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A place to store all of Martin Griffiths tweets seems like a good plce to me!
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Some Belated Martin Griifiths posts
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!
I want to add that this week I virtually stood in the queue to order my home PS5 Pro - there is something really special about the journey from working on prototype hardware to it becoming a real thing with the immense intellectual and human effort it takes from thousands of people to ship a console like this with more than 50 launch titles.
I’ve never lost that child like excitement I get when coding on a new dev-kit or that same excitement when the real console arrives at home and you boot-up a game you’ve worked on, for the first time. The brilliant tranquil image I linked off, summed up the launch milestone perfectly for everyone at Hello who have worked hard to reach this point - we can quietly breath again and take pride that our tiny team is part of this.
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There’s hope for this guy’s save been recovered on zendesk so, if the patch didn’t already magic it back
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/comments/1gbl45o/lets_help_find_this_planet/
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He’s followed this up with 2 before / after videos of the bug in the same thread. Crazy seeing an almost real-time evolution of a bug from his Dev POV, it really makes me wish we’d get more devs posting about their work at HG or how they tackled something technical. Even a day-to-day overview of how they work away on an entire universe would be a really cool watch for anyone in the community.
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I’ve been hoping for something new and frequent like past GDC talks. The Worlds update video was a nice step in a direction I’d like to see.
I think back to halo 1/2 development when Frankie O Connor was the community manager, every week there’d be a fun little update with interviews with people and what they’re working on tech/engine wise.
We live in a more connected age where the gap between consumer and creator is even shorter but sometimes it feels like things were more engaging and inciteful back then.
Martins posts really reminds me of those days and it’s good to see it happening.
I remember before launch, Sean was talking about what he imagined the data to look like as people started playing the game and he figured it would light up like a bicycle wheel, everyone beginning on the rim and making a line for the centre.
I just want to see some cool visualisations of the server data filling up over a time scale, or moments like the first person charting a discovery outside of Euclid. Would make for an interesting video.
Maybe we can apply for jobs at HG and then pitch them an in-house documentary crew. My background is in TV/Film, just sayin 
(I’ve already forwarded CVs for all of us)
edit: @dersvr below, I got my ps5 in February, not sure when the feature for transfer disappeared, possibly liquidators, but I feel fortunate. See posts daily from people asking about it that got a PS5 after it vanished. It was taken out the same time the entries for Cross Save on other platforms appeared, so roll on the Cross-Save Beta and may it be a short and smooth one!
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I used to send those game saves in till PS5 made it impossible to do so.
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I love the idea of HGs running around inside our save files. I have sent several with weird issues like this.
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OMG. He just followed me back on Bluesky. I need to up my screenshot quality. 
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Heh. Are we voting for ourselves that we are the best and most supportive community?
And what happened to the most wanted game award? It’s part of the Golden joystick award - I see, it’s happening on Twitch right now.
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We didnt get the nom for best ongoing game…
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Light No Fire was nominated for “most wanted” in the Golden Joystick awards and also didn’t receive it, GTA won.
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While I don’t agree with it, it makes sense.
People who don’t spend a lot of time or any time on video games, all play GTA.
For a certain sort in UK and Ireland, GTA and FIFA are the only games they buy.
Take into consideration GTA5 has been released across three console generations now, it’s certainly been a long time coming for a lot of people.
Personally I’m done with the franchise with how money hungry their GTA online tactics were. They didn’t even hide it, had the balls to call em Shark Cards. Also found it to be a generally toxic place, with all of the satire completely lost on most of the player base.
GTA RP mod looks looooads of fun though. Leave it to the community to make a decent mp game out of it.
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Well-deserved. Kudos to the small Hello Games team.
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