blooded animals, say, would probably have a lot in common with those on Earth - a head with two eyes, a nose and a mouth, and four limbs - because it's simply the most efficient configuration for such animals. The proportions may be different, but if a "design" works well on this planet, nature would probably adopt it universally. And this is what you see in the game - the animals generally aren't radically different from those on Earth, but different they certainly are. There are some wild and wonderful exceptions in the game, and a few that are implausible, but by and large they're quite conceivable, and they have behaviours. Same goes for the plant life. Some wouldn't look out of place here, but some are distinctly alien, and some are even dangerous.

There is plenty to do in the game, and if exploring is your thing, you'll be in gaming heaven :-() There is a back story of some sort concerning the alien races in the game, the early gleanings of which I'm only just beginning to discern. Should get interesting the more one uncovers of it.

Screenies. Had to take a few :-()

[smg id=8904 align=center width=600]

[smg id=8905 align=center width=600]

[smg id=8906 align=center width=600]

[smg id=8907 align=center width=600]

[smg id=8908 align=center width=600]

[smg id=8909 align=center width=600]

[smg id=8910 align=center width=600]

Nice pics fragger  :-X. Do remember to sleep and eat at some point this weekend  :laugh:

I'm on the final planet of my starting solar system - I has lots of wildlife and minerals (iridium, emeril and aluminum mainly), acid rain and no advanced life that I can find, well, at least none that is still around, as I have found some abandoned outposts. From here I'm going to backtrack and see if I can get one of those factory doors open on one of my previous planets, as I'm gonna need to leave this system soon.

Mandru, I'll echo what fragger already said. There have already been some intentional attempts by players to meet up, but no success. Apparently they were in the same place, but it was day for one and night for the other - different servers maybe? I'm really not sure why it didn't w@&k l, but point is it's tough even if you're trying to do it.

mandru, get the game.  :-D

mmosu, I aimed for something like a door handle that was glowing red. It did take a while for the door to blow open and in the meantime I had to kill those ever-present two sentinel drones and then reinforcement was announced that came waltzing in in form of some elite sentinel drones that however went off the warpath once I was inside the facility.

Oh and, don't attack large freighter ships that seem to be hovering in space as if abandoned. They're not  :-D I had a fleet of fighter ships take me out for my curiosity (and for blowing up reinforced steel containers on said ship)

fragger, nice story and pics :) Funny, I met some Gek in a similar facility that even looked the same. First I had to pay 10 units and then 20 (per interaction) and then 20 carbon for any more attempts. His first reaction was to give me some blueprint (ship engine related upgrade I think) and then he basically offered medical help as in restoring health or shields. There was that same type of trading computer device on the wall like in the space station I used to trade on.

I did as you did, fed some creature and it had the smiley over its head. It actually showed me valuables, I realised when there was a magnifying glass symbol where it was behind a knoll and when I got there, a lump of some rare mineral was on the ground for the taking. It did it several times with different things I could pick up. How cool is that :)

[smg id=8911 type=preview align=center caption="creature's gift"]

and the creature itself was just so cute. It was a young specimen. I found it funny and feeding it paid off  :-D

[smg id=8912 type=preview align=center caption="the Birdog"]

Another animal I found really funny I named after Rambo and Big Bird from Sesame Street. :-D

[smg id=8913 type=preview align=center caption="the Rambibo"]

fragger, the "K's" are called Korvax. :)

Another tip I ran across was "Don't just scan animals.  Scan the plants as well.  Discovering unregistered plants will pay cash rewards also."

Art, I've got a very similar animal on my current planet - named it "space chicken"

I've got the issue with the factory doors sorted too, didn't realize the mining beam doesn't w@&k on them, and honestly didn't think to try the bolt caster  8-X

I need to get off this rock, but I hate to leave with one species undiscovered...

LOL -- I just found myself continuously pressing the "post" button here, I am so used to the game's mechanic of having to keep pressing some of the buttons and wait for the circle (cursor) to fill up until it actually activates the function of those buttons.  :-()

mandru, what you described is some sort of second function of the scanner. If you just scan an area, you'll see a green wave of light like a tidal wave starting from your position and going outwards for some hundred yards or so, revealing available resources. The second function is some type of a photo camera you aim at whatever there is, taking in the fauna and flora alike. In the focus area (you may zoom 1x and 2x) anything that is a plant or an animal will get checked against your database of what you already identified like that. If it is a known object, the type and name will be displayed above that object. If it isn't known, you'll see "analysing" and then the name the game comes up with. It will be added to your database and that's when and where you may upload or rename and upload it to the real world's server database. So essentially we're very likely to catalogue everything just to get some sort of completion bonus and at the time to be able to recognise stuff that we had already come across at some previous exploration trip. :)

mmosu, regarding the bolt caster, hehe  :-D I used to press wrong buttons all over and shoot minerals/elements a lot by accident rather than mine them properly. ^-^

Some tip you guys may want to consider (mmosu actually gave me notions when he mentioned he didn't even think of the bolt caster) if you need more inventory space: Dismantle upgrades that are already there. Like, if you don't use your ship's weapon (much) then you may get rid of all those related upgrades which unnecessarily clog up precious cargo space. :)

played until I was tired, really tired. Woke up, went to the bakery for fresh breadrolls and croissants for breakfast.. and back into the game again.

GOOD TIMES  :-D

ha, today I met the first carnivore predator, looked like a pineapple and bounced around. The mining laser was enough to kill it, though.

I find one thing annoying, those locked doors and containers that read, AtlasPass required. I need to follow that red orb now, going to do some warp drive trips and get that bloody pass!

I sold everything and freed up my inventory, loaded the warp drive to the max (no formulae for the fuel, unfortunately, needed to buy the antimatter for it) and made some decent coin for any upcoming buying binge  :-()

Oh man, this is a bit exciting, going to warp away now  :-D

[smg id=8914 type=preview align=center caption="clear to go"]

Go boldly, Jim :-D

Thanks Art. Korvax was indeed the name I was trying to think of, but there is another "K" race - "K'lovee" or something.

lol mmosu :-D My worst fear is coming true - I am severely sleep-depriving myself :-() I can't wai to get back in, but I wanted to tell a few tales first. And yeah, "Boltcaster" was the other word I was trying to think of earlier. When I got a "mission" to blast open reinforced doors, the game actually suggested that I switch my Multitool to Boltcaster for the job.

Like Art, I too am having a very hard time tearing myself away from the game :-() The planet I started on was the only one in its system, and even though I didn't complete it (on around 60%) I couldn't contain my curiosity to see what else was out there. The next system I went to, and where I still am, has five planets in it - "Dustbowl", "Verdure", "The Barrens", "Sentinel Hell" and I've yet to name the fifth one. This last one is the first planet I've seen that has quite large bodies of water, like inland seas. I hear noises at night like there's something really big living somewhere, but the land is barren and I've seen no animals on it, so whatever is making the noise must live in the sea. The only plant life is inside caves and the resources are pretty scarce, except for Plutonium which quite abundant, so this may be my "go to" planet for fuel. The temperature is mild so it doesn't drain my suit at all, but my life-support goes down fairly quickly from the atmosphere, which apparently is somewhat toxic. The sky is red all the time, so there must be something yucky in it.

Sentinel Hell I so named because the Sentinels there are a total bitch. I only have to think about mining something and they start hassling me. There are Graviton Balls or whatever they're called lying around to be picked up, but if I so much as go near one the Sentinels open up on me, so I have to fly in and land near one (if I can find one from the air), dash out, grab it and bolt back to the ship. They damned near killed me one time. Apparently the degree of sentinel attention varies from planet to planet as there have been others where they don't bother me much at all, even if I laser a giant boulder of gold to the ground when they're nearby.

I like making up names for the plants and animals I encounter. I have so far catalogued a Jumping Jiminy, a Clown Sleeve Anenome, a Stegodog, a Fribbedigibbet, a Sea Donut and a Flobbel to name but a few :-() The Flobbel is hilarious, like a bouncing bag of spuds with a bunch of carrots sticking out the top. I love the mixture of anticipation and apprehension I feel on visiting a new world for the first time, not knowing what I'm going to find there. Most animals seem docile, but there are some nasties. Exploring a deserted settlement, I heard a skittering sound approaching and there was a thing like a dog-sized, six-legged spider with a crab's carapace running at me with murder on its mind, and it was fast. I jet-packed up onto the roof just in time, but the "Arachnacrab" wouldn't leave until I got out of its line of sight for a while. I don't know if you guys have been attacked by anything yet, but you'll see a warning in the form of a small red circle with a clawed-paw icon in it appear in your field of vision with an arrowhead indicating the direction that the attacking animal is coming from. Heed that warning if you see it!

