Something that I've been working on (on and off!) for more than a year ago, made it into #NoMansSky Voyagers - working closely with Sony to achieve the mind boggling feat of Playstation Spectral Super Resolution applied to eye tracked foveated rendering, in our game! Enjoy :)

“Space Pirate Time” - An astonishing #NoMansSky Voyagers ship build! (Credit Reddit u/muhdgo for this amazing work)

In a past life at EA I worked for 8 years on the engine for the Harry Potter games - in 2006 it was a formative time because Order of the Phoenix was the first fully streamed, open world game that we'd made : from an old sd card.. the first time Harry ran around Hogwarts on PS3!

The technical challenges in bringing the fishing update to all our platforms were a reel pain in bass. We didn't scale back though and not to carp on too much, it turned out fintastic... Working on this team is truly living the bream! Let minnow if you find any bugs, though!

In the #NoMansSky Worlds Part II trailer there’s a lovely sequence with multiple ships creating water wakes as they fly - here’s the first time 5 months ago that our talent graphics coder(Tom) demonstrated a ship’s wake on a still water surface. Blown away then and even more now!

I’ve seen quite a lot of debate recently about loading times and smoke and mirrors in space games - so thought I’d show you all the #NoMansSky debug camera .. a nice demo of how seamless and powerful our engine is! PS5 running here, with video from an iPhone… 3 planets in 50 seconds.

“One eternity later” (Credit Reddit u/barondrac) .. and in space, no one can hear the screams of “I'm ready! I'm ready! I'm ready!”

I spent around a year of my life spread over 2024/25 working on the NMS Switch 2 Edition - one of the most top secret projects I've ever worked on.. we even had a secret room to hide dev-kits! So proud of the end result - it is a remarkable device and a big step-up from Switch 1!

This is probably a bug, but quite a good looking one! Water goes a bit crazy if you beam down into it - causing quite a cool visualisation of our newer water physics.

“Spaceballs: The Video Game” (Credit Reddit u/solidsharkey)

“Venator-class Star Destroyer” (Credit Reddit u/TechnicalPirate95)

The team at Hello Games really loved this base build! The scale and setting within terrain makes it feel quite dark and industrial for #NoMansSky. Very cool ❤️

“The Sea Duck” Credit Reddit/Own-Astronomer-1296

This is another nice #NoMansSky Worlds Part II water demo - showing off bioluminescent algae! (From Reddit, Credit u/Solar-Sailor1982)

Another amazing #NoMansSky Voyagers ship build! “The best millennium falcon I could do with the parts we have” (Credit Reddit u/Sm1lerXD for this brilliant work)

Look up and wave to the International @Space_Station (Corvette Edition) in #NoMansSky. (Credit Reddit u/Total_Construction_6)

I Just noticed #NoMansSky is once again in the top 20 world wide best selling games on Steam. This is humbling and a lovely nod to our team’s hard work. Best of all I think it guarantees we continue to make the game even better and you all get to share our ongoing dev journey x.

I spent around 4-5 months of my time spread over the last year working on the #PS5Pro support. This was a tough gig since we are one of smallest teams releasing today and also one of only a handful of games supporting both 4K and 8K, as well as PSVR2. I am immensely proud of playing a part in this release today - hope you all enjoy!

A beautiful shot and one that makes us super happy to see - skydiving stretched our engine limits, to the point that some biomes (even a few weeks before release) had drastic fps drops with the combination of a slow decent and so much of a planet in view: It took the combined effort of both technical artists and coders to make this new feature so seamless, as it is now. It’s satisfying to see the fruits of that labour!

“Normandy SR2 (no mods) by Barden Builds” (Credit Reddit u/Maleficent-Guitar-46)

Growing up in a small, pretty rough town in South Wales, I was lucky to have amazing parents that taught me resilience and to try and try again if you initially fail: Shortly after the initial release of #NoMansSky I had a meeting with Sean in a pub in Guildford and everything he said on that lunch echoed with what I had been taught as a child. I’m thankful that synchronicity. Our tiny team at Hello Games have grafted and then grafted some more.. and although “very positive” might be just a few words, it means an awful lot, especially since we aren’t even close to being finished yet. Thank you to all players who believed in us and those of you who continue to journey with us. x x x

