Hello Games have been endlessly toiling to fix last week’s somewhat botched PC release of ambitious space explorer No Man’s Sky, culminating in not one, not two, not four, but exactly three simultaneous patches.
For more excellent space games on PC to have adventures in, launch yourself into this.
According to the patch notes, released via Steam, the first patch addresses what was supposedly preventing many players from even making it past the launch screen with support for older AMD Phenom CPUs. Most straight up crashes were debugged by users to indicated any processor without SSE 4.1 support was incapable of running the game, so now ‘thousands of lines’ of assembly code have been rewritten to require nothing higher than SSE 2.
Havok Physics, the third party technology partner used by many studios to simulate various physics properties in games, has also pitched in with new libraries that add Phenom support.
Support for Radeon 6xxx GPUs has also been added, though it appears to be the only non-OpenGL 4.5 card that has been given the star treatment.
The first patch also fixes various performance bugs such as capped 30/60fps framerates not doing what they were supposed to be doing, as well as fixing the GPU cache system to reduce stuttering on mainly ATI cards.
The second patch focuses more on a bunch of edgecase and not-so-edgecase crashes, mostly relating to warping. Sometimes you would warp into the inside of a freighter, or into your desktop after the game refuses to do the thing anymore, that’s apparently all fine now.
The third patch stops you getting stranded on a space station if you blew up in space without any fuel in your launch thrusters and the station doesn’t have any Plutonium handy. It also stops a bunch more crashes. Man, that’s a lot of crashes to fix.
Anyway, if you were one of the many who tried the game at launch only to be met with severe issues, the Hello Games team reckons that’s 70% of reported issues fixed, so give it another go maybe.