It's not easy trying to find the system you last visited on the galactic map. The stars you can jump to are connected by lines in the 3D map, which you can swivel and tilt around, and there are a couple of ways of selecting other stars. But for the life of me I can't find the one I first came from, which is a drag as I was going to go back and attempt to finish that planet. Maybe it's further away than I thought, but there is a limit to how far you can jump in the early game (you can jump further later on with upgrades, it appears).

The system I'm in gets a lot of banditry, so far I've been attacked five times while travelling between planets. There are large freighter-type ships that pulse in from time to time near the space station and once they sent out a distress call asking for help to defend them from pirates. I dutifully did so and got a bunch of gold and aluminum as a reward. I also suffered my first death at the hands of pirates. One enemy fighter can be a handful to deal with, but this time there were two. I clobbered one of them but the other one took me out before I could repair my damaged shields.

Okay, enough stories, got to go back now :-() This game elicits something in me that I never expected from a mere video game - a sense of wonder. It's awesome :-X

Just saw this on Steam (if you guys still suffer from issues)


Experimental Branch
We hope that you are enjoying No Man's Sky, but if you have mailed support@hellogames.co.uk with an issue, then please know that we are working to respond and make your experience as smooth as possible.

We have hot fixes for many issues in a build which is currently with our test team. This will exit testing and be made live for all players early next week.
If you are having issues and want to check this out immediately, we have made it available in a new Steam branch, called "Experimental".

We've already resolved many issues for people who reported them by moving them over to this branch.

Here's what's different

Improved AMD Phenom Support
Thousands of lines of assembly have been rewritten overnight to support AMD CPUs. Unfortunately whilst the game code no longer relies on anything above SSE 2, Havok Physics still requires "Supplemental SSE 3", which was not supported until "Bobcat" and above. We're discussing with Havok.

Alt-Tab has improved
Some systems/configs were crashing or not pausing correctly on Alt Tab. This should now be resolved.

Shader Caching
Framerate was initially stuttering due to shaders not being correctly cached by the GPU on some systems. We have replaced the GPU caching system. You may notice some stutter during the Galactic Map intro to the game (the very first time you run), but it should be smoother from then on (this will be fixed in future). This is particularly true on ATI cards

Mouse Jitter
Smoothing on mouse movement has been improved to prevent hitching or stuttering, and is now adjustable through the Options menu in "Mouse Smoothing".

Max FPS Cap
On some CPU/GPU configurations, setting Max FPS to 60 or 30 was not giving 60 or 30 FPS (causing stuttering). This has been improved.

Improved Performance
On CPUs with 4 threads or fewer, performance has been improved.

Intel GPUs
The game will now let you know if you are trying to run with an unsupported GPU. This will hopefully flag for some users that their high end GPU has not been selected.

Gsync
Gsync has been disabled by default, which was causing an issue for some users

Here is how you access it
To access the Experimental branch right-click on the game from the library page and select "Properties". Among the available tabs will be the "BETAS" tab.

Code: 3xperimental
Your new branch should be listed in the dropdown menu under "Select the beta you would like to opt into:"


If you encounter issues with this please mail support@hellogames.co.uk and include [EXPERIMENTAL] in the subject.

IF THIS BRANCH FIXES YOUR ISSUE, PLEASE LET US KNOW :)

Thank you,
Hello Games

Thanks, GKID. Luckily everything runs smoothly here but I did have an issue with the only one alt-tabbing out -- windows told me it was an "application" (not showing the name NMS) and I couldn't bring it back up. Instead, it told me two things (first one I forgot) and the second was that I probably didn't have a licence for it. Haha, as if.

However, there is ONE thing about this game that comes with every game, but this one does it better than ANY other game: From desktop to being able to do something in the game, it only takes 20 seconds! By comparison, GTAV takes nine times longer, around three minutes. And I hate that. Now, you can just create a restore point and quit the game when you're going for coffee or some such. Back at the PC, fire up the game and 20 seconds later, you're already back and that's really something.  :-X :)

Fragger, I noticed that paw icon and whatever it was, it's dead now >:D And funny enough, it too was some spider type with a top like brains. Hence I called it Brain Eater.  :-D

I don't know how or when I can get that blasted Atlas orb bitch to tell me what to do. The map shows freeroam mode or that Atlas-related mode but no dice. Maybe I need to accomplish something first. However, I went to a new system and there I had a Monolith UNDER WATER and far enough out and down that by the time I got there, my oxygen had been depleted. I returned to shore with crackling and sizzling sounds coming from my suit and that was my second attempt. I decided to reload after the first one as then I lost my orientation, couldn't get back to shore in time and croaked like a mafia job, drowned with concrete shoes. I really didn't want do retrieve my stuff out there so a reload was a lot easier.

[smg id=8915 type=preview align=center caption="waterworld"]

That's nice to hear  :-X Well, GTA loads a huge fixed map compared to NMS, which generates the world on-the-fly. I guess it is much quicker to do so than loading an entire city filled with life.

I have now arrived at my third system, this time the Korvax are boss around here :-D The two other systems before belonged to the Geks.

I noticed in space stations that the ships have some sort of base structure that are identical but details are different when you look at those ships. Also, the gear differs a lot between identical-looking ships. Hard to get a good ship like that, and an affordable on top.

Anyway. I's a lot of fun to see what is on the menu :-()

Fragger, when farming those gravatino balls, try just running away using the jet pack dash I was talking about. I've gotten the hang of it now and not only is it super efficient for just generally getting around, but makes it really easy to escape from sentinel scrutiny enough to start them cooling down, and then quickly return to the site of your previous mischief to, well, start trouble all over again  >:D

Thanks GKID for the info :-X They seem to be a good crowd of devs who obviously care greatly about their product and their customers' enjoyment of it. Good to see 8)

Cheers mmosu, I'll try that. The Sentinels on that planet are a royal pain, and not just with the Gravatino balls. If I try to do anything there, they're all over me - they attack me even when I do something completely innocent like interact with the comms pole in a new settlement or shelter or whatever to claim it. I can't scratch my bum without being attacked, and even if I'm not doing anything there'll be one literally right in my face. They're not just the little hovering jobs either - there's a considerably bigger one that crawls along the ground on four robotic legs, and packs a wallop.

About those reinforced doors that you have to shoot out, I found a technique. Firstly, it doesn't matter where you hit the doors. But when you're within multitool range, an icon appears on the door - a pistol with a white circle around it. As you're hitting the door, the circle gradually empties counter-clockwise. When it's all gone, the door will blow. So what I've been doing is this: Land the ship as close to the door as possible, shoot the door until I need to reload or the Sentinel warning message is heard, then scurry back to the ship and take off. Then I fly in a circle and land again. The Sentinels will have gone back to passive mode, and the white circle around the pistol icon will remain depleted at the point where I left it. Shoot it up again, and repeat the above. The circle usually empties after three, or at the most four, attempts.

One word of warning, though - if you've partially depleted the circle and for some reason you reload a saved game, the circle will have filled again.

On another subject, I've had an odd glitch a couple of times where I'll climb into my ship and hit the button to take off to fly somewhere else on the planet, and my ship will suddenly shoot straight up, all the way up into orbit in a couple of seconds, without benefit of Pulse Drive. Then I have to re-enter all over again. It only seems to be happening on one planet, so maybe it's a local glitch to that particular world.

On yet another subject, the pirates or whatever they are in this system are getting to be a headache. Every second or third time I go into space, either from the station or from one planet to another, I get attacked. The first few times it was just one fighter, which was fairly easy to deal with. But on the next two occasions, there were two of them. Last time, there were three! They've killed me twice now, the buggers. I can't run away either - the game won't let me engage Pulse drive while the fight is on, and if I'm already in Pulse drive when the pirates attack it pulls me out of it. So I've had to use up valuable ship inventory space to upgrade my shields and weapons.

Once, two of them jumped me just as I was entering a planet's atmosphere on pulse. They ended up down below me and apparently couldn't climb back up, all they could do was flit around above the ground while I was still screaming down nose-first from orbit. So I was able to rain photon cannon shots down on them, while they couldn't fire back up at me >:D

[smg id=8916 align=center width=600]

[smg id=8917 align=center width=600]

[smg id=8918 align=center width=600]

This planet is the fifth one I visited out of the five in the system - I called it Scarlett (the sky is red all the time there). Not a pretty world, but it's great for getting resources as there are no land animals, there is no wear on my Exosuit and the Sentinels are very passive. They don't care how much minerals I mine, as long as I leave the few plants alone. There are Plutonium crystals all over the place and lots of huge pillars of Gold, Heridium and Nickel. I've been cleaning up - go out, mine stuff up to my eyeballs, then take it back to a Gak base I found with a Trade Terminal in it and sell it :-X I'm saving up for a new ship with more cargo slots in it.

