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.
 No Man’s Sky took five years in the making by indie developer Hello Games. No Man’s Sky is a glorified version of the highly popular Minecraft game. Built on an in-house engine, the final product weighs in at a meagre 5GB on your hard drive. More surprising is that the game of this magnitude was developed by just 15 persons. 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’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.
