Building Worlds in No Man's Sky Using Math(s)

GDC Festival of Gaming
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2017–2026
YouTube
112K views · 9 years ago · talk · intermediate · evergreen

Sean Murray of Hello Games explains at GDC how No Man's Sky generates its universe of planets from math rather than hand-built content. The talk covers noise functions, deterministic seeds and building worlds on spherical geometry.

HN people treat it as the best talk on world generation and procedural math, and one calls it foundational for his own thinking.

“is the best talk I've ever seen on the topic”
Generative artGame design
#proceduralgeneration#noman'ssky#noisefunctions#gamedevelopment#gdc

3 comments from Hacker News

r
@ralusek2026 · in “My Ten Years in No Man's Sky”
One of the most interesting talks on the math behind procedural generation: ▶ this video That presentation was foundational for me personally wrt quite a few things.
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r
@ralusek2021 · in “One decade later, Minecraft world generation is interesting again”
Other things to note. One big one is that the world height limit has increased from 256 blocks to 320, which allows for much more verticality. I think the whole field of world generation is awesome. Perlin noise, and the concepts of "smooth noise" that have come from it, and the clever ways people have found to layer noise and use it to map biomes and heights, and spawn locations, etc. And then, even more impressively, with games like No Man's Sky, you have this concept applied to spherical geometry. I just think it's all so cool. Incidentally, his (Sean Murray, creator of No Man's Sky) is the best talk I've ever seen on the topic: ▶ this video
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t
@tangue2017 · in “Building Worlds in No Man's Sky Using Math(s) [video]”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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