Yeah, we're doing pretty much the same thing to handle the hardened doors, I'm just jet pack dashing around in a big circle to lose the sentinels instead of flying. Either way works, I just like to avoid burning more takeoff thruster juice than I have to.
I too am on my second solar system now. I've been trying to think of the most efficient way to approach new planets, and I think I'm getting closer to having a coherent method to my madness. Seems to me the best thing to do is find a beacon and pump bypass chips into it like it's a cheap slot machine. Visiting monoliths first will help advance your alien vocabulary, and this in turn will make it easier to deal with just about everything else - factories, signal towers, operation centers - all are easier to figure out if you've got the keywords down. Mining and cataloging local flora and fauna can be accomplished in the process of visiting all of the other points of interest.

Agreed about learning the alien words, it can be invaluable. I can now make my own Suspension Fluid to make the Antimatter to make the Warp Cells to fuel the Hyperdrive, thanks to translating enough Gek words to be able to choose the correct responses to their multiple-choice challenges.

I too am learning the importance of the beacons. These have led me to many Gek ruins which not only allow you to find out more about the Gek's story in addition to picking up a new word, but also every ruin seems to have two of those Knowledge cylinder things which will give you two more words, for a total of three from the ruin.

Via a beacon I learned the location of a derelict ship, but it was an hour's flight time away. It was quicker to Pulse into orbit, Pulse around the planet a bit, then re-enter closer to the wreckage. I just happened to time it really well and de-orbited almost right smack above the wreck. A couple of minutes as opposed to an hour :-X

I found a Trading Post today, haven't seen one before. There were about nine landing pads with ships coming and going, and a trade terminal in the waiting area. It was kind of cool to just hang around for a while watching the ships. I almost traded up to a 21-slot ship, but it would have cleaned out my account and besides, I've seen a 22-slot ship in the space station. I'll hold out for something like that, I think :)


[smg id=8922 align=center width=600]

[smg id=8923 align=center width=600]

damnit, fragger  :laugh: You just slipped your post in before I could post mine  :laugh:

I saw one of those trading stations pop up but I didn't visit it, I was on a mission of my own. However, in space stations, I saw ships with over 30 slots.

***

I just kill the sentinels when they approach and then finish off the door.  :-D

However, I came across one of those planets fragger described, with highly aggressive sentinels and those elite ones "on foot" which sport a massive far-reaching laser beam. They're annoying like hell. I just left the planet after I got what I came there for.

And finally Atlas missions are available. I think one first needs to go into space, open the space map and there choose the first option top centre (path to the centre of the galaxy or some such). Then some objectives will be given that lead to different systems and places. Now I can produce the fuel for the warp drive with my formulae.

And I found the Atlas thingy, massive :) Tomorrow I'll follow a bit more and try to get my blasted AtlasPass.

[smg id=8924 type=preview align=center caption="Atlas"]

Nice w@&k mate :-X 30 slots!? Now that's what I'm talking about :-()

What did you do to get Atlas missions? I said earlier that I didn't see an orb at the beginning. I hope the game hasn't screwed me there...

I somehow missed that post of yours with the underwater monolith. How in the world are you supposed to get that? Did you get it? I'm not surprised though that something like that would happen, with all the procedural placement of things. There's bound to be a few oddities pop up. I found a towering gold pillar that had its roots in a cave, but the top of it went through the roof of the cave and was sticking up above ground outside.

Thanks :)

I went to that underwater thing and got it, yes. Then I had an underwater ruin, same procedure but when I got there, the sign just disappeared and that's that. Probably a bug because there was nothing there. And I saw floating mineral rocks, more than once :) I made fun of one once by shooting eyes and a mouth into it  :laugh:

[smg id=8929 type=preview align=center caption="floaters"]
[smg id=8930 type=preview align=center caption="rock face"]

Ships? Yeah, 30 slots and more.. but I am not sure we really need that many unless we were into collecting, say, gold in vast amounts to sell it somewhere else. Then cargo slots are indeed important. I keep a lot of stuff that I come across that may or may not be important when it comes to future blueprints. Then I reconsider, sell the stuff and hope to come across it when I actually got some blueprints that require said items. For now, I keep plutonium for the launch and that asteroid stuff thamium for life support and so on, some iron and other elements needed for the warp drive fuel. The rest is just random stuff. Plus, keep an eye out for those huge egg-like constructions you find on planets, look for "(?)" symbols on your radar and visit them. You'll find a lot of different things but sometimes those huge egg-things which you can jump up into and there you'll get extra slots for your suit. Currently I am "only" at 17 slots but a friend got 24 already.

[smg id=8926 type=preview align=center caption="expand yourself"]

Regarding Atlas, here is a pic of my first attempt when I decided not to pic up that orb. It was inside that pod you can see in the pic and only visible when you walked up to it and looked into it. As you can see, it is right next to the ship. The orb would have been about twice the size of a basket ball I suppose.

[smg id=8925 type=preview align=center caption="in the beginning"]

It was like that when I started over but this time I thought heck, let's pick it up. So I got that red orb and that is obviously the reason why I have got an option in my galaxy map to follow its lead.

[smg id=8927 type=preview align=center caption="atlas interface"]

You'll see the top centre blue dot on the map user interface, left of it would be "free roam" or some such and leftmost was my initial Atlas thing. Since I had been playing on free roam, I didn't see any hints or mission objectives but when I went to space and changed it and then landed somewhere again, those missions kicked in. You can see it bottom right of my screen:

[smg id=8928 type=preview align=center caption="first atlas mission"]

Nice pics, love the face in the rock :laugh:

I've had that middle dot on my Galaxy map, but it seems to have gone away again. I did learn my first Atlas word today, but I had the dot yesterday. Odd.

Regarding underwater things, I received a blueprint for an underwater rebreather for the Exosuit as a reward from a Gek. I crafted it but I haven't tried it out yet. It won't let you stay under for ever, but it will let you stay under longer. So there is a practical way to get at underwater stuff, it seems.

I've been increasing my Exosuit slots at those egg-shaped upgrade containers you mentioned, there's a surprising number of them on Scarlett (I've been on that planet for days now, there seems to be a waypoint structure or something to check out every few hundred meters. I've lost count of how many I've done. I should look it up on the log screen). I now have 21 slots in my suit, but still only 16 on my ship. I'm trying to exploit this planet so I can afford a ship with a big cargo hold - better too much space than not enough :-() There is more gold than you can shake a stick at on Scarlett, huge pillars and domes of the stuff. One giant pillar of it yielded almost 130,000 units just by itself. There's also lots of giant Heridium pillars, and some Nickel ones, and many small fields of plutonium crystals. No Zinc, Thamium or Platinum, but a ton of iron in the caves amongst the foliage. It's a good planet to harvest these resources because there are no predatory animals and no wear and tear at all on the Exosuit due to the mild temperature. Only the life-support system gets drained, but I got an upgrade as yet another Gek reward that makes it last a lot longer. The Sentinels are also very laid-back here :-()

Can't find the sea animals though. Occasionally I'll hear a noise like a whale on steroids belching, so I'm assuming they're out there, but I can't see any - at least, not from shore. I'm a bit reluctant to go swimming out a long way because whatever it is, it sounds flipping big and mean - and I don't want to die out in the middle if the sea in case my grave canister goes to the bottom - or I have to swim all the way out again to get it back :-() There's always "Reload from save", I guess (have you noticed there are two saved game slots under "Options"?) It's a bit of a bummer because on the log screen, the % of completion doesn't appear until at least one animal is catalogued. Since nothing is showing there at the moment, I have no idea of my progress. Maybe there are no animals, or the sounds I'm hearing are a glitch. Speaking of which, I too have had that thing happen where you go to where a ruin is supposed to be, only to find nothing but a bare patch of ground. Yet the icon will disappear and the message appears saying you've found it, or whatever the wording is.

But niggles aside, I'm loving this game 8) Maybe it will wear off, but at the moment I can't get enough of it.

nice story :)

You can always change that dot on the map manually. Left and right of it are buttons (on your keyboard) shown that you may use in order to kind of scroll through. If there is a middle blue dot, then choose it again in case you went off.

Yeah, I've seen that. But my middle dot simply doesn't so anything at present.

In the meantime, I've developed a theory about Planet Scarlett.

First of all, in my last post I talked about how I can't find any sea animals. Coincidentally, when I went back into the game I came across a Gek theory about how the land masses themselves are the creatures. I've since noticed that the sounds I hear do in fact appear to be coming out of the caves. I only hear the sounds from time to time, and on one occasion I was standing with the sea to my right when I heard the sound come from my left. And right there was a big cave opening.

