What Are you Playing Now & General Game Discussions

[Stewy]

(09-15-2023, 05:49 PM)basballguy Wrote: It never even occurred to me that the entire planet would be random (terrain and points of interest) outside the main cities.  

We're having some misunderstanding here.  AI creation of a planets topography and RSS density, is not the same as procedural generation of quests, events, etc.  Some locations like New Atlantis were absolutely hand crafted.  The topography and RSS distribution are likely the same for all of us (with perhaps the nodes themselves being randomized?).  However, each planet is likely divided into sectors.  Some sectors will have a set quest that is the same for everyone (like the initial quest on Kreet), whereas most of the sectors will be populated by procedural generation the first time you land.  I guess I just got unlucky by having 3 Autonomous Farms right beside each other around New Atlantis.  But that does speak to the smallish pool of locations that each planet has to pull from when building out the planet upon touching down.

So it's:
Have a computer build a world with certain inputs for size, conditions such as garden world, or a moon, etc.  Tweak inputs to get what you want and BOOM a new world.  Does it have main and priority quests associated with it or is it just a RSS world with random events?  The team would add the non-random events/quests, and let the computer generate the rest upon first encounter with the player.

Note that the Mass Effect Andromeda team was working with AI built and Procedurally generated worlds in Pre-Dev, and according to report got them to work in their world builder software.  This was 2014 before NMS.  However, they never could get the worlds into the Frostbite engine.  So this concept isn't new and Kudos to Beth for seemingly pulling it off.