Sean
Murray, one of the creators of the computer game No Man’s Sky, can’t
guarantee that the virtual universe he is building is infinite, but he’s
certain that, if it isn’t, nobody will ever find out. “If you were to
visit one virtual planet every second,” he says, “then our own sun will
have died before you’d have seen them all.”
No
Man’s Sky is a video game quite unlike any other. Developed for Sony’s
PlayStation 4 by an improbably small team (the original four-person crew
has grown only to 10 in recent months) at Hello Games, an independent
studio in the south of England, it’s a game that presents a traversable
universe in which every rock, flower, tree, creature and planet has been
“procedurally generated” to create a vast and diverse play area.
“We
are attempting to do things that haven’t been done before,” says
Murray. “No game has made it possible to fly down to a planet, and for
it to be planet-sized, and feature life, ecology, lakes, caves,
waterfalls and canyons, then seamlessly fly up through the stratosphere
and take to space again. It’s a tremendous challenge.”
Procedural
generation, whereby a game’s landscape is generated not by an artist’s
pen but an algorithm, is increasingly prevalent in video games. Most
famously Minecraft creates a unique world for each of its players,
randomly arranging rocks and lakes from a limited palette of bricks
whenever someone begins a new game (see “The Secret to a Video Game
Phenomenon”). But No Man’s Sky is far more complex and sophisticated.
The tens of millions of planets that comprise the universe are all
unique. Each is generated when a player discovers it, and is subject to
the laws of its respective solar systems and vulnerable to natural
erosion. The multitude of creatures that inhabit the universe
dynamically breed and genetically mutate as time progresses. This is
virtual world building on an unprecedented scale .
This
presents numerous technological challenges, not least of which is how
to test a universe of such scale during its development — the team is
currently using virtual testers — automated bots that wander around
taking screenshots which are then sent back to the team for viewing.
Additionally, while No Man’s Sky might have an infinite-sized universe,
there aren't an infinite number of players. To avoid the problem of a
kind of virtual loneliness, where a player might never encounter another
person on his or her travels, the game starts every new player in the
same galaxy (albeit on his or her own planet) with a shared initial goal
of traveling to its center. Later in the game, players can meet up,
fight, trade, mine and explore. “Ultimately we don’t know whether people
will work, congregate or disperse,” Murray says. “I know players don’t
like to be told that we don’t know what will happen, but that’s what is
exciting to us: The game is a vast experiment.”
The
game also bears the weight of unrivaled expectation. At the E3 video
game conference in Los Angeles in June, no other game met with such
applause. It is the game of many childhood science fiction dreams. For
Murray, that is truer than for most. He was born in Ireland, but the
family lived on a farm in the Australian outback, away from
civilization. “At night you could see the vastness of space,” he says.
“Meanwhile, we were responsible for our own electricity and survival. We
were completely cut off. It had an impact on me that I carry through
life.”
Murray
formed Hello Games in 2009 with three friends, all of whom had
previously worked at major studios. Hello Games’ first title, Joe
Danger, let players control a stuntman. The game was, according to
Murray, “annoyingly successful” in the sense that it locked him and his
friends into a cycle of sequels that they had formed the company to
escape. During the next few years the team made four Joe Danger games
for seven different platforms. “Then I had a midlife game development
crisis,” says Murray. “It changes your mindset when a single game’s
development represents a significant chunk of life.”
Murray
decided it was time to embark upon the game he’d imagined as a child, a
game about frontiership and existence on the edge of the unexplored.
“We talked about the feeling of landing on a planet and effectively
being the first person to discover it, not knowing what was out there,”
he says. “In this era in which footage of every game is recorded and
uploaded to YouTube, we wanted a game where, even if you watched every
video, it still wouldn’t be spoiled for you.”
When
players discover a new planet, climb that planet’s tallest peak, or
identify a new species of plant or animal, they are able to upload the
discovery to the game’s servers, their name forever associated with the
location, like a digital Christopher Columbus or Neil Armstrong.
“Players will even be able to mark the planet as toxic or radioactive,
or indicate what kind of life is there and then that then appears on
everyone’s map,” says Murray.
Experimentation
has been a watchword throughout the game’s production. Originally the
game was entirely randomly generated. “Only around 1% of the time would
it create something that looked natural, interesting and pleasing to the
eye; the rest of the time it was a mess and, in some cases where the
sky, the water and the terrain were all the same color, unplayable,”
Murray says. "So the team began to create simple rules, such as the
distance from a sun at which it is likely that there will be moisture,”
he explains. “From that we decide there will be rivers, lakes, erosion
and weather, all of which is dependent on what the liquid is made from.
The color of the water in the atmosphere will derive from what the
liquid is; we model the refractions to give you a modeled atmosphere.”
Similarly,
the quality of light will depend on whether the solar system has a
yellow sun or, for example, a red giant or red dwarf. “These are simple
rules, but combined they produce something that seems natural,
recognizable to our eyes. We have come from a place where everything was
random and messy to something which is procedural and emergent, but
still pleasingly chaotic in the mathematical sense. Things happen with
cause and effect, but they are unpredictable for us.”
At
the blockbuster studios in which he once worked, 300-person teams would
have to build content from scratch. Now, thanks to the increased power
of PCs and video game consoles, a relatively tiny team is able to create
unimaginable scope. In this sense, Hello Games may be on the cusp not
only of a new universe, but also of an entirely new way of creating
games. “When I look at game development in general, I think the cost of
creating content is the real problem,” he says. “The sheer amount of
assets that artists must build to furnish a world is what forces so many
safe creative bets. Likewise, you can’t have 300 people working
experimentally. Game development is often more like building a
skyscraper that has form and definition but is ultimately quite similar
to what is around it. It never sat right with me to be in a huge
warehouse with hundreds of people making a game. That is not the way it
should be — and now it doesn't have to be.”
Posted by : Gizmeon
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