Sightseeing in Noctis IV

Different55 · 2014-12-01 20:08:32

So I got this game yesterday that I love and here are some pictures I took:

A planet with rings and a moon.

This one only has rings. I tried to land on it but apparently it's a gas giant so there's nowhere to land ;_;

I jumped up in the sky and took a panorama.

This time I climbed up a mountain and took a panorama.

Plateaus are good for panorama shots.

In the middle of this boring, flat planet was this huge mountain range just sticking out of the ground. I had fun climbing to the top then jetpacking off of it. The gravity makes it a little hard to jetpack on, so starting from the mountain meant I could soar all the way until I slammed into the invisible wall/leash keeping me from getting too far away from my landing thing.

Me standing on top of the mountains above.

Planet Doritos Locos Taco. I took the picture as I was traveling towards it. There's nowhere to land, but it looked like a party planet so I named it after a party-iest of all the tacos.

Same planet. This rectangular thing was just jutting out of the ground. This one was just outside of the sector, so I wasn't able to climb to the top, just take pictures from the end of my invisible leash.

One of the most interesting planets I've been on. The gravity's a bit lower than Earth, but the atmosphere is super thick and hard to see through. It's got crazy ridges, mountains, cliffs, valleys, everything. It's a fun place to explore. I named it "Beefy 5-Lyr Burrito", after my favorite burrito.

Same planet as above, but I landed in a different sector. I think it's darker and differently colored because I landed in a part with what looked like weird pink cloud cover. Because of that, it's even harder to see than the above picture.

Another planet.

The entire game is less than 1MB big. It's mostly 16bit DOS code, so in order to run it you either have to have windows , DOSBox, VirtualBox, or you could just slap FreeDOS on a USB stick and run it off of that (this works the best, but you have to restart the computer every time you want to play.) The game is made up of an entire galaxy of billions of stars, each with up to a hundred planets and moons orbiting it. Everything is procedurally generated, which means that the entire galaxy is made up on the fly, the same way every time. Like a fractal.

You can land on each of those planets, explore them a sector at a time. And if they're unnamed, then you can name them. Planets, stars, moons, whatever. If it doesn't have a name, you can claim it and then send your database (which contains all the names and stuff and is actually bigger than the game itself) off to be merged with the main databases. Every once in a while, you can download the merged databases and find out what everyone else has been exploring.

There's no story, just a little bit of a background story to go along with the game. Apparently there are a lot of planets with life on them (nothing sentient, though, except for other members of your species) but I haven't seen any yet.

colon · 2014-12-02 17:11:27

is it free

Different55 · 2014-12-02 17:17:37

Yeah, but if you have anything above Windows XP you'll need to either install it onto a USB drive or run it in DOSBox or VirtualBox. I have Windows XP but I run it off a USB anyway because it's so much faster.

Last edited by Different55 (2014-12-02 21:18:16)

Ratburntro44 · 2014-12-02 20:06:22

Different55 wrote:

Windows

Different55 · 2014-12-02 21:18:00

;_; forums y u do this

Starvr344 · 2014-12-05 00:34:26

I can't play noctis
;_;

colon · 2014-12-05 19:39:07

but that required DOSes

Different55 · 2014-12-05 20:33:34

It's possible to play it on any PC as long as you have a flash drive that's 2GB or larger. Starvr's flash drive was 1.9GB which freaked out FreeDOS since the actual size was smaller than the partition said it was.

Different55 · 2014-12-05 22:17:16

More pics. I found my first planets and moons with life on them!

According to the backstory included with the game, this is my home world. For whatever reason, the people there left the galaxy while lots of us were away discovering the galaxy. When we stopped by home for a visit, it was totally abandoned and we don't have to technology to chase after them. We're stuck here in this galaxy all alone until we die.

Anyway, I found these ruins sticking up out of an ocean of horrible purple liquid. This planet is horribly polluted, but there are plenty of other perfectly good planets out here. I can't think of a single reason why they would have just left us like this.

I found this planet orbiting a dead star I named Nightwalker. Since it doesn't give off any light, the planet is completely dark except for these glowy rocks on the ground and the stars in the sky. It's a beautiful place to go star gazing. If you fly high enough in your jetpack, the rocks look like stars themselves and it looks like you're completely surrounded by empty space. It's super easy to get lost, though.

I sat outside of this planet for like 30 minutes taking a snapshot of the planet each time its orbit, rotation, and weather patterns were updated and compiled the few frames I got into a gif. How this game manages to procedurally generate all this in less than a megabye is beyond me.

It's a bush! If it were animated, you'd be able to see it shaking a little in the winds from the storm going on here on planet Cracka Jack orbiting star The Captain Now.

