Ever heard the saying “Everything looks like a nail when you have a hammer”? Basically, just because you have a tool, it doesn’t mean it’s the best tool for every job. UE5 is great for making games, cinematics and loads of other stuff. But why use it to effectively behave as a browser like Chrome or Firefox, but worse, when there are alternatives made specifically for that?
If you peruse the folder where it’s installed and compared to any UE4 or UE5 game, you’ll notice all the other similarities in .dll files, folders and whatnot. Even the CrashReporter.exe is the same you see in unreal games. Or you can check the config files at Epic GamesLauncherEngineConfig which has stuff like BaseEngine.ini which, among other networking configurations, also has this:
Meanwhile, in Epic GamesLauncherPortalConfig, the “game” part of the launcher, you have DefaultGame.ini and DefaultEngine.ini, the latter’s first 2 lines pointing back to the Engine folder: [Configuration] BasedOn=…EngineConfigBaseEngine.ini
So, yeah, it’s the actual engine. I was going to complain about disk bloat, but my Steam install is currently sitting at 1.3GB and I’m not entirely sure how much of that is from cached stuff. GOG Galaxy is taking ~980MB, but roughly 650MB are from redist installers (MSVC2005, 2007, dotnet, etc), so a “clean” install would be way lighter than Steam or EGS, the latter at 1.1GB on a clean install.
I really wish they’d start by not making the EGS program a fucking UE5 app. Seriously, using the whole ass engine to render html is stupid beyond belief
What you been describing is not 3D models and meshes, which is what takes up the majority of the hard drive space.
My brother in christ, what the fuck do you think i’ve been describing then? I even linked an example of how the 3d model itself, the geometry, the mesh, occupies less disk space than the actual textures
For comparison, this Damaged Helmet in gltf format (which you can see on your browser here) has 15k triangles, a .bin file (the actual 3D geometry) of 545kb and roughly 3MB of textures - The Default_albedo.jpg is the “actual color” and it alone is larger than the .bin + .gltf, at 914kb.
What I see is that you don’t understand how procedural generation works. As is today, how do you think planetary terrain is generated? That it is all saved as a file that is read from your computer/PC? That you could load up a “planetXYZ.file” externally to edit it? That the terrain mesh is this huge file with all sorts of hills and plains that you could import/export and load in Blender?
The limitation is coder skill, not hardware. That .kkrieger example is 20 years old. It could make a Pentium 3 “generate an entire FPS game” from less than 100kb of coding instructions alone.
The question is "why don’t other people do it, then?" and the answer is “because having all those media resources as files makes the startup faster, memory usage down and is easier to modify and replace”
Judging from a quick Lets Play watch, the game is a top down 2D space combat with 3D graphics. You can go down on planets, but it’s a small map and meant mostly to upgrade your ship and repair it. It’s a space game with big focus on combat, but with nothing remotely comparable to NMS, really. Despite the irritating sound effects, I’m actually curious to trying it out sometime in the future.
.kkrieger did that. Not a “real game”, it’s a demo (of a demoscene), a “proof of concept” or a “proof of skill”. Nostalgia Nerd has a very interesting video about it on youtube.
3D models tend to occupy less disk space than textures, as these usually come in at least 2 files: one for the actual colors, one or two more for light mapping (bump map, emission, normals, etc). I don’t know which format NMS uses, but a .obj 3D model with 62k triangles will take around 4.5MB of disk space.
For comparison, this Damaged Helmet in gltf format (which you can see on your browser here) has 15k triangles, a .bin file (the actual 3D geometry) of 545kb and roughly 3MB of textures - The Default_albedo.jpg is the “actual color” and it alone is larger than the .bin + .gltf, at 914kb.
That’s the same problem again, you need hard drive space for all that 3D variation.
Not really. Again, they just need to be smart with what they have. Grassy planet where one third is green grass, another is red grass, another is yellow. No need for any extra stuff to be made, they already have the building blocks. Better yet, mostly grassy planet with patches of radioactive terrain surrounded by desert.
For buildings, just think about player made bases. You can make effectively “infinite” interiors and exteriors with all the stuff players can use to make a base. Write coordinates of “premade” rooms, write some extra lines of code to join specific rooms together and bam, all you needed was less than 10kb of extra text to increase variety.
If you mean mining Active Indium, they nerfed the price hard some updates ago. Using Oxygen + Chlorine for infinite multiplication still works. Another easy-ish way to get money is with a huge plantation of cactus. There’s a recipe that turns 200 into a gel that sells for 50k each.