Now that I think about it, the sounds do have a deep, echoey quality to them.

So... Since there may be in fact be no animals, and since this planet has an over-abundance of Gold, Plutonium, Nickel, and a few other resources, and since the atmosphere doesn't cause Exosuit wear, and since there is a disproportionately large number of settlements (and a lot of terminals), I'm wondering if the whole point of this planet is to be a resource trove. The number of settlements, shelters, beacons, outposts, and everything else is crazy. I've been at it for two days and there are still locations popping up all the time. The log page doesn't say how many buildings have been discovered, but it's easily well over a hundred I've found, and quite possibly closer to two. I've done another twenty just since my last post .There are question-mark icons all over the place, and I no sooner claim one than I see more nearby. Often I can see one from another, and on a lot of occasions I can easily walk between them.

So maybe that's why there is no percentage of completion for this one. It exists solely to be a money and resource well. Maybe once in a while you just come across one of these. It may also explain why I get attacked by pirates so often when I travel from there to the space station - which, thanks to all the terminals and trading posts on Scralett, I haven't had to do for a while.

Bloody hell! You did it again!  :laugh: Slipped your post in before me.. :-X :-D

Going to read your post after posting mine so I can focus.

***

Quote from: fragger on August 14, 2016, 03:32:56 PM30 slots!? Now that's what I'm talking about :-()

Here, the one I found quite early.. note the green price tag at the bottom of the screen.. :o I obviously couldn't afford it at that time.
[smg id=8931 type=preview align=center caption="30 slots"]

Sorry about that... :-D

Bloody hell! over 6 mill? I'm gonna have to mine a lot more gold!

Regarding what I was saying about the plethora of locations on Scarlett, here's an example. This is not one, not two, but three separate locations:

[smg id=8932 align=center width=600]

THERE! He did it again!!  :laugh: I will try and slip mine in before you can, next time :-D

Wow. Nice pic. And whoa, that's a lot of businesses there packed together. I need to find something like that myself.

Regarding your completion and animals or no animals, go to the menu where your planet discoveries are, you can check the planet's overall stats such as weather, flora and fauna. I happened to be on a planet that said "fauna none." Probably carnivore plants there, though. Oh and look up, there are birds sometimes and hard to fetch with the camera.

Okay, I'll do that :)

Admittedly, that picture was an extreme example. There are some remote locations too, but by and large these things are everywhere.

Actually, after my next haul I'm going to another planet for a while. I'll be dreaming in red if I'm not careful. When I grudgingly go to sleep, that is :-()

Maybe this time  >:D

NO! YOU AGAIN!  :laugh:

And yes, red dreams may not be so nice  :laugh:

Remember that trading in your ship isn't actually trading it in. You just abandon it. So if you buy a 6M ship, you'll lose those 6M the next time you want to buy a "better" one. I am sitting on over 4M and can't just get my head around buying a new ship.. I hope upgrading my exosuit will do the trick, I am on 17 slots and have seen a friend's suit with already 24 slots. That adds up if you have a big ship, of course. My ship has got 22 slots I think. Bought it for 1.5M

Here, that's where you get the info about planets
[smg id=8933 type=preview align=center caption="empty fauna"]

YES! By accident I found something interesting.. I was plotting a course back to my home (starter's) system when I came across that yet undiscovered system and rather than jumping past it, I decided to stop there. And there was that "anomaly" in space which I dared to check out. It paid off, I'd reckon, didn't it :)

[smg id=8934 type=preview align=center caption="choices"]

I made a backup of my savegame then just to be sure to be able to revert to this in case I want to.

However, I finally got what I was looking for..

[smg id=8935 type=preview align=center caption="AtlasPass v1"]

And I have to say, I came through a system discovered by a certain Tristan. So we are not completely alone out there.. I think the systems close to the Atlas path are likely to be visited by other players but not necessarily at the same time and how they got there may not necessarily have been through the same systems than we did. Still, one quintillion what, systems or planets? Anyway, astronomically small the chance to actually meet someone and he'd be really stupid to try and camp there just to screw you up. Will likely never happen.

What was the anomaly? And the undiscovered system? Not really following you there, old bean :) But I'm glad you made a breakthrough. Maybe you'll get to the centre in short order. If you do, please don't tell us what you find ^-^ I know you wouldn't, you have too much decency to spoil it for us. But if the rest of us don't make it and give up, then we might come a-knocking...

18 quintillion planets, don't know how many stars. Which is a crazy number as even a large spiral galaxy like ours "only" has a few hundred billion stars. Figure an average of ten planets per star, that's a few trillion. A trillion is only one millionth of one quintillion. Bloody hell... Maybe there are galaxies with that many planets in them, who knows.

As you suggested, I checked out the planet stats for Scarlett, indeed the category for both flora and fauna is listed as "Barren". Which is a bit odd as there are lots of plants inside the caves, and some of the caves are whopping, and in crater-like depressions in the ground. Maybe "Barren" for flora means plants that are completely on the surface.

I'm off Scarlett now, time for a change. I'm currently hanging around the space station checking out the ships. It's kind of fun watching them come and go, and checking them out when they arrive to see what they have to offer. It's a bit like shopping for a used car, actually :-() I've got just under 3 million to spend. I don't know about a 30-slot ship, I agree that may be unnecessary. Depends what one wants to do, I guess. You could certainly haul a massive amount of minerals in there.

I nearly went for a 25-slotter for 2.1 mill, and there have been a few 24-slotters around the 1.8 mill mark. I'm getting familiar with the styles of the ships, they're a pretty good indication of what sort of cargo space they'll have. Carrying capacity is all well and good, but I also want to have a ship that I like the look of :-() Some of the designs are quite cool, some are weird. There's one that reminds me of a chicken - I wouldn't be seen dead in it.

Something I noticed, don't know if you're aware, is that when it comes to things that can be in multiples in a single slot such as minerals, the ship slots hold twice as much as the suit's. A suit slot will hold 250 of something like Plutonium, but a ship slot will hold 500.

I'm going for good Exosuit storage as well, up to 22 slots now. Expensive though, as every new slot you buy from one of those upgrade crate things costs an additional 10,000 units more than the last one. Slot #22 set me back a cool 100,000 ???

I've decided that I'm not going to obsess over getting 100% with every planet. There can be good money if you do, but man, I could spend weeks just maxing the five planets in this system. Especially Scarlett and that flaming Sentinel Hell :-\\

lol, fragger, that chicken ship comment of yours cracked me up: "I wouldn't be seen dead in it."  :-X :laugh:

Want to see a real massive one?
[smg id=8936 type=preview align=center caption="massive ship"]

I now know what I am going to look for -- take a look at the engine bits, there is a warp reactor sigma upgrade in there. Ever since, I keep looking for ships like that and I found one that, if I had had the money, I would have bought:
[smg id=8937 type=preview align=center caption="nice ship"]

Where did all the money go? Well, when I met that guy who gave me the AtlasPass, he offered weapon upgrades and every time it cost more money just like the suit upgrades. I had the money and kept buying so I now have plenty to choose from.

I got my second weapon there as well and my third from the third alien race (called Vy'keen) on a trading station which was on a planet with EXTREME weather conditions.
[smg id=8940 type=preview align=center caption="nice gift"]

The weather really, literally, went through your suit in SECONDS. I'd say, no more than 30 seconds and your acid protection was gone. I already have a shield upgrade in my suit. The "best" of it: the only place safe was either in your own ship or at the trading terminal, as in, you literally had to bump into it. Only in that proximity were you safe from the storm and rain. CRAZY. ???
[smg id=8938 type=preview align=center caption="Corroding Hellhole"]

Well, when I left that hellhole, I got scanned and attacked by a couple of pirates. I "mined" them properly, though  >:D A powerful mining laser is enough to fry those bastards.
[smg id=8939 type=preview align=center caption="pirates!"]

With that AtlasPass in my possession (it doesn't dissolve like those bypass chips) I can now, finally, access those crates and some rooms in space stations. Nice. In every space station is the first door now unlockable and behind it is, so far, always a suit upgrade machine. Excellent. And some other gimmicks, sometimes multitool upgrades, sometimes other stuff. I know that was a spoiler but one I think is more like an appetiser so I am sure you'll forgive me  8)

[smg id=8941 type=preview align=center caption="behind locked doors"]

The canisters you keep finding on planets that are locked with that pass contain expensive things like an Electron Vapour or some such, often usable for warp drive cells.

If you lost me, fragger, when I went on about the anomaly and such, that was because I didn't want to spoil it but still give a hint. You may not know what I meant but when you see it, you will.  :-()

Oh, this is not going to be a spoiler but a WARNING:

IF you meet up with the guy who gives you the AtlasPass, you'll have another option to talk to him. For 20x carbon, he'll grant you a choice of 1) Ship upgrade (20.000u) and 2) Weapon upgrade (20.000u) and 3) Suit upgrade.

