No Man's Sky dev proves it's not all "smoke and mirrors in space games" by zipping across "3 planets in 50 seconds" to show how "powerful" the engine really is

A No Man’s Sky developer has shown off how “powerful” the game’s universe-generating engine really is.

No Man’s Sky has almost always been a technically impressive game, procedurally creating hundreds of varied planets, biomes, and funky alien critters in every play session. But No Man’s Sky’s engine programmer Martin Griffiths recently hopped onto social media to give us a peek under the hood, and the results are kinda intense.

“I’ve seen quite a lot of debate recently about loading times and smoke and mirrors in space games,” Griffiths tweets, probably referring to the discourse around… Star Wars Outlaws? Starfield? “So thought I’d show you all the No Man’s Sky debug camera… a nice demo of how seamless and powerful our engine is!” The video below, running on a PS5 development kit, then shows how quickly the game can load several different planets in less than a single minute.

I’ve seen quite a lot of debate recently about loading times and smoke and mirrors in space games – so thought I’d show you all the #NoMansSky debug camera .. a nice demo of how seamless and powerful our engine is! PS5 running here, with video from an iPhone… 3 planets in 50… pic.twitter.com/NOyy1qVgnAJuly 22, 2024

In a follow-up tweet, Griffiths explains that the above video has collision turned off “intentionally,” hence all the shots of the void beneath the game’s geometry. Pop-in still exists in the debug mode, too, though “optimization is still ongoing,” so you might not need to deal with it for too long if that’s something that affects your planet-hopping adventures. You might have also noticed that “generation speed has nearly doubled” since the heft Worlds update dropped last week as well – Griffiths says it’s largely thanks to the programming efforts of a single developer who spent “many months” rewriting code.

Griffiths finally leaves off with a tease: “My favorite platform to code for is…” No Man’s Sky is already available on modern consoles and PC, so unless the game is being ported to the Playdate, I’m going to assume he’s talking about a platform that’s not yet in the wild. What he’s referring to is anyone’s guess, but you can check out everything we know about the Nintendo Switch 2 and PS5 Pro just in case.

It sounds like all the tech behind planet-spanning survival game Light No Fire is hiding within No Man’s Sky’s new update.

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