A tree from the same planet as above. The reason this picture is so bright is because I managed to snap a pic during a flash of lightning.

Same planet, different tree, no lightning. The leaves on the tree are shaking so much it looks like the wind could almost rip them off.

The first non-plant life I saw up-close in Noctis IV (the first non-plant life I saw was birds, but it was from a distance). It looks like a large cat and it didn't seem to be too terribly afraid of me, unlike the birds. Those things take off the second you get close to them and are too fast to capture in flight when you chase them on your jetpack.

I'm not quite sure what this is. It looks a bit like a large, jumping gopher thing. Like the large cat above, this isn't too afraid of me, but they both will walk (or jump) away from me when I get too close.

Here are those birds I talked about (the green things in the sky). This is the closest shot I managed to get of a bird. I've seen birds closer up than this, but we were moving too fast in different directions and the birds were out of the frame before I could get the picture. From what I've seen, they seem to be about half the size of a gopherthing. Like a Gopherthing with back half chopped off and with wings added on in terms of size.

Same planet (again), but this time I landed outside of a storm. Things look different without all the cloud cover. Once the water(?) stops being agitated by falling rain, it looks like a mirror and reflects the sky and mountains around it. Without the clouds and rain, the ground looks brown and the plants look yellow.

Same seen as above, but a little closer to the lake.

This planet was experiencing like 5 types of eclipses when I landed. There were several planets and moons in between it and the sun, and it was really far away from the sun on top of all that. But because of that, it had a lovely red sky that contrasted nicely with the blue terrain.

Another moon orbiting star The Captain Now. There are a LOT of planets and moons orbiting this star, 34 in total. Anyway, this one had these weird, thick, short trees and parallel lines covering the ground. All I could find here was trees and birds. No bushes, no flowers, no ground life, just trees and birds.

Same moon as above, but from high in the sky so you can see all the trees. You can't see the lines from here, though.

Landed here near sunset, and its sky is amazing. It's a nice blue and the stars are starting to come out.

Bimps1002 · 2014-12-08 21:03:26

how is this less than a megabyte

Different55 · 2014-12-09 02:25:29

Because it's all procedurally generated. The planets, stars, and terrain are all generated on the fly with witchcraft. They aren't stored anywhere, they're just generated as they're needed the same way each time, so everyone sees the same universe. There are a few files that come with the game that store all the names and notes that people have given to planets and stars, and each of them is larger (the names file is 1MB, the notes file is almost 4MB) than the executable that created all those stars and planets.

What really blows my mind is the depth of everything. Each of the procedurally generated planets and moons (at least, the ones with atmospheres) have procedurally generated weather patterns that change over time, as you can see from my gif above. If you land in a storm, you'll see lightning, rain, and if you get close enough to plant life you can see it trembling in the wind. If you land on the outside edge, you might just get a cloudy sky with a few flashes of lightning. And the water. If the water is agitated (by rain, maybe) then it doesn't reflect anything and you can see the raindrops hit the water. But (again, as you can see in the pictures above) if it's a sunny day, the water is smooth and reflects the landscape, unless you go walking through it, in which case you can see the ripples you're making in the water. Thick atmospheres are foggy and hard to see through, and in thin atmospheres have completely black skies filled with stars. And there are some physics in here, too. When you land on a planet, your landing capsule bounces a bit. And if you land on an uneven surface, you're going to get deflected and bounce off at an angle. And all of this is in 200-500kb depending on if you count the modules.

I'm pretty sure the creator is a wizard.

Different55 · 2014-12-15 17:41:54

Made a movie using the built-in moviemaker. Last night I landed on this planet a bit before sunset, and when I woke up this afternoon it was well into the night on the planet. The stars looked nice so I made a video of them.

Different55 · 2014-12-16 09:16:52

Found a blue dwarf star spinning super fast. I named it Soopr Sanic

N1KF · 2015-01-01 01:06:56

ok sanic hegehog

Fradeshan · 2015-01-01 13:15:11

mr

N1KF · 2015-01-01 13:24:14

sorry

Fradeshan · 2015-01-01 13:26:08

sorry

N1KF · 2015-01-01 13:39:11

sorry

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#1 2014-12-01 20:08:32

Sightseeing in Noctis IV

#2 2014-12-02 17:11:27

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#3 2014-12-02 17:17:37

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#4 2014-12-02 20:06:22

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#5 2014-12-02 21:18:00

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#6 2014-12-05 00:34:26

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#7 2014-12-05 19:39:07

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#8 2014-12-05 20:33:34

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#9 2014-12-05 22:17:16

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#10 2014-12-08 21:03:26

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#11 2014-12-09 02:25:29

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#12 2014-12-15 17:41:54

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#13 2014-12-16 09:16:52

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