“Ships are cool and all but look at this planet. Awesome” (Credit Reddit u/TheBlank89)

Fun little time-lapse, showing off reflections, day/night lighting cycle and creatures. (via Reddit, credit u/Cheesyb3an)

One of the most humbling things about being an engine and platform engineer on #NoMansSky is receiving a save-game demonstrating a bug submitted to Zen-desk (verified through QA as reproducible) with instructions on how it occurs, and then helping fix it: Although every bug is important we can’t help but take extra time when the save is in the hundreds or thousands of hours - I think the record is over 4000 hours… Today I received a 611 hour save that reproduced a flickering bug that has been reported half a dozen times on my posts here - I promise that I will hawk that bug and fix it - when a player has put that much into our game it deserves the engineering fix.. and this then trickles down to all our future long term players. .. Just to add that’s on one platform combination out of 20 odd - the complexity is mad, so trust that we will fix everything we can. (Back from hols!)

For people asking about the “rare graphical glitch that caused some creature models to explode”… here’s a video showing the bug - it’s one that I fixed and was caused by certain creatures with fur when rendering them as a hologram - a silly bug with the “shells” geometry shader

Cockpit rendering in #NoMansSky like Ray’s screen-shot here is a constant source of complex rendering problems that we needed to continually improve as the game has grown: - All the cockpit screens are off-screen rendered, including 3D parts like ship models on the right screen and all the stats displays in the others. We need to sequence this rendering to share video memory as much as possible, and these also need to be scaled with settings/resolution. Holograms also have sit properly within this frame-work of ordering. - The Glass that curves into the structural ship elements has proper refraction and has to work, layered with all the other render passes, including VR where this refraction is in proper stereo. Thousands of lines of code to get a simple additive effect, distorting all other scene elements regardless of transparency and other order dependent passes. - Stars, Nebula, pulse effects, shadows, space fog, general particles and all other mesh rendering both in space and on planet, have to interact and sort with the cockpit view to give players an immersive experience. It’s a tough gig, but as always Ray has captured a pure shot that is a beautiful demonstration of our teams work. (On a personal note - got back from a holiday week in Denmark - Legoland, Lalandia, LegoHouse and WowPark.. amazing country, TY!)

“My Tron Recognizer” (Credit Reddit u/istandforgnodab) #NoMansSky

As a graphics engine coder I think when you look at a flickering bug like this one in the video below it’s not immediately obvious what is going on. The key here is observation - to study this flickering/bugged render carefully - what do we see? Firstly for me it was very obvious that nearly all of the scene shadows were flashing on and off - but (but!) there was a secondary issue where some buildings and parts of the sky were also flashing purple. Hmmmm. Interesting. I initially thought then this might be two separate bugs - but because the sky purple element could only based on full screen post fx and not 3D rendering I looked at this first with a few GPU captures to step through all our post processing to find the rendering stage which made these pixels turn purple: When I did this I found the colour 3D texture LUT grading that makes our different biomes have unique colour palettes was going very wrong - colours near 0 or 1 were wrapping and making the purple elements that we see in the said sky and base parts. The only way this could happen was if the texture was corrupt (which it was not) or if the 3D texture sampling was wrapping and not clamped as intended. That was the Eureka moment - because if the post fx had the wrong texture sampler then the disappearing shadows which also require an exact texture sampler for comparing depth might be also wrong because of the same kind of texture sampling issue! So with this idea that the engine was using the wrong texture samplers, but only in very high draw call scenes like the big base here I the looked at some engine limits and found the bug very quickly - a circular dx12 descriptor buffer for samplers running out over multiple frames, reusing the wrong data for new scenes inflight. Hence the flickering, as the GPU randomly got wrong samplers for some post textures or shadow depth. Easy to fix with triple limits for future expansion and also adding an assert/debug spam in case this limit is ever reached again - QA testers would see this message and report if they ever saw a flicker with this style of bug. My bug and my bad from 2017 porting NMS to DX12 without foreseeing how massively complex bases and our game would grow.