DON'T buy the ship upgrade, it will ALWAYS be a ship engine you already possess, so save those 20k. Buy exactly ONE suit upgrade which may be unique (I didn't have it, but the 2nd upgrade will always be the same if you keep asking/buying and the price will go up every time for all things) but you may keep going regarding weapon upgrades. There will always be a new one. I stopped when I bought the last one for 500.000u (lol) and didn't want to go further (800k and so forth). That's where my money went.

There is a fallback solution: You won't be saving what you did there until you get back into your ship.. because when you get out again, that's when the save will happen. So in case you screw up, just go to the options menu and load the current save (it's when you arrived and got out of your ship) so you can experiment there a bit.

[smg id=8942 type=preview align=center caption="rip off"]

Damn, fragger, sorry to hear that. I am sure they will -- no reason to believe otherwise. We're not talking UBIshit here  :-()

I am on my way back to my first system but have been kept by a somewhat lush planet so exploring on foot is actually fun. I can walk around for an hour and not get attacked by anything, not even the weather  :-() I too don't want to fight. :angry-new:

I found out one cool thing: At least with a scanner upgrade, looking through the camera reveals small white dots that seem to pulse (if slowly) and you can see them even through solid objects like hills. When I got close enough (constantly using the regular scanner on top) those dots turned out to be points of interest of alien nature such as a terminal in an outpost or, most frequently, those language cylinders. Nice :) Man, there are loads that I would never have found without that thingy  :)

Here you see them in the centre, almost in a vertical line, two in the dark and two on top of the hill.. and I just noticed, there are three more to the left  :laugh:
[smg id=8943 type=preview align=center caption="white dots of alien nature"]

and I kept tracing them -- this is what I got for it
[smg id=8944 type=preview align=center caption="word by word"]

I didn't have time to read everything I missed while away on vacation, but it looks like you've all had a fun time so far. I have the game backup saved from my w@&k computer, so I will be able to install it tonight, not sure if I'll have much time to play it though. I've been watching a live stream of the game that's been on all afternoon, switching back to w@&k-related stuff when the boss walks in, lol.

The game looks cool so far, though.

I'm pleased to tell you that this problem hasn't recurred.

I suppose what we shouldn't do is trick the game by saving half the progress of one set location. What I tried is to get one part that I liked and save, then do the other part and in case I didn't like it, revert to that save. I think it confused the game so much that it declined my well-thought-out efforts :-() I found out that I couldn't save that Antimatter then. I don't have two spare Warp Cells, just one. So it saved before I tried to fiddle with that distress location. Well.

Oh, the test save of a location that later resurfaced when I "rediscovered" it (you know, I couldn't save my game but in the meantime, without saving, I discovered that location and renamed plus uploaded it) -- here it is. It was funny when I used some type of antenna to find new locations and it showed me a "new" one, with the name I had already given it -- a name by which I would recognise it and as a proof of concept :laugh:

[smg id=8946 type=preview align=center caption="problems or not"]

As to gold, man, I found half a mountain to harvest.  :laugh:

[smg id=8945 type=preview align=center caption="gold"]

Oh and fragger, you don't have to worry about not having picked up that orb. A friend of mine didn't pick it up, either, and yet he found his way to the same guy who gave me (and now him) the AtlasPass. Go get it, sport  :-D

He chose the black hole navigation while I chose to follow the way of those Atlas interfaces. I reckon eventually I'll come across black hole navigation just as I reckon that he'll encounter Atlas interfaces. I think it's just different ways to get to the same end.

OK, installed the game and ran it a bit, configured my controls, looked around, BSOD. Reloaded, ran game, looked at two crates at the crash site, BSOD. Lather, rinse, repeat. Several times. Asked Google and it's not just me, several people have reported BSOD under various circumstances. A lot of them are from overclocking, but as far as I know, nothing on my system is overclocked, not since that Far Cry 3 (or was it FC4?) incident with my memory. Anyway, looking at some info, I changed a setting in the config file for G-sync, which shouldn't make a difference as I don't have a g-sync monitor, but figured it should be off. Lowered the frame rate to 30, lowered the anti-aliasing and all the graphic settings to medium and it actually ran a few minutes that I had left to play. So, of the 90 minutes or so I had available to play, I got maybe 15 minutes of actual play out of it. Let's see what tomorrow brings.

Not too happy with the menu system either, the way it bobs around when you move the mouse, I don't like. I want it to stay still. I also don't like having to hold down buttons to make things w@&k, when I click on something, I want it to be a click, not a click and hold for however long.

But, it seems to be a fun game for the explorer type, and I got the bonus ship from pre-ordering, so whoo-hoo one extra storage slot and it doesn't look as gimpy as the default ship.

I grabbed the atlas sphere, I guess that's the best way? Or is it better to not grab it and go solo? I see Art posted some about it and it seems the Atlas helps out some?

Welcome to the galaxy, D_B :) Yep, those niggles you mentioned annoyed me a bit too at first, but I sort of got used to them.

Cool tip with the scanner Art, and good save story :-X That is certainly worth being aware of.

That pillar of gold... I'm not trying to engage in any kind of one-up-manship, but I wish I'd taken a screenie of the monster pillar I found on Scarlett, the one I got over 130,000 units out of. It was shaped like a bowling pin and was an absolute whopper. It took me about 10-15 minutes to laser it all down.

I had a similar save experience myself. It was when I wanted to buy a new ship and I was checking out the other ships as they came and went from the space station. I finally picked one, but when I got in it I didn't like the cockpit layout. So I reloaded the game, intending to get something else. When it loaded, I found I no longer had my original ship, it was still the new one - but I still had all the money I'd had before I bought it! I had a heady moment when I thought I'd gotten away with something - but on closer examination, I found I still had only the same 16 slots as before. In other words, it was the same old ship, but now it was a different model.

This trick could be useful if there's another ship that you like purely for its cosmetic appeal, but don't actually want to buy it. Well actually you'll still have to buy it, but before buying you'd do a save (quickly get in and back out of your old ship to make the game save), buy the new ship, then immediately reload the game (I reloaded from the "previous" slot, not from the "current"one). You'll have your money back, and won't get any extra slots or new weaponry or anything, but your ship will now have the new appearance and cockpit layout.

The ship I have now actually gives me a much better view of the ground. I can finally land with some degree of accuracy, as opposed to thinking I'm setting down right in front of something only to come down several hundred meters from it. The layout on the old ship obscured the front-downwards view somewhat. This new one lets me look further down in front.

Apparently you can have up to 48 slots on your ship ??? This new one is great, but I'm still having to juggle a bit sometimes. That's just me, I like to lug a lot around :-() I can see myself upping the slots in future.

Here's a quick tip for anyone in the market for a new ship with more slots. The general rule is that the bigger and bulkier the ship, the more slots it will have. So don't bother checking out the smaller ships at the station. I don't know if we all start with the same ship design - mine looked like an X-Wing fighter from Star Wars. Similar ship designs will have only 16-17 or so slots. I've noticed too that the different alien races all have a different range of ship designs. I got my new one from the VY'keen (and their space station is a giant inverted pyramid shape).

After I posted last night I played for a few more hours and that orbit glitch didn't happen, but I don't trust it - every time I take off now I'm half expecting to find myself back in orbit. I'm loving the game, but I haven't yet made a commitment to it :-() If that orbit bug persists, I'm going to have to leave it for another game.

The following link in its second ("Get Rich Quick") section talks about a method of trading with other travelers at a space station and using the items marked by the station market as buying at a premium to leverage faster wealth building.

http://imgur.com/gallery/BhsO2 (http://imgur.com/gallery/BhsO2)

I don't know if you can saturate the local demand using the described technique but I'd suggest at the end of each station terminal transaction make sure the various common items going for Premium that you are marketing don't drop back to their base price to save yourself unnecessary trading (haggling?) with the other visitors coming to the station to sell their findings.

There may be a few other tips here that deal with the strategy and nature of upgrading your suits, ships, and multi-tools that you might find useful.


There's one other thing I came across which unfortunately I am unable to credit back to the original poster.  I heard that the suit's thrust that allows you to fly conserves fuel if you don't actually leave the ground employing only forward thrust.  I've seen a comment that with practice the forward ground speed effect will allow you to zip up a near vertical cliff to a cave opening or ledge that would otherwise require flight.


