No Man’s Sky has always been known as a technically impressive game, generating hundreds of diverse planets, biomes, and exotic alien species on every playthrough. But Martin Griffiths, the engine programmer behind No Man’s Sky, recently took to social media to show us the power of the engine, and the results are pretty impressive.
“I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion lately about load times and visual tricks in space games,” Griffiths tweeted, possibly alluding to Star Wars Outlaws or Starfield. “So I wanted to show you all the No Man’s Sky debug camera… a great demonstration of how seamless and powerful our game engine is!” The video below, captured on a PS5 dev kit, showcases the game loading multiple planets in under a minute.
In a follow-up tweet, Griffiths explained that the above video intentionally disabled collisions, resulting in shots of gaps beneath the game’s geometry (aka wall lag). The “object pop-in” phenomenon persists in debug mode, although it is “being constantly optimized,” so you probably won’t have to deal with it for too long if it’s something that’s affecting your planet-hopping adventures. You may also notice that “world generation speeds have nearly doubled” since the Worlds update launched last week — Griffiths said this was largely due to the efforts of a single developer who spent “months” rewriting the code.
Finally, Griffiths ends with a spoiler: “My favorite platform to code on is…” No Man’s Sky is available on modern consoles and PC, so unless the game gets a Playdate port, I assume he’s talking about a platform that hasn’t been released yet.
