Neil Tyson, Bill Nye, and George rr Martin are making a space game

[insert_name]

looks like Neil Tyson, Bill Nye, and George rr Martin are making a scifi sandbox. he seems to want to follow the laws of physics. it sounds cool, wonder how it will stack up to ksp?

link

[HebaruSan]

Quote

“You can build planets!” exclaims Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Wow, they somehow killed my interest in the first sentence. That just screams to me that they haven't thought about the actual gameplay at all (like No Man's Sky). Similarly...

Quote

For example, there’s no understanding of modern chemistry without physics, and there’s no understanding of modern biology without chemistry

...

If you’re on an exoplanet where the gravity is a little bit higher, maybe twice that of Earth, then if you create life, that life is going to have to be structurally sound to function in that gravity. Legs would have to be stockier, you’d have to be shorter, and life would have to look a little different. So the laws of physics then constrain what kind of life would ever evolve under one condition versus another.

... sounds like a Spore-esque emergent behavior design. We'll program the laws of physics, and the rest will happen naturally on its own! Except no game has enough CPU power to evolve organisms according to real (=interesting!) chemistry and physics in real time, so you'll get another simplified creature editor where you build Mr. Potato Head with fur or scales or horns.

Then he goes on to talk about base-building, bridge-building, resources, and trading. What is it, are we building planets, evolving life, running a company, or building bases and/or bridges? You need to focus to make something worth playing. This is the kind of scope that kids come up with when they tell stories about their toys, not a real product.

Reading between the lines, it sounds like a dev team hired Dr. Tyson to consult on some of the science in their game (whatever it actually is, impossible to tell from this interview) and they had a meeting to do some spitballing, and he came away with completely unhinged expectations about a fully realized Everything Simulator that is realistic and physics-based from the ground up and still somehow fun to play. And then this interviewer interpreted his vague impressions as if if he was co-designing it.

He's even teasing "future releases" already (evolving life and quantum mechanics), for a product that doesn't have one release. To me, those are markers of when the dev team tried to rein him in after he went completely off the rails. Yeah, yeah, Neil, we could consider doing something like that someday, but let's get back to talking about what we're realistically planning to do in the first release.

Edited July 24, 2017 by HebaruSan

[StrandedonEarth]

Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke...

[StupidAndy]

well I usually like things that people don't usually like, so I might like it, I'm interested

[WinkAllKerb'']

cool steps build the nexts

meanwhile

if you ask neil he may add that many stairs are endless

Edited July 25, 2017 by WinkAllKerb''

[pxi]

@HebaruSan covered just about anything I would have said.

I'll be keeping an eye on it because hope springs eternal, but I think we've all been down this road more than once.

Expect nothing, never be disappointed.

[kerbiloid]

11 hours ago, insert_name said:

and George rr Martin are making a scifi sandbox. he seems to want to follow the laws of physics

First two chapters... Then they get bored and: "Kill'em all with magic fire".

As in Spore the will be trapped by the gap between simulators of a mad demiurg (creating planets), Dr. Moreau (body modification) and Sim City (economics micromanagement).
As in GoTh they will sink in details.

Quote

If you’re on an exoplanet where the gravity is a little bit higher, maybe twice that of Earth, then if you create life, that life is going to have to be structurally sound to function in that gravity. Legs would have to be stockier, you’d have to be shorter

Or this just means that big moving animals can't survive there (hard to feed, hard to breathe, hard to move), and the biggest moving species will be a cockroach. 
Cockroaches can survive at several hundred "g" and even don't understand, what's happening. Living under two "g" is not a problem for them at all. Insects don't know about gravity.

And the biggest local species will be a colony of moveless actinias eating these cockroaches.

Why couldn't we be the biggest possible bioanimals in the Universe?
We definitely see that both weaker and stronger gravity make problems for the Earth species, and also both much smaller and much bigger planets look unappropriate for the life due to different reasons, the Earth is near the optimum.

So, in this case the game will be an ant colony simulator.
 

Quote

Structurally, can I build it out of rocks or do I build it out of metal? Do I have access to metal? No? Then I need access to a metallic asteroid.

Metal rocks. Rock is metal. Just a little rusty, because oxidized.

Spoiler

You can reach an asteroid without metals? Then why you need any metal at all?

 

Quote

Also, that the dragons are anatomically correct, with forelimbs becoming the wings (as in bats), rather than having separate wings sprouting from their backs

Happily, they haven't portraited Pegasus...

Btw, these so-called "dragons" are just stupid big flying reptiles, named so.

Not those primal dragons from early religions, who are a combination of a returning dead ancestor, a vulture, a graveworm and a snake (they didn't distinguish the latter two).
Their afterlife nature gives them their mystic superwisdom and abilities to fly and fire and other their magix.
These flying/crawling corpses with some wormish/snakish/birdish personal touch should look much more horrific and disgusting than kawaii dracarises and smaugs.
With deformed human skull instead of kawaii iguana head, smelling as corpse, etc. Because they are from the underworld.

So, the dragons are anatomically correct flying lizards (or pterodactyls), not "real" dragons.
Their flying and firing abilities appear from nothing, as well as thir wisdom (compared to stupid real-life reptiles).

[Gargamel]

Sounds like a game where you spend 45 minutes in a bar arguing over the rules of the game, and then your character is killed off with little warning. 

[Kerbart]

Games are rarely ever good "on demand," if it were that easy to create a good game there wouldn't be bad ones.

Celebrities rarely "make" a good game in the first place. Are they there just to lend their name? Provide input? None of them have a proven track record for even halfway decent games.

If Bill Nye's new science show is any indication, it's not going to be good, and having NDT on the cast doesn't suggest quality either.

[StupidAndy]

14 hours ago, Kerbart said:

If Bill Nye's new science show is any indication, it's not going to be good, and having NDT on the cast doesn't suggest quality either.

bill nye has a new show?

[MiffedStarfish]

On 24/07/2017 at 10:17 PM, insert_name said:

wonder how it will stack up to ksp?

It won't. Nothing can. 

[Nuke]

i figure it will be like ksp, but with a lot more main characters dieing.

 

now that i think of it thats kind of a tall order.

Edited July 26, 2017 by Nuke