My favorite take away from this thread so far was:

Quote from: fragger on August 15, 2016, 09:50:09 AM

I hope these pirate attacks aren't going to be too frequent a thing or it's going to put me off. I actually don't want to have space combat. I want to explore, trade, build up, learn the story and try to get to the galactic centre. If I want to have combat all the time, I'll play Wing Commander.

yep, that command.. er, comment, cracked me up, too :-X :)

mandru, thanks for the link. I actually hadn't figured out the premium (star symbol) system on a station because trading among the traders doesn't reveal its sense. Going to the traders once you know what the station terminal "wants" is something I haven't tried yet. I was successful enough just doing business down on the "trading floor" (space ship landing area) :-()

I can't save anymore but I can alt-tab out now.  :laugh: :D

I might as well start over, too.

And.. check this out (found on steam)

Quote7:05pmNo Man's Sky player maxes out ship, exosuit, and crafts an Atlas Pass without leaving his starter planet

PC Gamer

No Man's Sky player and Redditor DoktorFeelgood has played the space exploration and survival sim for over 25 hours, during which time he's maxed out his exosuit inventory to a full 48 slots, acquired 24 slot multi-tool, and found himself a 48 slot starship. The catch? He hasn't actually left his starter planet yet. Everything he's accomplished has taken place on the original planet he spawned on.

It doesn't sound like was a picnic, either. DoktorFeelgood reports that his starter planet wasn't some gentle, leafy, resource-laden paradise but an "acid desert with 24/7 acid rain." Not all elements were available for harvesting, so he had to locate a trading post and acquire minerals like copper and iridium through the galactic trade network. Luckily, his planet had plenty of gold for mining and selling. His suit upgrades were found and purchased through drop pods, which are scattered around the planet's surface.

To upgrade his ship, DoktorFeelgood used transmission towers to scour the planet for the distress beacons of crashed vessels, which typically present themselves as roomier than your own ship by one additional inventory slot, and he eventually worked his way up to the spacious space boat you see above. Dok even managed to find blueprints for an Atlas Pass, which provides access to special drops with useful and expensive cargo.

And, while he was shuttling cargo back and forth across the planet, he also managed to learn over 300 words in the Gek language. Just goes to show you, there's no need to commute. You can get a lot done by working from home.

Thanks, Eurogamer.

Got it to run for an hour or so until the first BSOD. I repaired my ship, went to space, docked at a station and sold some stuff, but needed more carbon. Took off and headed for the next planet, almost got to the surface, BSOD. Reloaded, Tried again, got closer to the surface, BSOD. Third time's a charm, got to the surface, saved, walked around getting stuff and the game minimized all by itself for some reason, and I couldn't get it to go back to full screen. It seemed to be running OK in the background, but it wouldn't restore from minimized state, so I had to end it. Tried the "3xperimental" code Art posted above and it says beta access code invalid.

But after playing the game a bit, I'm sort of liking it. I really don't like the slow movement, and the enormous time it takes to get anywhere, especially with the fear that any small thing could cause it to BSOD. If I could save anywhere without getting out of my ship, that would be nice.

While on a planet, it reminds me of Subnautica, only not underwater. Might as well be, though, you move so slowly. In space, it's like Space Engineers only you can't build stuff.

Well, just tried the beta code again and it works now, go figure. I'll try that. But what did you mean, Art, that you can't save?

Sorry to hear about all the probs you're having, D_B :-( I agree about the slow movement, it's like walking around in molasses. Even the sprint is more like a casual stroll :-() That's why if there's something more than a moderate walk away, I'll take the ship.

I'll let Art field the save question.

Me, I'm sticking with offline play. The game definitely runs better and while I still suffer from the occasional involuntary loft into orbit, it doesn't appear to be happening as much. Only three time during the past twelve hours or so of gameplay, and on two of those occasions I didn't end up in space but just a couple of hundred kays up, and could get back down quickly.

I'm not staying on planets with high Sentinel activity - I just land, claim, and move on. It's not like I'm going to run out of planets :-() I landed on one and a message appeared saying that the resources were protected and that the Sentinels would shoot on sight. One was in my face in no time. Okay then, bye...

The last system wasn't as bad with pirates as I thought it was going to be. I didn't get attacked, but whenever a few big freighters would warp in, the pirates weren't far behind. There would be a distress call followed shortly by the "Enemy ships detected" message, so I would pulse out of Dodge and avoid a fight - the pirates wouldn't come after me. For once.

I finally completed a planet, i.e. catalogued all the life forms. That's all completion consists of, tagging all the animals, nothing else. So far about half the planets I've visited don't have any animals, in which case completion isn't a thing. The last animal I had to get turned out to be a flyer, a creature like a miniature pterodactyl with a swallow's tail. There was a flock of them, and they moved around so fast that I couldn't get a tag on them. So I shot one down - you can still analyze them when they're dead on the ground. No Sentinels came and hassled me over it.

Got my suit up to 26 slots now, with Level 2 Jetpack and Stamina upgrades, among some other goodies. The extra slots were costly, but worth getting. I finally got a lead on the Atlas path, starting to make my way to it. I'm not in a hurry though, I'm having too much fun doing all the other stuff. I find it helpful to craft what I need and dismantle what I don't - anything dismantled can be built again from the blueprint some other time, as long as you have or can get the resources. For example, I'll craft an Exosuit heat shield (or whatever it's called) for hot planets and a cold shield for chilly ones, and dismantle which ever one I don't need.

The diversity of worlds in the game is amazing. I'd posted earlier about how there didn't appear to me much in the way of seas and oceans on the planets - boy, was I wrong! I just found a planet that is almost all ocean, with just tiny continents and small islands dotted around. The game does look fantastic, with wonderful photo-ops going begging all the time. If I stopped to take a pic of every cool scene that presented itself, I'd never get any proper gaming done :-()

I discovered that it's worth analyzing unusual rocks, too. If you see a boulder with an unusual pattern on it, even if it just says iron oxide when you stand close to it, analyze it with your binos. The pattern will turn out to be some kind of exotic element, which you can upload as a discovery for some dough.

The experimental version seemed to run pretty well, at least no BSOD after an hour or so using it, so that's a good thing. Next I need to try upping the graphics options and see if that causes any problems. Probably my imagination, but it seems that the walking speed is ever so slightly faster with it too, though some times it seems slower, so probably just me.

I spent some time on the new planet looking around, and found all the waypoints or whatever they are called, and scanned everything I saw. I'm not going to rename all that stuff, I still haven't thought of a name for the system or planets yet, thinking up names for all the plants and animals isn't going to happen. Though I briefly thought of calling them things like "Iron Mushroom" or "Carbon Treething" but that would just mean I'd have a bunch of things called that, and really, who cares?

But there is a good amount of enjoyment just flying around looking for interesting things (but, my god, does this game need a freelook option while flying), found some of those abandoned stations or whatever they are, with some stuff in them, fast ran out of storage space, found out when you discard something, it just disappears instead of falling on the ground like any sane person would think, so that you could maybe drop something, pick something else up, then decide which to take with you? Not to mention you can't open a container without a free inventory space, so you drop something, only to find out that container had junk in it, and you'd really rather have that thing you dropped back. Shot down a couple sentinels because they bugged me, but ran away when they called in reinforcements.

Art, I was never aware you could load different saves, I never bothered to look, and the menu system still bugs me, so I don't read as much of it as I should. I thought you had one save and it auto-loaded and saved and that was it. The only option was to delete the save and start over from square one. The menu system bugs me so much it took me a few minutes to figure out how to exit the game normally, you know, once it stopped crashing.

As for some screenshots (maybe about time to start a separate screenshot thread? I imagine we are going to be here a while)

The pre-order bonus ship, in all it's not-anything-like-a-Star-Wars-ship grandeur. Once I get some moneys, it will be dumped I'm sure.

[smg id=8956 type=preview align=center width=400 caption="X-Wing - not a registered trademark or anything"]

Another ship at the station, also not anything like a ship you might have seen in any TV show or movie, you can't prove it, I dare you!

[smg id=8957 type=preview align=center width=400 caption="Serenity - also not a registered trademark or anything"]

Yes, a mountain of Emerald, and not the biggest one I found either, the bigger ones couldn't all fit in one screenshot

[smg id=8958 type=preview align=center width=400 caption="Yes, I know it's called Emeril in the game"]

Haven't seen any pirates yet, but then I haven't left the first system either, but the pre-order ship has a heavy laser weapon thingy that I don't think comes with the normal ship. It will take out a small asteroid in one shot, so hopefully it will do well against pirates. I will reserve judgement on them until after I encounter them.

Oh yeah, if you look at the Steam notes for the game, there are a couple useful posts about getting more money, suit upgrades, etc. You guys might already know. But one seemed a bit cheaty almost. Save at a station, then go out and find a cargo ship, and attack it, hoovering up all the loot you get. This will of course get you in trouble, but that's what you want. Let yourself get blown up and die, respawn at the station, fly out, and I guess when you die, your stuff gets left behind? Well, go pick up all the loot you just stole with no repercussions.