“My proudest creation so far.” (Credit Reddit u/livannsnz_49)

Here’s a fun updated list of the platform combinatorics that we currently support in No Man’s Sky! It’s a long list, which I hope conveys the complexity involved in releasing a large cross platform game like ours: PS5 (Base) PS5 (Base, PSVR2) PS5 Pro PS5 Pro (8K) PS5 Pro (PSVR2) PS4 (Base) PS4 (Pro, x 2 - 1080p/4k modes) PS4 (Base PSVR) PS4 Pro (PSVR) PS4 (PSVR, enhanced when running on PS5) Xbox One, Xbox One S Xbox One X (x4 - Quality/Perf modes, 1080p/4k modes) Xbox Series S (x4 - Quality/Perf modes, 1080p/4k modes) Xbox Series X Switch (Handheld) Switch (TV mode) PC (around 140 combinations of graphics options - AA, Super Resolution, Quality modes etc) Mac (a similar amount of options, with dev support from The-Forge) PC (Steam Deck, Rog Ally, Intel, Laptop/Integrated graphics) PCVR (a dozen or so supported headsets, and most of the same options as flat mode) This is a simplified, graphics engine/platform centric breakdown, not counting major systems like networking, input and audio… There are also many other integrated paths like HDR and dynamic res scaling (DRS) on console, GPU vendor specific optimisations 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.

It roughly took four months of my time spread over the last six to enable foveated rendering on PSVR2 in our deferred pipeline and engine ... Enjoyed every minute implementing the support :)

I’m going to hijack Ray’s awesome post here and use it to talk about a particularly challenging engineering problem that we solve in No Man’s Sky, which arises as a direct consequence of our game universe being so astronomically large: You all probably know about shaders, which are the primary basis for rendering rasterised graphics in games and also might know that large titles can have thousands of shaders, so that they can render a rich set of materials/meshes, particles, shadows, post fx .. and everything you see, in game. We face a hard and complex task in #NoMansSky when it comes to these sort of shader combinatorics - not only as biome diversity and richness has grown over the years, but also because the exact set of shaders needed to render a planet or anything else that is procedurally generated is not known until it is calculated - nothing in NMS exists until the seeded generation produces the system, planet, ship, station (etc) or anything else that you then see on your screen! This aspect makes “shader loading” in our game more challenging than a lot of titles, where a traditionally designed/static world might allow you to have information about which shaders are going to needed, ahead of time. One up front thing that we do know is the whole set of shaders that could possibly be needed to render anything in the game .. and right now that number is around 60 thousand. The 60 there is not a typo, but at least we can initially reduce this starting count by 2.5x with some hash reduction - it still leaves us with tens of thousands of shaders, though! For console versions of NMS this huge shader set can be completely precompiled offline and then streamed in as needed - but on PC shaders have to be compiled and cached by the driver. To deal with such a large set requires quite a lot of extra work, in order to minimise hitching that would happen if a driver has to compile shaders (pipeline states) that it has not encountered before - Nobody on PC likes hitching, and pretty much every gamer has encountered FPS drops that are caused by this problem, across a large number of titles over the last decade, as game rendering complexity has grown. When running from Steam, there is an embedded shader caching system, (introduced some years back) and this is very helpful for reducing initial load times or long compiles/loads when you update a driver.. but even with this system in place, every time we do a large update (or patch) that has changed a lot of our shaders, we gather data from QA - dozens of hours of real play or smoke-test shader usage, visiting hundreds of planets, dozens of stations, freighters and bases, so that we accurately know and can precompile 99.5% of the most common shaders in use, to minimise this kind of hitching - quite a mad amount of effort to solve something that is never mentioned in patch notes and all just happens behind the scenes!

At 18 years old, around about 1990/91 and just a few years into learning 3D graphics I worked with a friend, the late Jose Commins to create our first 3D world on the Atari ST. It might seem primitive and crude, but this was a foundational step for me from there to #NoMansSky

This beautifully staged screenshot is a fair summary of how I feel tonight. Many of you have noticed that #NoMansSky is now marked as a #PS5Pro enhanced title on the PlayStation store - the only thing I’d like to say as an engine programmer who has been through all the PS iterations since PS1, is that this console absolutely rocks .

