How Will ‘No Man’s Sky’ Handle a Universe of Content?

One of the most anticipated games people were hoping to see more of at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) was No Man’s Sky, a space exploration game being developed for Sony’s Playstation 4 and the PC.

When Hello Games founder Sean Murray made a presentation at the Sony press event Monday night, the crowd gasped at the display of the size of the explorable universe. It seemed as though there were so many worlds to explore that every developer on the planet Earth must have been working on the game for years. Since that isn’t possible, it was clear that the game must generate the world content on the fly, as a player first “discovers” a system and its worlds.

That Hello Games is using that method of game world creation is born out in the May 18, 2015 profile of the studio and the game in The New Yorker magazine article “World Without End.”

Such a way of doing things raises some serious questions, however.

In the demo Monday night, Murray showed that, when a player reaches a new world, he can “register” the data about the world at a World Beacon that each world has. The implication is that, once a new world is “discovered” (i.e. once the game engine on your console or PC has created it), that world is now set for ever in the game.

Does that “Beacon” actually send the new world data to some server at Hello Games so that when other players come to that world, they see the same content you as the discoverer see?

If so, those servers are going to get crowded very fast. So, maybe what happens is that your console or PC becomes basically a torrent feed, seeding the world content to all players around the Earth.

If that turns out to be the case, Hello Games better make that clear sooner rather than later. I am not sure I want my game system to be a Bit Torrent seeder (and before anyone else says it, no, not because it would have a negative impact on any porn I might be seeding).

However, if neither turns out to be the case, then each player will have a completely different universal experience, and the amount of data that needs to be stored on each console or PC will become insanely large very quickly.

After all, even though Hello Games claims in The New Yorker piece that the world generation algorithms are a combined few hundred lines of code, once the world is generated, it must be defined by a much larger chunk of data, to include world maps and skins, creature AI, and even weather data.

Another thing that is not clear is whether or not the world generation engine takes advantage of a finite set of maps and terrain skins, or if everything is completely newly generated. If the former, it would save a bunch of data space, but worlds would eventually start becoming repetitive. If not, each world could be amazingly different, but when enough worlds are discovered the amount of world data would be gigantic.

However Hello Games is handling these questions, we likely won’t know for a while, as the release date for the game hasn’t even been announced yet (or even the release year). But whatever it turns out to be, you can count me as one of the many people exploring strange new worlds, discovering new life and new civilizations, and boldly going where — both virtually and literally — no one has gone before.