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Starbound it especially makes no sense to me (beyond being creatively rewarding, which NMS could or could not be, who knows) because there's no universal server. Every generated instance is its own thing.

 

But NMS!

 

*checks out mod stuff* 

 

*sees no-hud shortcut mod*

 

*is happy*

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Performance is definitely CPU bound, not video card. I have a 970 and it's barely heating up, but my fairly nice i5 is constantly pegged.

 

"Oh man, I'm going to go through  Giantbomb videos while I play this game"

 

:( 

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That's the exact situation I ran into. Check my process priority note pasted here from the page.

 

Edit: I probably should have posted this earlier, but I was having all sorts of problems streaming video and other critical applications on PC hitching and breaking when No Man's Sky was running. I noticed over the weekend that the NMS.exe process is set to Above Normal priority in task manager. While I'm sure they must exist, I've never seen another program set itself to anything but normal by default before. When I switched to Below Normal (In Win10 you can do it from Task Manager > Details Tab > Right Click NMS.exe) the performance of everything else on the PC improved a ton, with a barely noticeable effect on NMS itself.

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I don't understand why base building matters at all, since you're moving from plane to planet all the time. Much the same way that building a base doesn't matter much in Starbound either, because you're not on a planet long enough to really get much of a use out of a base because individual planets are rarely interesting enough to be worth hanging around.

 

It makes sense to build A base in Starbound, though. It makes much more sense to me than NMS. It's where all your things are. There's agriculture and cultivation. Gotta come back to pick your corn. It also makes sense from a travel standpoint, because my understanding (I am still a Starbaby) is between hubworlds and technology you can teleport between some places. That makes "going home" viable in a way that backtracking in NMS doesn't seem to be, or seems to be somewhat discouraged (either by a quest mechanic pushing you forward, a sense that seeing new things is a goal more than returning to previously seen things, or the overall disposability of so many planets).

 

Plus there's multiplayer. It's drop in/drop out. You can invite whoever you want into your game to see your rad castle, or give them a planet's coordinates because they're all accessible to everyone.

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Hmm, it's been a while since I played Starbound. There wasn't really a way to teleport around before, so as you ventured further from home it would cost more and more fuel to get back. Eventually I just started harvesting food on each planet as I went.

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I do agree about the futility of base building. 

 

This is why I built up a fantasy about getting a space RV you could walk around inside of, and maybe even customize the interior into your base. I especially get this fantasy during warp-speed sequences, to walk away from the cockpit and go to the back of the RV, like in all the sci-fi movies and shows.

 

But that won't happen any time soon for so many technically reasons. The warp-speed sequence between systems is clearly a loading screen animation, you can see the geometry for the cockpit load and unload when arriving. You can't even move your view around the 70degrees you normally could. The warp-speed animation I assume is when the generation happens, meaning there's no resources left over to goof off in the back of the RV with a zoo of space-cows. Maybe this could be possible, if the whole travel time took a lot longer.

 

Terrestrial base-building seems like an easy promise to deliver on what they already have without having to get crazy technical.

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That makes "going home" viable in a way that backtracking in NMS doesn't seem to be, or seems to be somewhat discouraged (either by a quest mechanic pushing you forward, a sense that seeing new things is a goal more than returning to previously seen things, or the overall disposability of so many planets).

 

It isn't discouraged so much as completely not supported. There's no way to tell where you've been or what path you've taken from the galaxy map. Early on in my playing, I had been excited about having a hyperdrive and left my starting system. After a second warp, I remembered that I hadn't scanned more than half the junk in my home system and decided to make it back there to finish it out. I spent 20 minutes fiddling with the map and never even found the last system I had been to. I wouldn't be surprised at all if it turns out that there is a way to do so that's just never made obvious, but as of now, it seems almost impossible.

 

If they put in base-building without an easy way to return to any given planet, they may as well have never done it in the first place.

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I'm guessing base-building will only be something that matters once you get to the center of the galaxy (whatever that means, I'm on my second planet still). Maybe that's an end-game system to give people a reason to go back out into the rest of the galaxy and continue mining.

 

Timing-wise it would make sense as something to drip-feed the release of, since it'll feel like an "awesome" "addition" after the portion of their rabid fanbase has gotten to the center, rather than just another part of the base game (no pun intended, sorry).

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Base-building combined with not being able to return to your home system could add up to some interesting story telling. The feeling of leaving your home, never to return. Who knows what, or who, you left behind?

Or, the feeling of returning to a home after it has been abandoned, player bases are seeded into the world. And those bases might always appear abandoned, if multiplayer is never integrated, we remain in our separate instances, continuing to be ghosts that can hear our own footsteps.

it sets up "No Man's Sky" to share a lot of thematic environmental qualities of "Gone Home."

kkQz8M7.jpg

Which could be cool.

