No Man's Sky: How I Learned to Love Procedural Art
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.ค. 2024
- ""Procedural"" is a bit of a buzzword at the moment, but what does it
actually mean? A tiny team of artists at Hello Games is using procedural
technology to create the infinite worlds of No Man's Sky, and in this GDC 2015 talks, Art Director Grant Duncan describes their procedural journey so far, as well as show the tools and techniques they've used to bring technology and art together far closer than he ever imagined.
I love how they had to make virtual "drones" that use in game rules to debug their game.
NMS’ custom color palette is one of its greatest strengths
I'm only 6 minutes in, and this guy has already explained more about the precise way the game generates content than anyone else has. The great thing about procedural generation with computers is that computers can't actually generate random numbers. They seem random, but they are actually not, which means that every time you randomize based on a seed, you'll get the exact same result for all the "random" values, which is why you can go back to the same planet and see the exact same scenery. It's fricken brilliant.
20 minutes in - I could listen to this all day. It's fascinating!
Yeesh, you have no idea how procedural generation works
SleepyHe4d Actually, I do. Maybe you don't.
He does, actually. I've worked with it before and he's right.
+SleepyHe4d
i dunno, seems pretty accurate to me. Do you want to share your obviously superior knowledge of the matter to enlighten us?
He seems to have a firm understanding.
Great dialogue about the procedural generation and how it works in No Man's Sky to create the interesting life and landscapes displayed thus far. Kudos.
I'm not a techie or an artist, but hearing and learning about the procedural generation in No Man's Sky is so fascinating. I'm going to need to expand my storage options for all the screenshots and videos I'll be taking of this game.
***** Hmm, good point. Can't wait to get out there and explore.
did you actually buy it? did you like it?
Amazing! Can't wait for the release :)
And did you like it?
Yeah, it's great
@@baronvonbeandip its coming boys! very soon we nearly at half way through!!
Great talk, thanks!
Probably one of the most informative videos about no mans sky, really reassuring the care that has been taken to make the worlds feel real, not a homogeneous soup of random creatures and plants.
+Burgled *cough* spore *cough* oh EA.... what have you done!??!
This looks great! NMS just need more animal variations and please more of that cool looking terrain anomalys and you has done the greatest generated world ever!
just thought of something I would like to see a video on, the variations of the kind of stars that are used in No Mans Sky. Will we see red dwarfs, pulsars..ect? Will stars die? can we see black holes created from them?...again, I may be asking way to much from this game..but that stuff would be cool.
When I think of procedural generation, I think of a deck of cards.
64 cards, simple enough, but then it's shuffled and everyone gets 5 cards, and the hands have amazing variance. Then magnify that by a million, and even the average joe can somewhat grasp what procedural-generation means.
The shuffling, card types, and hand limit are the rules, the cards are the possible outcomes.
The tricky part, which I am amazed by the devs at No Man's Sky for tackling, is getting the rules to produce beautiful art consistently, limiting the amount of variance (and even removing variation in some places) to narrow results down to something consistently publicly appealing.
Artists definitely have reason to feel threatened, as the truth is procedural generation can eventually overtake them in productivity and potential. Though, I like to think this will just give artist more room to work on center piece art like boss-designs, rather than spending dozens to hundreds of hours on terrain and miscellaneous mobs.
We could reach a point where, there will be a lot less room for artists, but the artists that find work will be doing a lot of meaningful work!
+mega17 It's not all that hard. I work with procedural generation in my own time a lot, and it's amazing how interesting the stuff it can create is provided you design the algorithms right. At the end of the day, if procedural generation results in shit, it's not the fault of procedurally generation. It's because the programmer has built a shit algorithm.
+mega17 bad artists won't become good artists because they learned how to program. bad programmers won't become good programmers because they learned how to draw a turkey with their hand. Nothing new to fear. Good artists will still be in demand... so will good programmers. Someone that worked to get good at both will make the others irrelevant and forgotten. The greatest artists have always been on the forefront of technology and science. If a creative person refuses to keep learning and inventing they will spend their career following others as a perpetual hobbyist or disposable contractor.
Those are some extremely snobby rebuttals. lol
mega17
And yet it is true. Procedural generation is just maths. If you don't tame the maths properly, then you don't get a good result.
***** Randomness is chaos from order. Procedural generation is order from chaos. People too often confuse the two.
2015 comments: Ooh, No Man's Sky!
2016 comments: Hahahahahahaha... Ha.
2017 comments: Oof, don't remind me.
2018 comments: No Man's Sky didn't turn out that badly in the end.
2019 comments: 2015 comments: Ooh, No Man's Sky!...
Your comment confused me.
I want this in my veins now!
@8:25 I see procedurally generated buildings etc. There's nothing like this in game yet.. is there plans to incorporate something like this at a later date?
there are currently procedural crashed freighters and freighters, what do you mean? edit: just noticed you said this 4 years ago
There needs to be an exception From ALL THE RULES on every 1000ish planet, so that we get so see the real weird stuff going on!
Or maybe we can have a weapon that can do this?
lindersi Sean has stated the weirder stuff can be seen when you start getting closer to the center of the galaxy.
8:20 what did he say? i really want to find that ruins generator
+Naj Kraemer procworld.blogspot.com/
ninjadodo thx
How does two players get to meet at one planet, shouldn't the planet be different for both players at same location? and biome also be different?
