Love that analogy!

Since it's not clear from your post, have you actually played NMS?

The reason that most people essentially max out tech on their first planet isn't because they're "completionists", it's because there's so little content in the game. NMS is an "everything can be found everywhere in bulk" sort of game. Including tech blueprints.

So how do you imagine that miners on Mars will be competitive without actually having mining equipment

It's not a comparison of mining equipment or no mining equipment - it's a comparison of A) automated, self-maintaining, may-not-get-damaged-or-it's-lost-forever mining equipment or B) human-controlled, human-maintained, human-salveagable mining equipment. In an environment where the premise is that humans already are.

The robots that are outcompeting them are on Mars, and orbiting Jupiter taking pictures, oh, and orbiting the earth transmitting signoals around and doing science and stuff.

Because there are no humans there. What about this is hard for you to understand? I'll repeat: there is precisely one place in the solar system where humans exist outside of Earth: ISS. Do robots outcompete them there - yes or no?

The best numbers I could find is that the annual cost of the ISS

Red herring. We're comparing to a scenario where humans are on Mars either way. Talking about the cost of putting people on Mars, keeping them alive, etc, is irrelevant because that is planned either way. The question at hand is, is it cheaper to use their already present labour, or send robots? And it's a no contest comparison.

Do these [abc.net.au] look like Mar's rovers to you?

No, and:

1) ... nor would you have the payload capacity to send something like that
2) ... nor would something like that survive the Martian environment (dust, radiation, cold, pressures low enough for outgassing, difficulty with radiating excessive heat, etc)
3) ... nor can you use that sort of power source on Mars
4) ... nor do you have people there to do the (extreme) sort of maintenance such a vehicle requires
5) ... nor do they do the most complex operations, only doing the (proportionally very simple) ferrying operations
6) ... nor do they have to avoid risk at all cost due to the lack of people there to fix it if it goes awry and hits something
6) ... nor do they have to avoid risk at all cost due to the lack of people there to fix *whatever it might run into* if it goes awry and hits something. ... and about fifty other things.

The ISS is just floating there doing nothing.

Deflection. The question was, in construction and research on ISS, do they use the available human labour, or do they send robots to do it? Of course robots are used where there aren't humans, but that's not the topic of discussion; we're talking about a world where there's a human settlement on Mars. You're arguing that robots outcompete humans in a space environment where humans are. Well, we have precisely one space environment where humans are - ISS. Where are all of the robots outcompeting them?

I'll reiterate:

It's certainly an arguable point as to whether it's worth the cost sending humans in the first place - but once they're there, there's no debate at all about whether it's cheaper to use their labour or to engineer, build, and send robots to do the same task.

You use it primarily in the winter months as a home heating source, I presume? ;)

It would be a bad idea to clean it now -- at this point the dirt is its primary structural element.

The above was a really good case study in business ecosystem dynamics.

When the Amiga 1000 came out, it was alien technology -- probably 10 years ahead of its time. The Amiga OCS chipset's graphics and sound hardware of its contemporary competitors look like historical artifacts, and it's OS was an actual pre-emptive multitasking operating system, not just a glorified disk loader.

However, any company in the world could design, build, and sell a new PC sound card or a new PC graphics card, any many of them did. The PC sound and graphics cards continued to suck (relative to the Amiga) for quite a while, but simply due to the fact that so many different companies had hired so many engineers to work on developing them, they improved every year, and eventually surpassed the capabilities of the Amiga sometime in the mid-90's.

Amiga's engineers were undoubtedly some of the most talented on the planet, but their small team eventually couldn't compete with the sheer numbers of PC-based engineers. By the time AGA came out, the writing was on the wall: An open system that gains traction will eventually outgrow and out-innovate a small, closed system, no matter how awesome the skills of the closed systems' engineers.

Surely this is a joke. How can you possibly have any tech blueprints left to find, 120 hours into the game? Most people essentially max out on their first planet.

You have a serious tolerance for grind. I don't know whether I should congratulate or feel bad for you. ;)

ASCII? You spoiled child, back in my day our games graphics were displayed with blinking readout lights on a board. Old Flashey, we used to call that board. A game of "Hit The Button At The Right Time" used to cost a dime, which was two hours wages at the time, but oh, how I sunk so many dimes into Old Flashey...

I actually liked the gameplay concept. There's nothing wrong with the concept for many people. The problem is that they failed to actually deliver the concept.

