No mans sky is like 18GB or so on my PS4, yet there are 256 galaxies and literally around 18 quintillion planets. It can be played completely offline too, so it isnt coming from some server somewhere
I understand they’re procedurally generated, so they dont even exist until you pass through that area, but even after playing for countless hours and crossing thousands of miles of landmass, the save file is still extremely small
In: 1323
There’s no real significant ELI5 possible for this I think, it’s really just math. You could I guess also think of it as putting the idea of compression on its head.
Instead of taking some arbitrary data that your art department built, you have a small seed (a number) and an algorithm that auto-generates these assets on the fly. The algorithm will be small, the seed will be small, the core asset primitives won’t take up much space. The trick is really just that instead of having to do a best effort attempt at compressing something arbitrary, you start from something knowingly fixed size and small.
Few games are infinite, many are unbounded, for specifically the reasons you cite. If the user can modify the world, that has to be stored. Depending on how much they can alter the world and how precisely you want to retain that, the more storage will be needed. Your game then can still be unbounded, but won’t be infinite – the storage or memory does eventually run out after all.
But say you made a drifting game with an infinite track and an indestructible everything, no tire marks or anything, then yeah, that can be proper infinite.
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