“We Have a Lift Off!” (Credit Reddit u/CieKite)

Here’s a fun list of the platform combinatorics we currently support in No Man’s Sky. These all have to work for each update and every patch that goes out the door! It’s a long list, which I hope conveys the complexity involved in releasing a large cross platform game like ours: PS4 (Base) PS4 (Pro, x 2 - 1080p/4k modes) PS4 (Base PSVR) PS4 (Pro PSVR) PS4 (PSVR, enhanced when running on PS5) Xbox One, Xbox One S Xbox One X (x4 - Quality/Perf modes, 1080p/4k modes) Xbox Series S (x4 - Quality/Perf modes, 1080p/4k modes) Xbox Series X Switch (Handheld) Switch (TV mode) PS5 PS5 (PSVR2) PC (around 140 combinations of graphics options - AA, Super Resolution, Quality modes etc) Mac (a similar amount of options, with dev support from The-Forge) PC (Steam Deck, Rog Ally, Intel, Laptop/Integrated graphics) PC (VR, a dozen or so supported headsets, and most of the same options as flat mode) I should add that this is a simplified, graphics engine/platform centric breakdown, not counting major systems like networking, input and audio… There are also many other integrated paths like HDR and dynamic res scaling (DRS) on console, GPU vendor specific optimisations on PC and foveated rendering for PSVR2. All of these created and maintained in a single unified code base, by the (relatively tiny) team at Hello … it’s certainly a super fun puzzle-set to work on every day!

This blew up quite a bit - thank you all for the kind comments and feedback! Some notes and answers to some questions: - The debug camera mode has no collision detection (intentionally), so you see me fly under the terrain a bit at the start of the vid and also overshoot a bit under the surface near the end. I left that in to demo how this mode is experienced in daily work. - The game is in “all planets have water” debug mode in the video. - The flashing jumps have nothing to do with LOD transitions, it’s just a “fixed” jump that we use to cover distance rather than waiting for the camera to accelerate! - Yes, there is still pop-in, and you can see it most notably on far distant terrain/instances if camera movement outruns generation. Optimisation is still ongoing. - PS5 dev-kits are that noisy - But they are fine workhorses and are rock solid! - The CPU and GPU load is above 95% once you’re within a planets atmosphere in a generation / rendering demo like this one, or in-game if you are flying at speed. - Generation speed has nearly doubled in the Worlds update thanks to a single programmer (Jordan) spending many months on a large rewrite of the core voxel code. - my favourite platform to code for is…. :)

“KITTY!!!” #NoMansSky ShipBuilds. (Credit Reddit u/Str8TripNOuT)

“It's impossible! No, it's necessary” (Credit Reddit u/KenFalco87)

50 years later, these paintings are close to screenshots from our game .. #NoMansSky. Inspiration from the past, weaved into the future.

11 months ago when I wrote this post the positive response came as a huge surprise - I was the coder responsible for the original #PSVR2 support for #NoMansSky … and then a few months later made another resolution improvement, where the response was that NMS was still too blurry, even though I personally thought it was better than many decent RTX cards! I really felt that I had let people down. The subsequent foveated rendering work was a huge experiment and basically R&D in a very pure sense - we genuinely did not know if foveated rendering would work out with such a large engine and it’s feature set - and the same was true recently with our new Worlds part 1 update where bringing new water, clouds and complex GPU instances to PSVR2 has taken a significant amount of engineering effort from many team members. Hellogames is a unique company and has a culture that allows this and it’s very cool to participate in this adventure. I’m definitely not finished with PSVR2.

And breathe! #NoMansSkyTheCursed like all our previous updates is a true labour of love - many team members often spent several days on single bugs with QA and the game team working immensely hard with big engine changes. It’s such a thrill to see this update go out today. Enjoy!

The experimental branch has been updated with a large number of bug fixes. This build has something that everyone has been asking for - dynamic water simulation being enabled on PS5 and Series S/X.. myself and Tom worked through hard some bugs with this, so we are thrilled to see it get enabled - roughly this should be the 5.53 patch depending on any further issues we find during testing. Screenshot from Thursday on Series X! steamcommunity.com/app/27585…

This is so lovely to see - #NoMansSky Voyagers is at number five in the Steam global best sellers chart! A thrilling reward for the team at Hello Games - for the hard work, perseverance and love of our craft.

