The algorithms of No Man's Sky - Rambus

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 17th, 2016. Developed and published by the indie studio Hello Games, 'No Man's Sky' is built around a procedurally generated deterministic open universe that contains a staggering 18.4 quintillion planets. The game also boasts complete solar systems, varied weather systems, detailed flora and fauna, fascinating alien creatures, as well as fully functioning buildings and spacecraft. Indeed, No Man's Sky plots the position of stars and their stellar classification, while pseudorandom numbers generated from the position of each star are used to determine the planetary system and corresponding features. "The universe begins with a single input, an arbitrary numerical seed--the phone number of one of the programmers. That number is mathematically mutated into more seeds by a cascading series of algorithms--a computerized pseudo-randomness generator," Roc Morin of The Atlantic explained in a detailed article about the game.