When released this year, next-gen sci-fi video game, No Man's Sky, will feature 18 quintillion visitable planets that would take you five billion years to visit - no toilet breaks allowed.
What an amazing concept, even if we'll only get to see a tiny fraction of what No Man's Sky is set to offer. Currently in development by independent UK-based studio, Hello Games, the virtual landscape is procedurally generated by an algorithmic programming system that features what Hello Games founder, Sean Murray, tells Game Informer in the video above is "a series of very simple formulae laid on top of each other to create something quite complex".
What this allows for is incredible detail and boundless material to explore; zero loading time; and almost no content stored on a disc, your PC or PS4 console, or in the cloud.
"I can fly over this terrain, and you can see this slight amount of, no pop-in, but you can see the world fading in. And what's happening is it's actually being generated as I fly around," says Murray. "None of this exists on the disc, none of it exists on the machine, none of it exists in the cloud, it's just generating from a set of maths functions - always generating the same way because it's maths." In any maths formula, he says, if you take the same input, and you put it into a specific formula, you're going to get the same output, time and time again.
As Luke Hopewell explains at Kotaku, each pixel, voxel, and polygon that goes into creating what you see in front of year is constantly changing and forming based on how the player positions the virtual camera. "By using that input, the formulae in the game world can figure out what each rock, tree, creature and mountain is meant to look like," says Hopewell. "As you fly around the world, the formula gradually changes with the player camera input and draws the world in front of you. Everything fades into view through a light mist which disguises the edge of the world, so the player never gets the sense that they're about to outrun the game world."
For those of us who have been a bit underwhelmed with what next-gen consoles, the Playstation 4 and XBox One, have so far delivered, this game is well and truly taking advantage of their unprecedented processing power to make something awesome. Watch the video above by Game Informer to hear exactly how this game is being made. With this on the horizon too, I'd say 2015 is going to be a good year for gaming.
Source: Kotaku, Game Informer