No Man's Sky Trailer
Hello Games are the Guildford-based video game studio who have wowed the world with previews of No Man's Sky. Charles Raspin explains why the sky is no longer the limit
Ordinarily, the creators of a game have to program every single thing that exists within it.
Even with a scene as simple as a cow in a field, they had to design the field, design the cow, put the cow where they wanted it, and tell it exactly what to do. This can get pretty time-consuming, especially when you move into things more complicated than fields and cows.
What if they didn't have to?
What if they could just hand the computer an array of cows and fields, and let it go to work? You might end up with a field with a cow in it... or two fields and no cows. Or a field packed with cows. It's out of your hands. The possibilities are endless.
This is called procedural design, and it's the idea that No Man's Sky is built on... except instead of cows and fields, Hello Games are letting their computers play around with entire planets, resulting in a game that they say will be practically infinite in scope and variety.
We've explored Guildford's gaming heartland before, but Hello Games estimate you'll be able to explore more than a quintillion different planets in their new game, traversing land, sea, sky and the space between worlds in your spaceship.
It's a wild claim, but one backed up by the sheer excitement at this month's E3 - the Electronic Entertainment Expo - when footage of the game in play was finally released. It seems that in Guildford, the sky is absolutely not the limit.
No Man's Sky is scheduled for release this year
