Nobody with sense is out here arguing that it's easy to make games, but sometimes the challenges and intricacies of game development aren't super visible or understandable. To put things into perspective, No Man's Sky engine programmer Martin Griffiths shared a version of the 20 "platform combinatorics" that Hello Games' open-world space sandbox currently supports, with a few caveats that ratchet it up further. First, here's the full list of formats, straight from a recent tweet from Griffiths: I'm assuming the Xbox One S and standard Xbox One are listed together because the hardware differences between them are so incredibly minor that there's no practical difference in optimization.
As Griffiths notes, we're glossing over the notoriously branching settings and setups of PC gamers with a passing, 'yeah, it's on PC.' And that's still the simple version. "This is a simplified, graphics engine/platform-centric breakdown, not counting major systems like networking, input and audio.
.." Griffiths adds.
"There are also many other integrated paths like HDR and dynamic res scaling (DRS) on console, GPU vendor specific optimizations on PC and foveated rendering for PSVR2. All of these, created and maintained in a single unified code base, by the systems and engine team at Hello Games." Griffiths regularly shares and discusses the ins and outs of game development using No Man's Sky as a lens.
Some cases are pretty insular, like the No Man's Sky player whose bugged 611-hour save receive.