TLDR > A lot of the repetitiveness isn’t a problem of “Lack of disk space”, it’s just a matter of not making good use of procedural generation. Seeing “the same building blocks in a different configuration” is better than seeing “the same thing”.
the space that they would need on your hard drive to make the game really non-repetitive visually would be out of this world
Not necessarily. You can procedurally generate textures, sounds and geometry, but that becomes a huge CPU hog in a game that already blows CPU usage. But most of the repetitiveness can be “fixed” (read: reduced) without adding more than ~20MB of new textures and geometry.
One of the problems is that there’s no variation within a planet. Every grassy planet is the same mechanically. Sure, one might have bubbles in the air, another might have yellow grass instead of red, but they’re mechanically identical. It’s the only planet type to find starbulbs and minerals with parafinum. No grassy planet has an ice cap, or a desert patch, or a volcano. If you ever need to find cactus and pyrite, you have to go to a desert planet. If you need uranium and gamma weed, radioactive planet. Then you have the caves, which are completely identical in every planet.
Some planets may have bio luminescent plants, which are gorgeous to look at, but because there’s no variation within a planet, you see them everywhere. There’s never a point where you think “This is the spot on this planet”. Because everywhere is “the spot”, so it’s just “the planet”, which can also be found on the next star system.
Save for airless planets, if I’m not mistaken, every planet has the same 3 “trap” plants (man eater, whip, spores in a cave). There’s not even a color change depending on the planet. Same damn plant, same damn damage, same oxygen amount on death, whether on ice or on a volcano.
Another thing that compounds on the lack of planetary variation is the same sin that Starfield did, of every point of interest being the same everywhere. Every market is the same, every small settlement is the same, every infested facility is the same. This one is easy to give more variation, just create some building blocks and chain them together, like how rooms are generated in ARPG games like Diablo or Torchlight. You know how each star system has a different market rating? Use that to calculate the maximum size any one POI can reach, or as a weight to the POI that can appear (small settlements become more common in 1 star system, markets more common in 3 star, etc).
They do the above in a limited capacity with derelict freighters, so it’s not like there’s “no way” to do it or “they don’t know how”.
Yet another thing that breaks the immersion and “want” of exploration: the vast majority of the galaxy is “settled”. Star systems without any alien presence are the exception. What the hell are you even exploring if there’s already someone there with a working teleporter in space, plus several POI dotting every planet?
The inventory has been one of the primary sources of complaints since day one, but despite several major overhauls they haven’t fixed the core issues, just made it slightly less inconvenient to use each update.
Still waiting on them fixing the fucking interaction. Hold E to interact with the thing 5yd behind you instead of the npc right in front.
Another old annoyance that will probably remain until the end: stopped firing your weapon for 1 second? Let me holster it down again, sure you won’t mind the extra 400-500ms animation lag until you have to fire that sentinel again!
PS: Oh, and the teleport list! Another thing that desperately needs more information shown and a way to order/filter it.
Your comparison makes no sense. Watching a movie in a theater is much like watching a an actual play or a live concert, it’s a “group experience” that isn’t quite like watching a playback on your TV.
If you divide those 870 over 24 months (2 years), that’s 36 dollars a month. If you spent that money every month on games, you could get 1 or more each month and might luck out and get a HUGE “return of investment” if you calculate it entirely as money / time played. Plus, it’d be hours and hours of entertainment any day of the week, not only “each weekend”. Buying on GOG would also mean you get to “own them forever”.
You pledge to support the development of the game
Please act and reply like an investor instead of a fanboy, then. Just because you want to see the game come through doesn’t mean you have to defend everything RSI does to raise money.
Gave it a whirl. Basically, you can now scrap ships to get their components to create a new ship inside any station. Couldn’t find any merchant within the station selling pieces, so you have to go out and explore, or scrap some of your own ships.
Stations now look slightly different from one another and no longer have those semi-hidden rooms that nobody cared about. Alien vendors now give a discount if you’re at a good standing with their race. Guild “vendors” offer a list of stuff for free, but I don’t get why the prompt is red instead of white. Performance is still mostly CPU bound.
Overall decent update, but the new features don’t warrant playing more than 1 hour.
The irony is how much Starfield copies from NMS, often the bad things and as a worse copy, like scanning stuff on the planet surface, jump range limitation, space “exploration”, shitty performance