Massively has an article about a game named No Man’s Sky. In the article is a video by TheHappieCat explaining how the game’s makers created quintillions of worlds using fractals. The thing I find surprising is the worlds are never stored in a database. Yet when you come back to a world it is re-generated, but the same exact world is generated. TheHappieCat explains how she thinks it works.

The Massively Overpowered article Eve Evolved: No Man’s Sky vs Eve Online, by Brendan Drain explores what the differences between Eve and No Man’s may mean how Eve could be impacted.

The author expects both game designers to take hints from and be influenced by the other. At least he hopes that will happen.

I wonder how Project Sansar will handle terrain creation. We know we will have larger ‘regions’ than Second Life™. Shaping terrain for large areas gets old quickly. For a creation tool to be popular it can’t be boring or tedious.

Blender is boring, tedious, complex, and time consuming to learn and yet popular. So, to some degree people will put up with the odious aspects to achieve a goal. Second Life avoided much of the initial tedious creation and let users move on to ‘higher level’ creation. A bit similar to blogging software that allows us to write what we want for a blog without having to write the computer code that drives the whole thing.

We are about 5 months from finding out. However, you can play No Man’s Sky now… on PS4… :/ But, not to worry, it is available for PC’s at Steam (US$60) and other places. (More videos and screen shots at Steam.)