No Man’s Sky is a new computer game with a universe of 18 quintillion planets
The newly released No Man’s Sky computer game would actually take a gamer 584 billion years to finish according to its developers.
Each detail is unique to countless millions of planets across a virtual galaxy. No Man’s Sky’s 15 member British developers made this possible 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.