Just_Ice_au, you have been tremendously helpful to new folks lately, both linking to and quoting information relevant to their questions.

Thank you!

"[Y]ou can’t die, but you can lose everything" seems pretty unambiguous to me. If you're adventurous or just unlucky, you take a substantial loss to the gear that allows you to explore more effectively. Hence my term "permageardeath." I think that works directly against exploration as gameplay, and ...

I just saw the RPS comments based on Graham Smith's interview of Hello Games's Sean Murray, lead developer of No Man's Sky. I think they are trying to make my brain explode. I really, really do not like designed-for-consoles or online-required. But nearly everything else described about NMS sounds e...

CutterJohn, I respectfully disagree. I don't think there's much doubt that starship interiors are completely doable from a technical perspective. The real question is whether a game will benefit from having interiors and the other features that need to go with them. (The old "but what would you do w...

There are always the ALife flocking algorithms....

This is the part where I mention the difference between realism, which pulls things from our real world into a game about elves or starships, and plausibility, which defines the specific physical and social features needed to define the invented world of a game. Starfaring civilizations building cra...

Just to be clear, my comments about this game being designed to work on consoles (albeit "next-gen" consoles) and multiplayer were simply things I don't care for. Those features don't necessarily make No Man's Sky a bad game; they just make it one less interesting to me. Having said that, let's unde...

Procedurally generated worlds with ecosystems sounds great to me. On the other hand, it's apparently being built so it runs on consoles. And it's multiplayer. A lot of folks want or are OK with those things; they just don't do anything for me. Certainly worth watching, though, if only to give other ...

I did check out Pulsar. My antennae are always up for things like this. ;) While I'm all for making it, and I like a lot of its announced features, it's not something I'll be playing. The co-op features don't do anything for me, but more importantly, roguelike permadeath makes exploration too risky....

Thanks for the reminder about Rodina. I actually wrote the developer about it last year with some questions, and got back a very nice and informative note. I'm looking forward to it, including the interiors. But I'm hoping they'll have gameplay value at some point. I have nothing against ship-murder...

Gazz wrote:maybe we didn't quite turn out the way He intended and He's been on the line with tech support for the last few thousand years.

I'm hoping they skip the usual first item on the support script where they asked if He's tried rebooting the system.

ThymineC wrote:But Einstein said God doesn't play dice? I'm so confused.

There's another story that, after Einstein made this remark once too often at a meeting, Niels Bohr is said to have complained, "Einstein, stop telling God what to do!"

Ah, ship interiors. I literally cannot count the number of posts and threads on this subject that came up in just the two (pretty heavily-trafficked) forums I was part of that talked about the design of Star Trek Online. (The first was a fan forum for Perpetual's version; the second was the official...

Some additional thoughts: 1. All of these ideas should support the intended gameplay experience. We (or at least I) don't know exactly what that's meant to be. I assume from the LT Prototype that individual dogfighting will be possible, and some kind of fleet management. But I don't know if the latt...

VR went down like a lead balloon … Never underestimate a lead balloon. Not quite the small balloon made of solid lead that inspired the metaphor, but fair enough. Actually, for many years I've loved Buckminster Fuller's idea that a large enough " tensegrity sphere " would, if the air in it were hea...