“Is my venator to big for the anomaly?? WiP of my 1:1 scale venator” (Modded, Credit Reddit u/Mrpablito2334)

Wow! 🙏

This ship from the master builder Ray really made me smile! PSVR was code-named “Morpheus” and PS5 Pro “Trinity” and our codebase is littered with these names - so it seems very fitting to have the Nebuchadnezzar flying around in our Universe!

“My Corvettecycle” (Credit Reddit u/after-dark-night)

A fun little story about #NoMansSky Voyagers: The working internal dev title for this release was the “Biggs” update! This name actually started life as some new code that was written for a ShipBuilder and customised ship code class - which is a bit of mouthful.. so it was abbreviated to “Building In Giant Ships” (BIGS). At some point to make things sound even bigger someone enthusiastically added an extra G in a conversion .. and after that it was always the “BIGGS” update … A purely random way to arrive at the rather appropriate dictionary definition of the word: “The name Biggs is of English origin and is derived from the word big, which signifies something that is large or significant. “ :)

I don’t think outside of the original Harry Potter team that it’s well known that an earlier version of this engine was used to bring Quake 3 to PlayStation 2 - I still treasure that achievement and the plaque I have here in the office.

There's a ton of fixes coming in the next #NoMansSky update, but close to my heart are two things that I've now coded up which just missed the original release: - Support for Terrain Tessellation on Switch 2, which significantly enhances surface detail, allowing landscapes to appear smoother and more intricate at close range. - Support for creature fur rendering on Switch 2. Making it's way there's also some optimisations that give a large improvement to our 40fps (unlocked) mode, making the game significantly smoother! Little shot of the new terrain working - not bad for a hand-held! steamcommunity.com/app/27585…

Wow - what an amazing freighter base! Super impressive. (via Reddit, credit u/Sea_Statisician_259)

I feel very privileged to have been part of the #NoMansSky journey - it’s been absolutely mad fun and at the same time often a roller coaster of emotions participating in every release .. 8 years and 8 months working on NMS for me, today on this anniversary!

The same location and save running with the fix - flicker is gone and since it was a general engine bug/limit being reached it’ll probably help other large bases that had this issue on Xbox.

After our Switch 2 release I forgot to post an update of our fun list of the platform combinatorics that we currently support in No Man’s Sky! A single emoji can’t describe the effort to support such a long list, but I hope this conveys the complexity involved in releasing a large cross platform game like ours: PS5 (Base) PS5 (Base, PSVR2) PS5 Pro PS5 Pro (8K) PS5 Pro (PSVR2) PS4 (Base) PS4 (Pro, x 2 - 1080p/4k modes) PS4 (Base PSVR) PS4 Pro (PSVR) PS4 (PSVR, enhanced when running on PS5) Xbox One, Xbox One S Xbox One X (x4 - Quality/Perf modes, 1080p/4k modes) Xbox Series S (x4 - Quality/Perf modes, 1080p/4k modes) Xbox Series X Switch (Handheld) Switch (TV mode) Switch 2 (Handheld) Switch 2 (TV mode) PC (around 144 combinations of graphics options - AA, Super Resolution, Quality modes etc) Mac (a similar amount of options, with dev support from The-Forge) PC (Steam Deck, Rog Ally, Intel, Laptop/Integrated graphics) PCVR (a dozen or so supported headsets, and most of the same options as flat mode) … and of course this is a simplified, graphics engine/platform centric breakdown, not counting major systems like networking, input and audio… There are also many other integrated paths like HDR and dynamic res scaling (DRS) on console, GPU vendor specific optimisations 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.

Gosh! This is what’s known as a “keeper” :) Absolutely gorgeous shot here from the legendary Pachafly .

With our #NoMansSky PS5 release today there is a bug affecting some players that can cause a black screen or corrupt rendering when flying down to a planet or loading into a save on certain planet types: The root cause of the issue has been found this evening and this fix will be fast tracked - please note this is a rendering/systems issue and no game saves are at risk. Any boot to black game saves will render correctly again with the fix.

A key part of porting #Journey to PS4 was upgrading the version of PhyreEngine that the original PS3 game used.. this came with a nice bonus, because the new version supported both PS4 and PC. This allowed us quite early on to have a basic version running in Windows for rapid iteration - here’s a clip from the February 2014 after months of work where the dune system ran somewhat correctly - thousands of lines of PS3 SPU code converted to AVX intrinsics! A relief to see on screen after a lot of debugging.

