@GDCPresoReviews@mastodon.gamedev.place
2026-04-28 07:03 UTC
GDC 2017: “Continuous World Generation in 'No Man's Sky'” by Innes McKendrick (@im?) of Hello Games https://gdcvault.com/play/1024265/Continuous-World-Generation-in-No
I thought this was better than the other GDC 2017 Hello Games presentation, because this one was more about how to make game content.
They do all their generation in spherical coordinates, and only when they need to save out the result do they project the data to the faces of a cube. The stretching was small enough that it wasn’t noticeable.
1/4
Replies (1)
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@GDCPresoReviews@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-04-28 07:10
They don’t model the interior of the planets; instead they just have a low frequency heightmap on the surface of the sphere, and there’s a sort of skin of voxels on it. Each voxel is roughly 1m^3, and only holds a few things: - Density - Two material IDs - Blending weights of the two materials They generate the voxels in chunks of 36^3 voxels. They generate everything in a sequence of passes; each pass writes out a data structure that the next pass reads. It’s a pipeline. 2/4