No Mans Sky does it pretty well. Who knows? Maybe when we get up to PlayStation 10 or 20 it'll actually be simulating the cognitive/sentient elements of the universe too.
Doing something "pretty well" compared to the task and doing something complete, is not really the same, when we are talking about a possible infinite universe to simulate. Because in this case, even just correctly simulating the leave of an tree, would take infinite comouters.
You could simply alter the consciousness of simulated beings to believe that the tree is complex and exists fully. This sort of dynamic pruning/altering of conscious reality would dramatically cut down on what needs to be simulated.
We could all be staring at placeholders (if even that) while believing we are interacting with a complex, fully defined world - in the meantime, the simulation modifies our consciousness(es) to smooth over any gaps in what could actually be a crudely defined generative world.
> You could simply alter the consciousness of simulated beings to believe that the tree is complex and exists fully. This sort of dynamic pruning/altering of conscious reality would dramatically cut down on what needs to be simulated.
I don't know why everyone insists on No Mans Sky. Having a space engineers MMO with thousands of players would be way more interesting. If every player builds 5 autonomous vehicles then the game would have simulate 5000 vehicles 24/7.
Sometimes when I play No Man’s Sky, I hope I’ll come across a single planet that has culture/cities. A quirk in the simulation that gave rise to it. Much like our lonely little blue planet. Or maybe I just smoke too much.
