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[Shadowlord]

Saving binary data in the .png format and having it still be a coherent image, though? I mean, I know that that's pretty commonly done (almost trivial), but using it for a game you're actually selling and having it be good enough to work is pretty amazing.

Yes.
I won't give you an example because the examples I know are both Japanese and NSFW and I don't want to be seen with knowledge of those things. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

By "NSFW" you mean "anime porn games," don't you?

[Gunner-Chan]

By "NSFW" you mean "anime porn games," don't you?

3D custom girl uses it, so do others like Artifical Academy 1 and 2, Yuusha and another illusion game I can't remember the name of for it's poser mode too.

If I remember right it's not exactly a technical feat, as I think you just load the actual data stream into the header or past the end of file otherwise depending. I remember seeing a gif that had a zip file hidden in it with that kind of trickery.

[guessingo]

Whenever I see a hyped game that is a big bust, I like to thank all the man children who pre-order this stuff. Thank you for wasting your money and pre-ordering so I can see all your comments. I do not feel sorry for people who lack 'self control' and 'delayed gratification' to wait a week after release for reviews to come out and for online comments from fans about games before buying.

I look at reddit for forums and you see the guys who have no self control posting pictures of the beers and sodas they bought just for this game they have been waiting forever for... and I think good god. Its just a game. Wait a week for reviews. In 6 months virtually every game has a price cut. You bring this on yourselves. Its a game. Its not life saving medicine. Its not water for someone dying of thirst. Its not indoor plumbing so you dont have to go to an outhouse in the middle of the winter. Its a game.

People who buy into all this hype are idiots. Jim Sterlings site got taken down by psycho fans because they didn't like his review.

Before this game came out, I was seeing obvious red flags that the fan boys ignored.
1. No review copies
2. When I see interviews with Sean Murray, I get a big 'wtf do I do ?' its all about your stupid engine.

My theory is the guy over scoped the game and spent so much time on his 'universe generation' engine that he didn't make it fun. He under estimated how hard it was to make the engine to generate the universe. Then he got financing from Sony and his small team had to port to both Sony and PC with just 15 people. I can get why he had to do that, they needed the funding.

[Flying Dice]

It's mostly likely that Sony forced an early release, TBH. The game is full of places where there are obviously absent features and mechanics. And Murray was contractually obliged to not say so, and too much of a social failure to get the point across without violating any terms.

[Krevsin]

It's mostly likely that Sony forced an early release, TBH. The game is full of places where there are obviously absent features and mechanics. And Murray was contractually obliged to not say so, and too much of a social failure to get the point across without violating any terms.

Honestly I also believe that the dev team bit off a bit more than they could chew and that the current game is such as it is due to the perfect storm of those two elements. Big budget publisher setting a firm release date onto a project of a team that may have had dreams a bit bigger than they could manage.

[Retropunch]

It's mostly likely that Sony forced an early release, TBH. The game is full of places where there are obviously absent features and mechanics. And Murray was contractually obliged to not say so, and too much of a social failure to get the point across without violating any terms.

Honestly I also believe that the dev team bit off a bit more than they could chew and that the current game is such as it is due to the perfect storm of those two elements. Big budget publisher setting a firm release date onto a project of a team that may have had dreams a bit bigger than they could manage.

Agreed. I think most of it was last minute cuts to make it more stable. To make sure that everything works across a procgenned universe is pretty difficult. If they took risks and released it with stuff that was a bit buggy it'd be panned for being released way too buggy (more than it already is!) and so I imagine they just cut everything that had any slight problems.

Key example would be the flight model - it's been massively simplified and I think most of this is just because the earlier one was always getting into issues. Hopefully they've done 90% of the work with most of the stuff they showed , so the rest will come out a reasonable pace

[MaximumZero]

I was told that your jetpack is unlimited when pushing against a surface and climbing

This is true, have tested.

[ragnar119]

New disappointment discovered : No Man's Sky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8P2CZg3sJQ

[Retropunch]

New disappointment discovered : No Man's Sky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8P2CZg3sJQ

That video is...pretty harsh. I can name roughly every single game ever that's had features cut last minute or downgraded (take the entire Ubisoft catalog for shining examples) and not had such a harsh treatment. I also don't think that showcasing a few glitches and weird creatures makes sense - it's a massively open world game - these things are bound to happen. Ironically, the video keeps panning back to skyrim as some sort of gold standard, which was the king of all glitches when it was released.

