how will they do the discovering species part of the game? will it be the first person to find the species amongst your friends list? or do they have a cloud database of thousands and thousands of species? how will that work
Animals are given a base type of animal (such as a deer base, or a meat-eater base). Then, the game generates the animal off a series of sliders, sticking to the color of the planet's/area of the planet's flora and fauna in order to make it not stand out.
This system is the same for trees, and partially the same for ships (which are confirmed to be three classes: trader (heavier weapons, more cargo space, probably slower), fighter (very "sleek" and acrobatic-like) , and adventurer/explorer(stealth mode, better hyperdrive)
To get back onto the question, the game also randomly assigns a Latin name to the animal based on its characteristics. Players who first discover the creature will give the animal a common name, and Sean, the lead programmer, says that he knows there is going to be a section of the galaxy that has animals with the name "snake".
This is all using ALGORITHMS.
This game is literally a graphical compilation of heavy math, algorithms, and rules. When you leave a planet, everything you looked at gets deleted, but when you go back to the highest level of detail (there are multiple levels of detail), everything there will be the same to the pebbles that you were there. When you look up at a planet from another planet, that planet is at the lowest level of detail. When you decrease your distance, the level of detail increases.
Honestly, the scaling stuff? The entire loving universe, to scale?
Sounds a little too good to be true.
No. No Man's Sky is not the size of the Universe, because you probably won't be able to find and map every single planet in the game's universe, because the sun would have consumed our IRL Earth.
The GALAXY is not a universe, but it is to the point where it can be called infinite.
Who knows?
Dinosaurs in space the videogame
10% of all planets will be habitable/have simple life.
10% of those planets will have complex life (might be highly mutated creatures).
10% of those planets will be a utopia of pretty deer and nice dinosaurs.
(something around that)
The developers had to FIND the planets in the videos. None of it was scripted.
Oh, and this game has CAVES.
and JETPACKS.
*hype intensifies*