+Abdul Wahab Khan the planet will have the same seed, in his example: the planet has a unique seed to that specific planet which is stored and when both players get to the planet, it gives them both the seed of that planet then their own "math boxes" get the seed and give the same result because the math box is an algorithm that takes the seed and deciphers it into different things for the planet, such as the colour of trees and the sky.
The same planet would be using the same seed for both players. So they look exactly the same for both of them.
*****
Then how the player made changes on the planet is stored? if its stored in server and players retrieve it then it means the more storage is required the more planets you visit?
+Abdul Wahab Khan i think they store it locally. so no big storage needed on servers.
Abdul Wahab Khan
that is a really good question
This game blows my mind the more I think about it. I wonder how large the game install will be. If it's smaller than one gigabyte my mind may well explode.
+Jahooba Well that's the idea. A lot of it is generated at runtime from only a couple hundred models and textures so the install won't be significantly large.
Not responsible for your minds destruction when you hear about the demoscene and what they can do in 64k.
You play it now it is really great now
The game itself is 2 gigabytes but 75% is just music I think
@@isbestlizard "Not responsible for your minds destruction when you hear about the demoscene and what they can do in 64k."
I got 10 teras of disc space on my computer, who gives a fuck what someone can get from a 64k executable, it's totally irrelevant.
Sharks and dolphins can't share the same rig/animations since sharks has a vertical caudal fin and dolphins has a horizontal one.
Also, its possible that they could rotate the entire tale/spine before applying the skin weights so that the left and right motion becomes up and down.
"And"
I wonder, What is under that tee-shirt, sir?
26:00 Some of the most dangerous animals on Earth are actually large herbivores (think hippos, buffalo, moose, etc.) Loving this process but this bugged me a little, their creature/flora+fauna design could have benefited a lot from a biologist consultation! Of course, this is less art direction and more behaviour coding.
Still baffled you won't bring this to Xbone.
Where it at tho
every fucking tree looks like the same besides color and leafs
Same goes for animals
this is probably the only thing I'm disappointed with the game btw
really? I think the artstyle was the best of the game. It is just empty, has no real gameplay elements, but it looks neat.
Its like minecraft in an entire universe but with nothing to do...
Like real life then
Funny that his fears got realized after the release of the game...
Namely it being an endless boring realistic terrain. Procedural methods are great time savers when used properly.. but often it's not the case. It always ends up being varieties of the same thing... which dry out quickly & you're left with.. well, the same thing. It's just a shortcut at the end of the day... reduced work increased content output... and often at the expense of quality. This is a content creation perspective though... Not talking about the game engine. A procedural engine has a lot of advantages in that it doesn't have to load all the objects in the level in memory & will instead stream & instantly generate data as you move around
It was a classic mistake, thinking procedural generation can actually create content. Real content can only ever be made by people, procedural generation can only chop it up, mix it around and deliver it in different combinations. All those procedurally generated animals in NMS were made of textures and body parts etc that had to be hand-made. Even in a game like Dwarf Fortress, the building blocks that make the world were hand-made, it just happens to be easier to mass produce content when those building blocks are all simple text-based elements.
It's still incredible too me how so many people look at this and act like procedural generation has never been done before. It just blows my mind. Not the procedural generation. Simple stupidity.
+KneeShoe it's never been done this beautifully before. (unless of course our universe is also a simulated world but that's another topic for another simulated day)
procedural tech has been around for years and years, but it has never been applied in such a practical, large scale way before. Like Duncan said, most examples of procedural tech use "programmer art" and it is never usually very interesting to look at unless you are passionate about the underlying system functionality.
Because this team have spent so much time and brain power bringing the engineering of procedural tech together with art they are getting a lot of attention and I think they totally deserve it.
Diablo 1 had procedural levels...
It came out in 1996 :P Same concept now but applied to 3D graphics... nothing fundamentally new here... just different methods
So it just uses 64-bit seeds then...
+Barry Smith You fool.
spuddie ?
seriously though who don't know Minecraft
even if the game was shit but helo games made a name for themselves
These guys from Hello Games are not exactly great at making their presentations exciting. They all seam shy and reserved, and that's cool I am too..i understand. but maybe they could get a hype man or spokesperson to explain things during conventions in a more exciting way...cant wait for the game!
Steve Mabee Because they are not trying to overhype their game, like Bungee did with Destiny. It´s their first big project and I guess they try not to make it sound better than necessary
Mike Serds I get that, but they could be a little more excited about their own game..it kinda worries me a bit cause its like they are saying "don't get to excited about this game" why?..is it going to be boring?
Steven Mabee They don't want people to be dissapointed if it's not as cool as it looks.
Steve Mabee GDC is more of an "scientific" discussion panel than a sales show! So it´s meant for persons who are interested in the details and the process of building the game. The audience is filled with Artists and Gamedevelopers. He doesn't have to sell his game to them.
+GimletSc THIS. +1
No Man's Sky shouldn't have been advertised as a game, it should have been advertised as a procedural art generator.
i would rather have someone that really understand procedural generation than this guy that try so hard to get a grasp on this....
but then i dont want it spoon fed like a sheep, this is procedural generation for dummies, and i am no dummy.
I expected to see more art and not slides full of texts.Disappointed!
ElGuapo this isnt really meant for consumers to watch
Brendan Forish So you think that consumer would watch this 30 minutes presentation?
that is the exact opposite of what i said and i quote "this ISNT meant for consumers to watch" this is a GDC presentation this presentation isnt about no mans sky its about precedural art and making other artists understand that procedural art it does not take away control and it can be a good thing to use even in games that arent procedural