“My attempt at recreating an X-Wing” (modded, Credit Reddit u/paul_pk)

Worlds Part II patch 5.51 has been released for PS5 - full details: nomanssky.com/2025/01/worlds…

I walked into my office this morning after a pretty crazy busy week, where I worked on every single console and a fair number of our platform combinations. Cables and controllers everywhere - an unordered mess! Instead of tidying I worked on PSVR2!

Today. I was doing some work on improving PSVR2 in #NoMansSky and managed to get myself the double (distortion) foveated bug again! PSSR though… made it look even better than before, so I had a walk around the station..

“Ghost Rider Hell Cycle” (Modded, Credit Reddit u/Business-Ad7834)

This was a lovely thing to read, when I finished work this evening! I’ve mostly been working on Xbox and Switch engine stuff this week, but looking forward to getting back to VR once a few more live issues are sorted. ❤️❤️❤️

So good! ❤️❤️❤️

The #NoMansSky Worlds part 1 update is now out on all our platforms! I made a summary earlier in the year about the list of the platform combinatorics we support, which seems relevant to repost right now, given the very large new feature set and improvements in this release. So… The Worlds part 1 update had to be made to work on: PS4 (Base) PS4 (Pro, x 2 - 1080p/4k modes) PS4 (Base PSVR) PS4 (Pro PSVR) PS4 (PSVR, enhanced when running on PS5) Xbox One, Xbox One S Xbox One X (x4 - Quality/Perf modes, 1080p/4k modes) Xbox Series S (x4 - Quality/Perf modes, 1080p/4k modes) Xbox Series X Switch (Handheld) Switch (TV mode) PS5 PS5 (PSVR2) PC (around 140 combinations of graphics options - AA, Super Resolution, Quality modes etc) Mac (a similar amount of options, with dev support from The-Forge) PC (Steam Deck, Rog Ally, Intel, Laptop/Integrated graphics) PC (VR, a dozen or so supported headsets, and most of the same options as flat mode) I should add that this is a simplified, graphics engine/platform centric breakdown, not counting major systems like networking, input and audio… There are also many other integrated paths like HDR and dynamic res scaling (DRS) on console, GPU vendor specific optimisations on PC and foveated rendering for PSVR2. With all this complexity there will be bugs, but rest assured we are on the case!

Here s a video of the 600+ hour save that showed the horrible flickering. I’ve debugged the issue and have submitted a fix.

#NoMansSky Beacon 5.75 is releasing now on all platforms - amongst the other fixes, it contains a fix for a PSVR2 only bug that was exceptionally difficult to track down. I probably spent more than 15 hours on this one, which caused flickering on some types of grass and trees!

No Man’s Sky Worlds Part II 5.57 was released today, focused on expedition 17 and a few high priority general fixes. The rapidity and pipelining of patches for this update has been crazy even for someone involved since 2016 - Laser team focus! nomanssky.com/2025/02/worlds…

A short story and lesson about stability and bugs with a large, complex game like ours - #NoMansSky : So.. like most titles on console and PC, our dev team can see daily crash reports submitted by gamers and we monitor these for every release and work from the top, fixing bugs.. in our last release we are at the lowest number of daily crashes ever, despite the huge growth in players with the worlds part 1 update. This is a remarkably achievement with such a large piece of software on so many platforms, with a tiny team, relatively. Over the years software at scale has been one of most interesting things in terms of my own personally learning - the live data has been incredibly enlightening, because with hundreds of thousands or millions of players it gives you a whole new perspective on game stability. As an example some years ago I did the primary engine port for PS5 and on release I became really despondent when we were getting 600 crashes a day despite our best efforts with a particular crash . When I dug deeper it turned out that we often had 600 people playing the game for over 20 hours and just suspending and resuming, until a small memory leak crashed the game - in context these people had visited > 150 planets in their play session! These days our smoke tests cover such a case and often PS5 has reached > 1000 planets over whole 3 or 4 days of continuous running - not quite windows 11… but close :) TLDR(!) software engineering at scale is hard - but we do try bloody hard to fix everything we can with all the data we have at hand.