These things happen in game development, and I can't fault them for it really. The only big issue I have is the multiplayer element - that's such a core piece of game play that it either is in or it isn't - they needed to be clear on that from the very start.

Again, I think a lot of it is just that the hello games team have been woefully bad at communication after launch - they really needed to get ahead of all this and make some assurances rather than just trying to weather the storm. If they came out and said 'hey, we know a few bits are missing, we'll patch it all up asap' then everyone would cool down pretty much immediately - the issue is that people think it might never get fixed.

[ChairmanPoo]

For the look of things it's too darn expensive for the content that actually got released. I  can understand that they feature-creeped themselves and probably had to make a saving throw. However, I can also see why someone who paid 60 bucks expecting something better might feel they've not gotten their money's worth.

IMO the moral of the story is:  be wary of preorders, be wary of hype, don't buy in impulsively.   

I learned this one with That Which Sleeps. In hindsight, the 10 bucks lost in TWS have been recouped with interest in a way, as I avoided jumping onto this partly because of the TWS experience

[Putnam]

New disappointment discovered : No Man's Sky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8P2CZg3sJQ

Ironically, the video keeps panning back to skyrim as some sort of gold standard, which was the king of all glitches when it was released.

And has the entire arena questline and a good chunk of the mages guild questline (I.E. the part that makes it make any sense at all).

[ragnar119]

New disappointment discovered : No Man's Sky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8P2CZg3sJQ

That video is...pretty harsh. I can name roughly every single game ever that's had features cut last minute or downgraded (take the entire Ubisoft catalog for shining examples) and not had such a harsh treatment. I also don't think that showcasing a few glitches and weird creatures makes sense - it's a massively open world game - these things are bound to happen. Ironically, the video keeps panning back to skyrim as some sort of gold standard, which was the king of all glitches when it was released.

These things happen in game development, and I can't fault them for it really. The only big issue I have is the multiplayer element - that's such a core piece of game play that it either is in or it isn't - they needed to be clear on that from the very start.

Again, I think a lot of it is just that the hello games team have been woefully bad at communication after launch - they really needed to get ahead of all this and make some assurances rather than just trying to weather the storm. If they came out and said 'hey, we know a few bits are missing, we'll patch it all up asap' then everyone would cool down pretty much immediately - the issue is that people think it might never get fixed.

Sorry its not a good excuse to say if ubisoft or any other company did similar crap and went away with it, people should go soft on no man sky. Especially as people were never soft on ubisoft and crap they did with watchdogs and assassin's creed.  If you do shit, be prepared to get shit back, especially if you hyped that shit up a lot compared to any other game out there. All this problem could have been stopped if the developers were honest and not quietly supporting all the hype so they can sell more copies.

[Retropunch]

Sorry its not a good excuse to say if ubisoft or any other company did similar crap and went away with it, people should go soft on no man sky. Especially as people were never soft on ubisoft and crap they did with watchdogs and assassin's creed.  If you do shit, be prepared to get shit back, especially if you hyped that shit up a lot compared to any other game out there. All this problem could have been stopped if the developers were honest and not quietly supporting all the hype so they can sell more copies.

I certainly don't think we should go soft on them, I just feel the level of vitriol has been a little bit too high. NMS basically delivered (other than multiplayer) what it said it was going to, it just didn't do it as well as people had hoped. That video for instance kept on showcasing physics glitches as somehow being indicative of how terrible it is, whilst pretty much every single open world game has the same problems. Similarly the other bits have been pretty minor - no landing on lifeless asteroids? wow. much care.

I completely agree they needed to be more honest and upfront, but I can't blame a developer for allowing hype. Wouldn't you want people to be hyped about your game?!? Other than the multiplayer aspect, I feel that the whole 'SEAN LIED TO ME' is just due to people imagining it'd literally be star trek: the game, and it falling short of their ridiculously high expectations.

[LASD]

I've been talking about this situation with quite a few people already and it took a while to find a good piece thinking about it from the developer's point of view, but here's one.

Quote which also pretty well describes my feelings towards the situation:

None of this means that we can stick a designer in a room, demand extraordinary feats of prediction and shout liar at them when they fail: this is a waste of everyone’s time.

[ChairmanPoo]

I disagree. They based a preorder marketing campaign on claims that were misleading at best. They deserve to get thrown into the lot of people who have done the same.

I think the author is being corporativist, possibly because once he had his own dubious promise to deal with: Frozen Synapse ended up getting coop as paid DLC (IIRC it was supposed to be a free update at first... then it was left out)