Continuous World Generation in ‘No Man’s Sky’

GDC publically releases the videos of some sessions every year and this year one of those is Innes McKendrick’s talk about the generation pipeline in No Man’s Sky.

There’s a lot of interesting bits in the talk, so I’ll just highlight a few things that appeal to me personally.

First off, the emphasis on augmenting artists rather than replacing them. The engine is agnostic about where the content comes from, making no distinction between generative content and hand-authored content. As Innes says, the goal was to enable “our artists to produce more, rather than replacing them with an algorithm that doesn’t quite do the same job.”

This is an important point, and something I’ve tried to emphasize here: sometimes a generative approach isn’t the best approach; choose the method that fits. And giving artists more tools is a perfectly valid approach to using generative methods.

Another point is the use of evaluation tools to test the generator and its output, so that they could track changes from build to build. This is exactly the kind of data that is useful to automate, and it makes the jobs of the artists and the programmers easier.

The talk also has a ton of technical details that are useful to consider if you’re wanting to work on your own continuous world generation. Not to mention voxels, interesting non-planar spaces, and building a world at scale.

http://gdcvault.com/play/1024265/Continuous-World-Generation-in-No