Noted on Reddit - you can fish underwater! Bug or feature - Should we fix this?!

The first batch of fixes for #NoMansSky Voyagers are now out in our Steam experimental branch. These will make their way to the first 6.0 series patch, pending testing and feedback. (I fixed the Xbox HDR black screen and a PS5 crash. Long, but good day!) steamcommunity.com/app/27585…

A long list of fixes with a lot of hard work from our team! I implemented the new DLSS3 and frame generation support in our engine for the #NoMansSky Worlds Part 1 update, working with NVIDIA over many months - this build includes the first large set of improvements to iron out various system specific issues with scaling and edge cases - There are two issues (that we know of) remaining : 1. Limited or no scaling on some systems, but in 4K only - resolutions below this should always gain more than 70% FPS. 2. A missing option to allow Reflex low latency with boost mode. Feedback from this experimental release is welcome and requested!

Just thought I’d mention a few VR related things from this experimental build for the forthcoming 5.04 patch.. We now have full water reflections for VR on PC at ultra settings and these are also now implemented as standard on PSVR2 . For graphics programmers reading this - on PS5 it has marched screen space reflections with foveated render targets, which was quite a fun thing to get working! Lastly, we also have thousands of people who play VR with a PSVR1 headset on PS5 - we’ve hopefully resolved some stability issues with long plays with this incoming release. Enjoy!

No Man’s Sky Worlds Part II 5.55 is now out with a boat load of fixes! Today also marks the launch of EXPEDITION SEVENTEEN: TITAN which will run for 6 weeks. nomanssky.com/2025/02/worlds…

Another little peak into #NoMansSky Worlds Part II development - from around late November with both creature water dynamics and lighting/luminescence experiments, from Tom. The initial displacement is fantastic and the overall effect got balanced for the release.

With a large update like #NoMansSky Worlds Part II when we reach the second or third patch we start to focus on more minor issues - this one here was largely unreported, but the (ready brek!) glow around the ship in some systems did not look good, and we wanted a fix! I worked with Sal who did the major lighting revamp and we got to the bottom of the bug, painstakingly checking renderer code paths from the last release to the current. A fun puzzle and the bug is now fixed and will make it to the 5.52/3 patch.

Believe it not.. even after I fix these sort of bugs on my own dev setup.. I doubt myself - sometimes then, even after our amazing testers confirm the fixes (especially Gregor who is my QA VR Wingman without whom none of VR releases could ever have come to pass)… I am still relieved to see these bugs fixed in the wild. #NoMansSky on PSVR2 is a huge passion for me, so I hope I can keep the community happy and patient as we optimise.

Look what just arrived :) I love my #PS5Pro dev-kit, but this is so nice to see at home, in the living room!

No Man’s Sky Worlds Part II 5.54 is out - Xbox was fast tracked and came out last night, PC an hour or so ago, and PS4/PS5 just about now! What a week! nomanssky.com/2025/02/worlds…

For a game like #NoMansSky where we support hardware like Switch which is around 6-7 times slower than a PS4, the release of the 5090 means that we will now be supporting a GPU scaling range potentially of nearly 500x, from our slowest to fastest supported platform!

I was overwhelmed by the responses here and did not predict the outpouring of positivity about childhood memories of Harry Potter, and then other game devs posting that this work influenced their own life choices, to become part of our industry. As an engine programmer I was a small cog in a hugely creative team - around 190 people with the vast majority in art and design and only around 25 engineers if my memory serves me. Working on the Potter games did teach me an important lesson - that engine programmers and “tech” in video games should focus on empowering artists. This period of my life was an experience that to this day defined how I live and make choices by. Often (and especially) young engineers focus on code in a pure sense - forget about that and build features that magnify the talents of your team and you’ll make a better game!

Snow Gek! (via Reddit, credit u/nemkhao) #SnowMansSky :)

Foveated rendering for #PSVR2 in #NoMansSky was really an R&D project to start with - we genuinely didn’t know if all our rendering methods would work well with this tech, but 6 months ago enough engine plumbing had been done for a first working (unresolved) render! (1/5)

This shot from Ray is such a beautiful demo of the work that went into the #NoMansSky Worlds P1 update and especially the improvements in the recent 5.03 patch. It’s a constant surprise to see images like this,framed in a moment with such artistry: hear hear to all our explorers!