Oh yeah again, today's Penny Arcade is relevant


Ugh, too big to embed, someone shrink that again? I forget how. Done that, knew how to. / Art

Yeah, I read that, I might even try :-D

I just read a news article on steam telling us that there are already MODS out for this game.. a mod that rids us of pirates and drones would be very cool.

Entertaining post, D_B, and again you named a few things I think we all wondered why, like the stuff you delete from your backpack rather than dropping it, and you wrote about that in your typical dry and straight manner which cracks me up, nice  :-X :laugh:

Speaking of Mods (or possibly a software update/game tweak) something I'm sure would be fairly well welcomed would be an additional category of upgrades for your ships which would enable and improve the ship's automated ability to repel pirates in flight and possibly provide players some ground cover (at least within line of sight when near the ship) while exploring.

A player would probably be required to pay the costs of energy, materials, or fuel required to utilize a feature like that but if ships in the game had highly capable auto defenses that can be boosted to remain at least one step more agile, smarter, and deadlier than the pirates...  It sounds like it would be well worth the price.

reminds me of the X series (X² and so on) where there were modules available that could auto-protect you by controlling the ship's turrets and firing at enemies. Which again reminds me, why the hell can pirates scan your cargo while we can't? How can they pull you out of warp or pulse speed and even block those engine modes while we can't? And why can't we protect ourselves against those measures?

However, regarding better sight, I noticed that mouse and keyboard won't w@&k or at least I don't know how to but with a controller, you can actually look around. here a series with the redeemed space ship (pre-order bonus)

[smg id=8959 type=preview align=center caption="ahead"]
[smg id=8960 type=preview align=center caption="right"]
[smg id=8961 type=preview align=center caption="left"]
[smg id=8962 type=preview align=center caption="down"]
[smg id=8963 type=preview align=center caption="up"]

OK Art, how you do that? I'm sure there's an equivalent on mouse/KB, but I may go the GTA route and switch to controller for flying, as NMS does hot swapping of controls like GTA does.

Oh, and I'll just leave this here:

http://nomansskymods.com/ (http://nomansskymods.com/)

right joystick for "view"

Joystick support for the game would be nice. I've got my nice joystick that would love to be installed in a spaceship.

@mandru, about all you can do the deal with the pirate threat is upgrade your weapons and shields. Some kind of avoidance measure would be nice, but as Art said, the game won't even let you cut and run. I could put up with the pirates if I at least had the option to run away, but I don't - the game forces me into a fight whether I want to or not. That's what I have the real problem with.

Twice now I've been jumped while entering a planet's atmosphere, and the pirates have somehow ended up below me where they apparently can't climb and they can't shoot back at me, so I've been able to rain photon shots down on them from on high. Those are the only two times where I've had any kind of advantage. They're so nimble and their aim is so phenomenally good that if there's more than one of them, you're in trouble. On one occasion I had four at once and I didn't stand a chance.

For those of you playing, I don't know if you're aware of it but there is an aiming reticle during combat which calculates deflection shooting for you. When you're pointing towards an enemy, you'll see three marks appear around the pirate ship indicating a kind of lock-on, but there'll be another three-sided aiming-type reticle a short distance away from the target. This reticle is what you should aim at, not the pirate ship itself, as it's calculating the deflection of the shot for you.

I haven't seen pirates yet, as I'm still in my home system, but I did try to attack just a random trader to see what would happen. He of course called the cops, and I took him out and a few of the sentinels, maybe 3 or 4 all told, before I couldn't repair my shield fast enough, then died. I spawned back at the station and got the message to go pick up my stuff but I loaded the save game instead as that was just an experiment. Do any of you have an idea if there's a limit to the lives you have? I see on the upper left there's a health indicator and some symbols for things that look like lives, but that would be weird in a limitless exploration game. I guess I should look up what the HUD parts mean I suppose. But the tip I posted earlier about attacking a freighter and grabbing the goods until you die will w@&k, so just have at it I suppose.

But the latest patch that the experimental branch supplied yesterday seems to w@&k very well, no crashes last night after 3 or so hours of playing. I also used the "optimal" settings that nvidia had set up, which were all higher than I had them set at just to get it running before, and it all seemed to w@&k well. I spent a lot of time on a barren moon with no animals and only a few plants, gathering resources. Went back and forth to a trading post to sell stuff and got my reputation up enough that a guy there upgraded my mining tool for free. Now I can just give them 20 carbon and request a new word to learn, so soon I hope I'll be able to understand them better. This is the Viking language (I know it's Vy'keen in the game) I guess there are two others? Anyway, I forget my standing with them, most trusted or something like that.

Oh, and installed the "no waiting to click something" mod from that link above, works great. No more pausing every time I want to do something in a menu. I guess that's put in so that console users can be sure what they are clicking on with their clumsy clunky controllers. Going back to that site to see if there's anything else I want to install to "fix" the game.

those symbols aren't lives, I suppose they represent how much shielding you've got.

The bar above is shield, and the symbols themselves are "life" for lack of a better term, cause it seems once the shield is down you start losing those, and once they're gone you die.
And on that note, space combat on this game is bullcrap  >:((
There's literally NOTHING you can do to prevent getting jumped (short of never going anywhere) and ALMOST NOTHING you can do to survive once it happens  :D
This aspect of the game needs a BIG overhaul  :angry-new:

yep

the only thing you can do is fill up your entire ship with upgrades.

Quote from: Art Blade on August 21, 2016, 12:20:53 PM
yep

the only thing you can do is fill up your entire ship with upgrades.

Yes, and it's garbage - not to mention it undermines the spirit of the game. The most annoying thing is that you get pulled out of pulse drive when you get attacked. So let me get this straight - an object traveling at near light speed gets ground to a relative crawl by a scan from a pirate ship, because reasons  :D

totally agree :-D We had this discussion elsewhere here already, apparently no one of us likes nonsense and to be forced to fight, on top every fricking time you leave or enter whatever it is, station or planet or system.

I too hate this pirate business that gets in the way of everything I try to do above a planet's surface, but I'm dealing better with them now. Once you start getting your weapons and ship shield upgraded (and arranging your upgrades efficiently) you can survive longer against them. Since rearranging my ship's weapon upgrades to take the best advantage of the adjacency bonus (I prefer the Photon Cannon for combat) I can clobber them fairly quickly. My Photon Cannon now spits out shots like a minigun. I can usually trash a pirate ship with one or two good bursts, and my Shield lasts longer before needing to be restored.

Doesn't make the pirates any less of a pain in the backside though, I would still be a much happier camper if they weren't around. Occasional pirate attacks would be OK, might even help to jazz things up once in a while :-() But something like one attack every couple of dozen trips on average would be tolerable. Getting jumped every flipping time you venture out into space is ridiculous.

Can you actually, in any way, benefit from those pirate attacks? Like getting (scrap) metal or blueprints or maybe even respect from the locals?

If you destroy the pirate ships you do get increased standing with whichever alien race governs that system, and sometimes a destroyed pirate ship will leave a canister floating in space that you can fly into and pick up. So far though, every canister I've picked up has been empty, but presumably you can get something out of them once n a while. I don't think every destroyed pirate ship leaves a canister behind.

Ah I see. So they should rather downgrade the amount of pirate attacks or upgrade the importance of good standing with the 'natives' and the amount of good loot you get from those cannisters. Judging from your experiences a downgrade of pirate activity would be best... Or giving you an escape opportunity so that you can choose whether or not you'd run the risk of confronting them. The latter would implicate imo that those cannisters contain something valuable.

Man, it's been long since I've lived so intensely with other's gaming experiences!

Why don't you join us? :) The game is great fun, despite some of the shortcomings we've mentioned - the worst of which were fixed with the patch (the save problem, Alt-Tab functionality. and the frame rate). The pros definitely outweigh the cons. I'm even learning to live with the lift-off glitch, which I seem to suffer from far more than anyone else here - as far as I know, Art has only encountered it once, and D_B not at all. I get it a lot. It would still be nice if they would fix that, and I think maybe they will since quite a number of players suffer from it. It's included in most gaming sites' "known bugs" sections.

Actually, I got the launch to orbit thing for the first time yesterday, but I think there was an overhang of some of the landscape fairly close to where I took off from, so maybe that messed up the ground avoidance thing and shot me to orbit? Then again, I've also taken off close to some overhang or cliff and just bashed right into it, so who knows?

