Building the Infinite Digital Universe of No Man's Sky

An anonymous reader writes: Hello Games is a small development studio, only employing 10 people. But they're building a game, No Man's Sky, that's enormous — effectively infinite. Its universe is procedurally generated, from the star systems down to individual species of plant and animal life. The engine running the game is impressively optimized. A planet's characteristics are not computed ahead of time — terrain and lifeforms are randomly generated on the fly as a player explores it. But, of course, that created a problem for the developers — how do they know their procedural generation algorithms don't create ridiculous life forms or geological formations? They solved that by writing AI bot software that explores the universe and captures brief videos, which are then converted to GIF format and posted on a feed the developers can review. The article goes into a bit more detail on how the procedural generation works, and how such a small studio can build such a big game.

Comments

Re:"Downvoting" fucks everything up.

[AndroSyn]

All the best posts on /. are modded -1. I just feel like I'm only hearing half of the conversation when you view the comments without the -1 posts. /. isn't the same without it.

Oh and fuck beta :D

Re:"Downvoting" fucks everything up.

[PopeRatzo]

Wait, so you actually browse Slashdot at -1? Because there's some damn awful stuff on here most of the time. Acres and acres of spam, unrelated rantings of psychopaths, and copypasta from adult novels...

My ears are burning.

So what are you guys talking about?