"I found… Skyrim?" (Credit Reddit u/Puttgetter101)

You are both an ambassador for our game and a shining light in the darkness that creeps into much of the internet atm. Keep doing what you are doing - love your creativity and fine talented touch with our worlds.

😅

I saw this video from @AziliaTheGreat last week and was puzzled - We hadn’t noticed this quality regression with PSSR/PS5 Pro, but the bug reproduced on my dev kit, right away. 6 hours of debugging later, I worked out what went wrong and a fix made into the current 6.04 patch!

On PS5 quite a few people reported this horrible visual bug with water and underwater base parts, affecting both VR and flat-mode. A fix is now in today’s experimental build and should make it to a future patch. My bug - rolling eyes when I found it.

You can see here how Elite directly influenced me - 5 years later after this club, aged 16 I wrote my first 3D code for this vector screen demo on the Atari ST. I would not have written this and would not have ended up working on #NoMansSky if Elite had not existed! #elite40

In a previous post I mentioned the crazy platform combinations we support in No Man’s Sky - I don’t often work from the main office so my home space has to fit in all the dev kits and hardware to support the game engine for every release: In 250sq ft there are 19 PCs of various specs, 7 small ITX low end systems and 8 console dev kits, 10GBe networking and 25GBe to my main 4 dev PCs, along with security and temperature control .. quite a lot of effort to build! Note some kits are masked in the photo! The framed lithograph on the wall is a Journey print by Mark Englert. The desk was custom made by a UK company that specialises in media/video editing)

The first raft of fixes for #NoMansSky Worlds Part II are now out in our Steam experimental branch, including the PS5 hang/black screen issue amongst others. These will make their way to the first 5.5 series patch, pending testing and feedback. steamcommunity.com/app/27585…

One of the bugs that has proved quite tricky to fix is now resolved in our current experimental build - this should make its way into #NoMansSky 5.74. The bug made certain base part textures low resolution and has eluded us for quite a while. Some more details: When looking at this issue, it seemed 'obvious' that this must be an engine bug, because we stream textures and the higher-detail mips load in, dynamically... but after some debugging (and a few other red herrings), we still could not reproduce the issue in Dev - it only showed up in final packaged builds. After quite a lot more digging, it turned out that there was no engine bug at all and the issue was with the build system - with our growing number of platforms some changes to our automated build system exposed an issue with the staging area for sizing and compressing textures - in this case, for the first time a build machine was creating game data for both Switch 1 and another console/PC...and once the Switch data was built the textures were not rebuilt at the correct resolution for the higher detail platform. The bug only affected a certain class of textures (Atlas multi-textures) - probably 150 or so out of our 42000 source textures! Quite hard to fix, because in testing we had to reproduce the conditions of the automated build - repeatedly building Switch first, then PC and then manually examining all the intermediates and final data, until the revised code was correct... Glad that one is resolved :) steamcommunity.com/app/27585…

A few more recent favourites from the team at Hello Games - picked from Reddit and our internal #NoMansSky Slack screenshots channel. ❤️

Aged 11, some 40 years ago, I fondly remember running excitedly to an after school computer club… to program BBC Basic for an hour and then to play Elite … which of course was the real reason for sprinting there every week! Such an influential game - #elite40

I often use him to help with some of our really hard to fix, flickering graphics bugs.. obvious really… since he can just clippy those triangles back into place.

A few of Ray’s ruins builds like this one have made our team pause for thought - someone relatively new commented “I think it happens to everyone at some point, but this is the first time I saw NMS without properly processing what I was looking at and thinking .. What game is this?”. Even as a veteran myself I’m blown away by the work of the art team and creative builds like this one, that expand the possibilities in the universe we’ve built.

Some good details in this article about our #PSVR2 release for #PS5Pro . Translating the tech numbers: we use dynamic resolution, so roughly the lowest Pro renders at is the highest base PS5 ever did, then the Pro peak is 55% more pixels multiplied 1.75x with foveated rendering!

Lovely to see these bug fixes come through after some tough debugging sessions involving many members of the engine team.