And, for anyone who wants to read the main gripes a lot of people have about the game that was shown in the preview videos, and the game that was released, there's been a web page created for it, as the original reddit post is gone since the author deleted his account on that fact he was getting too much grief for it.

http://www.onemanslie.info/the-original-reddit-post/ (http://www.onemanslie.info/the-original-reddit-post/)

There are a lot of good points made there, things were specifically talked about that were in the game a few months before release that vanished in the time before actual release. I didn't watch all those videos closely back then, just skimmed some and thought it looked like a cool game. I didn't go, "Hey, at 1:56 in that video, they showed a river and talked about XYZ feature, and it's not in the game now, and I'm mad!" but apparently a lot of people did. I can understand where they are coming from, it's almost like seeing a commercial for a new car that has doors, only to find when you go to buy one, that it does in fact, have no doors.

I think when Sony got involved, they soon realized that the game they were making was in no way going to be playable on a Playstation, and Sony told them to tone it down until it does, and what we have now is what was left after they cut a bunch of stuff. One of the main things is the number of creatures you see on screen at a time, animals attacking each other, etc. These types of high level AI and number of objects on screen is just something a console can't deal with. Heck, even a decent PC would have trouble. But they kept showing stuff like that in the videos up until a few weeks before release, and that has ticked a lot of people off.

Terrain doesn't seem to be a factor with the lift-off bug in my case, I can get it anywhere.

It certainly is looking like the reason for the delay in releasing the game was not because the devs wanted to fix last-minute problems, but because they needed the time to cut stuff out at the insistence of Sony to make the game console-friendly. I still enjoy the game, but I can't help wondering what else the game might have had to offer if Hello hadn't gotten into bed with Sony.

Incidentally, I have seen an animal kill another animal, but only on one occasion.

Well, I can't join right now. First of all because I'm 2000 km away from my rig (still on holiday in Spain ;))  and second because I've spent so much on holiday that I should be careful with farther expenses atm, heheh

But I am definitely considering the purchase of the game. I know I will enjoy it greatly, and it would be super cool to share the fun with you guys :)

I certainly hope that you'll join this epic galactic party  :)

Likewise :)

And the nice thing Binn is it's only a 6GB download, so you won't have to wait an age for it to come down.

to me it was only 2.5, I think it gets extracted to 6 on installing it.

Yeah? I didn't watch it, I went and did something else while it was downloading.

I watched it, which is how I also know it took like +/- 8 minutes with a 50Mbit line and you said it took you like 10, with a less capable internet connection you'd have downloaded about 3x the volume in a comparatively equal amount of time. Just trying to make sense of this information and I can only conclude that you checked the disk space used, not the download size of the installation packet.

With my current data rates I don't have to worrie about any download sizes, but anyway I Will definitely get the game, although it Will probably be somewhere late september I guess. This game is just too fun to miss :)

I just went by what was reported by numerous sites on the net immediately pre-release, and since the download only took a few minutes I didn't bother fact-checking. Fact-checking now, it is actually about 2.6GB.

 ^-^

Man, you guys are probably so far ahead of me now, and I'm the one that had the head start! :laugh:

That's cool, it's not a race :-D

Indeed. It's not a race, as fragger said, no need to rush anything, so let's relax :)

Well, at least as long as mmosu doesn't start to overtake us, that is.

 :-D

Quote from: Art Blade on August 27, 2016, 05:43:10 AM
Well, at least as long as mmosu doesn't start to overtake us, that is.

Yep, figured something like that was coming  >:(

You're right though, it really isn't. I'm looking at NMS as what I'm planning on filling the days with in between Destiny expansions, and since there's a big one coming up in a couple weeks, I'm in prep mode right now- stocking up on resources and being sure I've checked everything off of my list for this chapter of the game before it moves on to the next. I'll be back on NMS soon, but to be perfectly honest, that last pirate encounter left a really bad taste in my mouth  :angry-new:

yes, I think no one here so far likes pirates.

What seems to w@&k is to stay in the first system and for what I can say, I have tested several times, jumping up to 8 times between the first and second system never triggered pirates.  There will be a distress signal in space about the 5th or so jump, but even if you get caught in the middle, don't fire and just ignore them. I got hit but not wrecked. I was able to conduct my business at the spasta (space station.. shorter) and jump away. The distress signal disappeared. After the 8th jump between those two systems I quit the test without ever seeing any pirates.

Wanna start over? :)

I don't want to jump in to a system and quickly jump out again, I'll probably want to explore among the system's planets without getting attacked every time I travel between them. When the pirates' target is you and not the freighters (not a distress call mission) you can't ignore them - they'll doggedly follow you all the way into a planet's atmosphere.

The devs definitely overdid the pirate attacks, way too many of them. The first attack I copped was in the very first system I jumped to after the start one. It was just one fighter which I tangled with and shot down, and I thought it was actually pretty cool, believing it was something that might happen once in a while. I didn't realise that from then on I would have to go through that practically every time I went into space. It got old pretty darned quick.

Some sort of pirate frequency setting for the game would have been nice, but the devs seem to think that everybody wants lots of combat.

So strange, I just made the first jump to a new system, and no pirates. Completely random thing, and you just go unlucky?

I think fragger triggered it by (if accidentally) shooting up a freighter. And the second time by getting involved in that distress signal space battle, if I remember correctly. Which is indeed unlucky, both times.

I have my current career and have spent a lot of time in my 2nd system, going from and to planets and the spasta, never saw a pirate. I did at least two if not three independent tests, starting from the first system, and did several jumps, the highest count was 8. Albeit, I only jumped between the first and second system. However, no pirates, ever. Only once a space battle, that bloody distress signal in mid-space.. I got shot at but it may have been stray bullets as the battle just rushed past me and stayed there, waiting for me to join which I refused to do. I was able to land in the spasta, even trade with the pilots, and get out to jump to the other system again. The distress signal was gone, no pirates. Jumped away and back, no pirates. Reverted to my current career again.  No pirates.

I think not attacking anything might be the key at least in the first two systems to avoid triggering pirates.

Oh and fragger.. if pirates keep getting at you.. maybe a change of your aftershave will do the trick  :-()

 :-D

No, I did nothing to trigger the first attack - that episode with the freighter was about three systems later. I jumped into the first system after leaving my start one, went to the station, then went to the nearby planet for a while. I then flew to another planet further away, and about halfway there I got the "Hostile Scan" message. Got taken out of Pulse and had to mix it up with a single pirate ship in the middle of space. From that point on, every second or third flight would include a pirate attack, and every second or third attack, the number of pirate ships would increase by one until I was having to deal with four of them at once. And the attacks became more frequent, until every trip through space would involve an attack.

I read elsewhere on the net that the more cargo you carry, the more of a target for pirates you make yourself. I don't know if that's true or not, but I think not as when I was in that system I would be attacked regardless of what I had on board.

In my new system I've had a few interplanetary flights without being attacked. Maybe some systems are more prone to attacks than others and I was just unlucky the first time, but in that game no matter which system I went to I would get attacked frequently. Maybe it was a bad part of the Galaxy :-() Or maybe it's race-related. I've gone from one Korvax system straight to another, haven't met the Gek or the Vy'keen yet in this game.

Speaking of galaxies, are we all even in the same one? I'm in a galaxy called "Euclid". It tells you the galaxy name in one of the pop-ups somewhere, maybe when you land on a new planet or in the Galactic map, I can't remember exactly. I thought there was only the one galaxy that everybody played in, but maybe that's not the case.

yes, I read Euclid as well.

Okay :)

I've been in this new system for a while and made a number of trips between planets, and haven't seen any pirates (touch wood).

I was thinking about the space stations. Here's this gigantic thing with just one opening to fly your ship into, you enter and fly down quite a long passage to the docking area way inside the depths of the station. Yet you then go up one level, down a short corridor, and suddenly you're in a room with a window looking outside ???? It's like the Tardis in reverse.

nice. :-() Just like the math geniuses who created the buyer/seller percentages.

Example: In your inventory, you'll see the actual average price, like 27,000 for those resonators.

When you buy them for say, +1.4% over average, they cost around 33,000. When you buy or sell them for say, +103% above average, the price is some 55,000.

Well, yes..  ???? ^-^

or worse, sell an atlas ball for around 65,000 but buy one for around 2,200,000. MAKES SENSE :D

 :laugh:

Yesterday I met another pilot on a planet and he had one of these atlas balls. I thought "Wow, this is a once-in-a-playthrough-chance to buy something super-duper unique" and paid the price. When I went checking if it was still in my inventory (I thought it might have disappeared same as the original ball we get when we start the game) I saw the lousy 64k and thought "What the F*.... reload!" :D

hehe yeah, during my first career I was given an atlas ball for free and only then saw it was worth nothing if you wanted to sell it compared to the price when you wanted to buy it.