The video above is a teaser for the upcoming game No Man's Sky, a new project by Guildford-based independent game developer studio Hello Games. In December of 2013, this teaser was revealed at the VGX Awards, an awards show dedicated to video games and their developers that was broadcast on Spike TV. It is, essentially, a procedurally generated open-universe exploration game and, quite frankly, possibly the largest ever, boasting a game world that would take longer for one to even barely come into complete contact with every inch than it would take for our own real sun to die out. How long is that, you might ask?
Almost 585 billion years. Numerical notation: 585,000,000,000. The sun is theorized to burn out and turn into a red giant in approximately 5 billion years. Sean Murray, lead developer at Hello Games, said that it would take 585 billion years to visit the entirety of NMS' "universe" if you visited each and every planet for just one second. To barely scratch the amount of content the game is to contain, it would take 117 times longer than it would take for the sun in our solar system to die. So, how many planets are supposed to be in the game?
18,446,744,073,709,551,616. Almost 18.5 quintillion That is a lot of planets for just one game.
The universe of No Man's Sky is said to be persistent for all players, meaning that every player will experience the same universe, and much (if not all) of it will be uncharted territory, even to the developers themselves, so how will it be possible to keep an entire universe running in-game? Well, with procedural generation. In video games, procedural generation means that artwork and objects are generated into the game algorithmically, rather than having all of it created manually, then prerendered into the game. If it were done manually, the game would probably have a giant installation file, one unrivaled in size for quite a long time. It would also mean that the game would never get done; not in our lifetime, anyway, and I highly doubt that anyone would spend decades on just developing one game. Let's go a little more in-depth with this process.
The developers explained that the generation process would work as if there's a spherical area around each player. To that player, everything within that area is generated according to specific inputs to the game's algorithms. Everything outside of that area doesn't exist. When a player moves from one area to the next, the code -- and everything generated from those input values -- is basically deleted; lost. However, that code isn't entirely lost. Since the algorithms rely on specific inputs to generate what is needed, simply traveling back to an area that the player left will reinstate the code and bring back what was initially generated. This ensures a persistent universe, and not something shaped completely at random. This also ensures that not all of the code is running at once for any one player, especially when it doesn't need to be. If it did, the CPU required to run something of that size is, at this point, probably unfathomable for anyone that owns anything short of a supercomputer.
Let's backtrack to that blistering number of planets. 18.5 quintillion planets. How is this possible? The developers use a 64-bit number to generate the number of planets in the game. Since each bit is binary, and inputs can only consist of ones and zeroes, that's two different inputs. Since there's 64 bits to the number, it would be like multiplying 2 to the 64th power, or 2*2*2*2~ and so on, up to 64 times. The number of planets in the game comes up as a result just a little less than what the result would be if you multiplied 2 to the 64th power; trust me, I've checked, and so can you.
So how much fresh and interesting content can be put into the game? That's really up to the artist(s) to decide. To quote Sean Murray: "I feel this is a game we're going to be working on for a long time." Does this mean that they'll keep adding fresh content to keep us interested, long after the game's release? It's uncertain.
There's still much left unknown about No Man's Sky and, being a fan of the game myself, I can't wait to see what Hello Games has in store, but it begs to wonder how much is too much. There are so many planets in the game; uncharted, unexplored. What's to stop the game from generating a planet and everything on it that is identical to another planet in every single way, except for its color? What if it's completely identical? Can the developers produce enough objects to stop this from happening and, if so, how long will it take? Will they lose their playerbase before that can happen? A lot of these questions remain unanswered, and I suppose getting bored with a game like this all depends on the players themselves.
How do you feel about games of gigantic size? How long can you play one before you get bored, if you ever get bored in the first place? What does it take to keep you interested and engaged in what is mostly a game about exploration? Let me know; I'd love to read your views.
