Tweet
Five years in the making by indie developer Hello Games, No Man's Sky is a game of incredible scale from a relatively small team. Built on an in-house engine, the final product weighs in at a meagre 5GB on your hard drive - a tiny amount compared to any typical AAA release. This is far from ordinary, and with the game relying heavily on procedural generation, very little of the game's visual make-up uses pre-made textures or assets. Instead, the star of the show is the set of algorithms at its core - lines of code capable of generating terrain, plants and even unique wildlife on-the-fly. Each detail is unique to countless millions of planets across a virtual galaxy. No Man's Sky achieves this not through an inflated budget or a large pool of staff, but through a smart use of technology. Visually, we're talking about a largely overlooked approach to graphics rendering that makes this level of variety possible. For No Man's Sky, we're talking about voxels.
Rather than concentrating solely on the polygons seen in 99 per cent of games made today, No Man's Sky's core utilisation of voxels makes this procedural generation - and also destruction - much easier. However, it also comes with several other pros and cons. Fundamentally, the difference between a polygon and a voxel is simple: a polygon is made up of three points or more in a 3D space, where each of these points is called a vertex. A triangle is made of three vertexes for example, and of course a square would be four. But in No Man's Sky's case, a voxel is a single point in 3D space, given a value for size, colour or opacity, much like a giant pixel.
Read more…
More...