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
Well it’s like baking 10 cakes or having the ingridents to back 10 cakes. The ingridents will take less storage that the 10 cakes will do and now consider also the cook book. Thats it. The game is a cook book with ingridents from that you can bake infinite amounts of worlds
When I explore a new planet then save the game, I am not saving the planet with its details. I am saving a reference to those things.
For example, the game has three assets. An asset is what you see on screen.
1- A tree
2- A rock
3- Another type of rock.
When I load a new planet that has those three assets, I am not actually creating them from scratch. I already have them. So I reference each of them.
So for example a rock is made of textures and a model. So I give them an ID, say 2. This way when I want to place a new rock, I simply address “2”, instead of loading the rock’s texture and model from scratch.
Same thing with a save file. I am not saving textures or anything of that sort. I am simply saving the fact that “2” exists on planet ABC. This way when the game loads up the save file, it will see that 2 is a rock, and will load the rock’s texture and model accordingly. Those can be found in the game’s installation folder.
It gets more complicated as you go into details, like location of the rock, state (Is it damaged?) and so forth. That is why, if you go into the save file (And know what you are looking for) and change the “2” into a “1”, the game does not know any better — It will render a tree, because it will just look up what “1” is, and that is a tree asset. I know it’s not exactly ELI5, but you seem to be knowledgeable so I explained it as such.
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