But, it's also antithetical to the universe being so big no one ever sees each other. Wouldn't base building encourage people finding each others star systems even more? Isolated multiplayer interaction seems to be barely within scope, let alone a lobby full of cooperating builders.

Perhaps every day the ghost town you live in will update itself.

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It's not super obvious, but you can definitely trace your route back to where you came from. Scanning for discoveries on the Galactic Map will show you your old discovered systems. Last time I scanned I found all my old systems, all the way back to my starter system, and one system discovered by a "Kenny". :tup:

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Is that what that button does? I've hit that almost every time I've used the map, and I've never seen anything obvious happen. The rest of the game constantly makes you press and hold to fill a circle or plays a sound cue when you do anything, so not seeing or hearing any sort of response made me think that it either wasn't working or there was nothing to scan.

 

Speaking of which, there's a mod to make a mouse click a goddamned mouse click.

 

Listening to this week's Bombcast reminded me that Cheat Engine exists, and there's a cheat table that strips away some of the crafting and inventory bullshit. Might be something to look at if all you want to do is just explore.

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Listening to this week's Bombcast reminded me that Cheat Engine exists, and there's a cheat table that strips away some of the crafting and inventory bullshit. Might be something to look at if all you want to just explore.

 

Take care to not get VAC banned.

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Is that what that button does? I've hit that almost every time I've used the map, and I've never seen anything obvious happen. The rest of the game constantly makes you press and hold to fill a circle or plays a sound cue when you do anything, so not seeing or hearing any sort of response made me think that it either wasn't working or there was nothing to scan.

 

Speaking of which, there's a mod to make a mouse click a goddamned mouse click.

 

Listening to this week's Bombcast reminded me that Cheat Engine exists, and there's a cheat table that strips away some of the crafting and inventory bullshit. Might be something to look at if all you want to just explore.

 

The PC control overlay is the wrong binding, apparently. It's "X" not Tab or whatever it says. :P

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The PC control overlay is the wrong binding, apparently. It's "X" not Tab or whatever it says. :P

 

HOLY SHIT IT WORKS

 

As icing on the cake, after you've scanned, you get a prompt that says to press "D" to find the nearest discovery to you. It doesn't work (WASD rotates and zooms the camera). It's "X" again.

 

Great.

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"Experimental Branch" has been released for PC users. Some kind of beta hot-fix of various PC architecture functionality stuff.

 

Oh man, yeah. Sorry, I forgot to post that here. It's been out since day one.

 

Also! I installed the latest Nvidia drivers from the 16th and they massively improved my frame rate! :tup:

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Base building makes sense because the crafting doesn't seem to be in service of anything other than exploring, and exploring is gets repetitive, so the game will eventually need to evolve into something else. THe center of the galaxy thing is a good goal, but a year from now, no one will care. That is assuming they want players to keep playing this... which parts of the game seem like its that kind of game, other parts seem like it's a digestible one or two off experience.

 

***

 

I have a pretty weak cpu, but was still getting 60fps on launch day, the fact it is quite a bit slower since the weekend suggests they adjusted the code somewhere that "broke" it for me.

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I've also lost interest in "getting to the center" as it seems there's no unique proc-gen there.

 

All the unique proc-gen seems to be on the other-color-stars that requires advanced warp drives. I haven't farmed those up yet.

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I've also lost interest in "getting to the center" as it seems there's no unique proc-gen there.

 

All the unique proc-gen seems to be on the other-color-stars that requires advanced warp drives. I haven't farmed those up yet.

Huh, that's interesting. I thought it was supposed to get wackier as you got closer to the center. Wonder why that changed.

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Whatever is going on with the Atlas is creepy and I want to follow that to the end. I have yet to understand one word it's saying, despite having picked up a few Atlas words here and there.

 

Edit: I'm a bit stuck right now. i need a larger ship, since most of my ship is taken up by artifacts I need to hold onto. Because of that, I don't want to refuel my warp core since that will all be lost on a ship swap, so I've also got a cargo hold full of warp fuel. All that cargo being used up makes it take longer to make money, which delays the ship swap, which means my cargo remains full. :( I've been hopping around hoping I'll just find a crashed ship that's big enough so I can save my money for more suit upgrades.

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I finally realised that you can Hide the HUD in the Graphics Settings. How did I not notice this shit before taking so many screenshots?!

 

Anyway, here's my first HUD-less shot in 4K!

 

3UBRCtm.jpg

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The weird pop-in and bad anti-aliasing are starting to get to me. I feel like this game should be so pretty, but it isn't. 

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When you're using a mouse, the menu's parallax scrolling gets clamped down on pretty severely, which was great up until this happened:

 

post-8476-0-97906900-1471569961_thumb.jpg

 

Being able to charge components by dragging materials onto them solves that problem (Did you know that was even possible? I didn't until four hours ago!), but I'll still have to juggle inventory around if I want to craft something and there are only bottom spaces available.

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