I think the difference between the concept and the reality does, however, lay bare a more important element. What most people want out of procgen isn't just that the algorithms can generate diversity... it's that they can generate scenarios that even the coders wouldn't have expected. Some algorithms can do that. Others cannot. NMS's absolutely cannot, they're just standard fractal noise terrain with random primitives, animals that are just armatures with random parts swapped out, etc. For anyone thinking of taking up the mantle of such a game after the failure of NMS, I think that's really going to be a key aspect. Because players are always going to explore worlds faster than developers can make new content, so if your engine is limited to making "things that the devels have thought of", it's always going to wear thin rather quickly.

The real world we live in always keeps presenting new fascinating worlds every time we explore a new place, for a key reason. Real worlds are built by fluid and rigid body interactions (primarily fluid, at least on the large scale) with variable chemistry. Physical properties like viscosity vary over numerous orders of magnitude in different pressure and temperature environments, and there's thousands of different chemical constituents that can be found in bulk, depending on the environment. Furthermore, each body is exposed to anisotropic conditions (bombardment, solar radiation, Coriolis force due to its rotation, etc), and widely varying local conditions like gravity. Basically, the computer equivalent would be CFD with chemical equilibria. Now, of course you can't do some extreme-detail CFD simulation of planets in realtime. But IMHO, if you want interesting generation, you want a generation algorithm that can emulate these sort of *effects*, even if the underlying core mechanism is radically different. Terrain generation algorithms generally make a goal of emulate the effects of uplift/folding, erosion, volcanism, impacts, etc. Recognizing how radically, many-orders-of-magnitude different these can all be in different environments, and with different materials in the same environment, seems key to making landscapes that can defy even creator expectations.

I think Pluto should be the gold standard. Before NH arrived, who would have thought that what we'd find was a giant scar facing Charon where the mantle bubbles out in supermassive convection cells, with mountain-sized icebergs drifting around the soup and collecting in iceberg-mountain ranges on the shore (just to name a couple of the really bizarre things New Horizons discovered)? The issue isn't "could you code a generation algorithm to emulate Pluto?"; of course one can. The question is, "could you code a generation algorithm that would have come up with things as weird as Pluto, without having to explicitly spell them out, without you ever having seen them before"?

I tried to convince myself that it was a "relaxing", "meditative" experience, a "palate cleanser" if you will.

After a while, I just couldn't convince myself of even that minimal goal. It's just... nothing. The terrible gameplay actively discourages you from doing the only thing that the game really offers (exploration), and the exploration is only skin deep due to the shallowness of their generation algorithm.

And really, how can you say NMS feels "solid", when you can walk right through the animals and things don't fall when you mine out the ground from underneath them? What's the opposite of "solid" in this context?

Nothing that the person wrote in that post is in any way accurate.

They do! Those big firefly-esque ones handle differently than the little colonial-viper-ish ones.

No, they don't. They all have the same speed, turning radius, etc. The only difference is that on the big ones, when you get out you can take falling damage ;)

You could do it by going to a world someone will later return to and mining resources

Nope. It has no effect. Resources don't sync between instances.

they were planning on getting, or taking a crashed ship, or if they did any terraforming with the grenades, using your own grenades to destroy what they did. (If you do enough terraforming, it sticks)

No, it distinctly does not. And this has been known since the first day after release. Two players even sat around mining stuff in front of each other - even day/night and locations of sentinels, etc aren't synced between player instances. Heck, more to the point, if you mine something, leave the system, then go back to the same spot, all of your changes will be lost, even in your own local instance.

And I do believe that selling enough of certain items to vendors will change the prices offered. You sell enough Emeril to a vendor...it will lower the price it offers.

It does not. More to the point, it escapes me how you could not realize this, as this is the way most people make money - searching out a starred system and selling the same item over and over again, because the price remains fixed no matter how much you sell.

Is there anything more you'd like to just make up about the game? Or did you pick up a copy from Bizarro Universe or something that's a different game from the one that the rest of us have?

Nice reading comprehension. In the game files. The game files distributed contain the actual assets used by the game, and then a bunch of random stuff not used by the game, in different directories. These unused assets range all the way to the whimsical, such as a lego-man dummy player model on a unicycle, to a monkey in a hat, to the Fallout logo. Among the "not used by the game" stuff are the files that were used to fake the E3 demo, in an "E3" directory. These models are only partially rigged, and thus could not actually be used in the game. More to the point, if you try to include a model that large in the game, you can't even see it. Creatures in game don't behave like in the trailer, their actions don't affect the landscape like in the trailer, etc - all of that was hard-coded. Faked.

Really, once you start digging into the game files, it's amazing the depth that their fakery went. Even the "player-named star systems" that you see during the loading screen are just from a hard-coded list in the game files.

More to the point, they continued lying about the content right up to launch (e.g. incl. at the release party) and in tweets after the release (the "slowed down planet rotation", the "people can't see each other because too many people are playing" lie, etc).