No Man's Sky's Engine Programmer On Game's Stability

Martin Griffiths, a seasoned professional and current No Man's Sky's Engine Programmer, who frequently shares curious behind-the-scenes game development content, such as how No Man's Sky's engine can handle planet-landing sequences, an entire thread worth of insights regarding the porting of the 2012's Journey, and rare development footage from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, has shared a quick glimpse into software engineering at scale, along with an anecdote about a peculiar game crash on PS5.

Like many titles on console and PC, the No Man's Sky team receives daily crash reports from players, tracks these reports with each release, and prioritizes fixing the most critical bugs. Remarkably, the game's latest update has resulted in the lowest daily crash rate ever, even with a significant increase in players with the Worlds Part I update. This is a remarkable achievement with such a large piece of software on so many platforms with a relatively small team.

As Martin explained, working with large-scale software has been one of the most interesting aspects of his personal learning journey. The live data has proven to be incredibly insightful: with hundreds of thousands or millions of players, it offers a whole new perspective on game stability.

The developer shared an experience from years ago when he was responsible for the initial engine port for PS5. At launch, he felt disheartened to see 600 crashes per day, despite the team's efforts to address a specific issue. Upon further investigation, he discovered that many players were playing the game for over 20 hours, frequently suspending and resuming their sessions, which led to a small memory leak that ultimately crashed the game. Apparently, these players had visited over 150 planets during their play session.

Nowadays, No Man's Sky smoke tests cover such scenarios, and the PS5 version often manages to explore over 1,000 planets during three to four days of nonstop play.

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