No Man Sky in trouble? Developers may have a patent problem.

[SvennoJ]

KLXVER said:

method114 said:

Completely disagree with this statement. It's easy to talk like this though when your not the person who put thier time and effort into creating it. The real disgusting thing here is the devs of this game using this and not even bothering to talk to the creator to see if it's cool.

Not with a patent from 2004 he hasnt done shit with. The developers probably didnt even know about it. This kind of game has been talked about way before 2004.

The developers did know about it

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/world-without-end-raffi-khatchadourian

More recently, he had noticed geological formations that an artist had hand-designed for another video game, and realized that the algorithms of No Man’s Sky were not equipped to make them. The problem nagged at him, until he found an equation, published in 2003 by a Belgian plant geneticist named Johan Gielis. The simple equation can describe a large number of natural forms—the contours of diatoms, starfish, spiderwebs, shells, snowflakes, crystals. Even Gielis was amazed at the range when he plugged it into modelling software. “All these beautiful shapes came rolling out,” he told Nature. “It seemed too good to be true—I spent two years thinking, What did I do wrong? and How come no one else has discovered it?” Gielis called his equation the Superformula.

Murray, sitting before his monitor, typed the Superformula into the terrain of a test planet. He began simply, creating walnut-shaped forms that floated in an infinite grid over a desert. The image resembled a nineteen-eighties album cover, but the over-all look was not the point. Whenever he refreshed the rendering, the floating shapes changed. Many were asymmetrical, marred by depressions and rivulets. Game designers refer to lines of code that require lots of processing time as “costly.” The Superformula is cheap.

Ofcourse no clue how far they went through with it in the end.

He envisioned using the Superformula throughout the game, especially at the center of the galaxy, where landscapes would become more surreal. With only small shifts in its parameters, the equation was producing impressive variability. In one rendering, it produced rolling hills. Murray refreshed the screen: a star-shaped rock formation appeared. He seemed pleased. “It’s always a good sign when I am clicking the button, and there is that slight amount of excitement,” he said.

The main problem that Genicap is also trying to tackle is how to get all that beautiful variety without getting the unwanted stuff.