No Man's Sky Patch on the Way, Will Make People "Very Happy"

A new patch for the ambitious space game No Man's Sky is on the way. According to developer Hello Games, it's going to make some people "very happy"--whatever that means.

The news comes from Hello Games director Sean Murray, who wrote on Twitter (via VideoGamer.com) that the patch is currently being tested before it is released.

Murray did not provide any specifics on what the new No Man's Sky patch may fix, improve, or add.

No Man's Sky launched for PlayStation 4 a week ago, but it's the PC edition, having only launched on August 12, that is apparently running into more problems. In response to the issues, which included crashes and frame rate drops, Hello Games launched an "experimental branch" that players could join to play a version of the game with new changes applied before they're released to everyone.

It's possible the patch Murray is referring to is a full, public release of the experimental branch, though this is not confirmed. The experimental branch right now includes the items below, as written by Hello Games.

Improved AMD Phenom Support

• Thousands of lines of assembly have been rewritten overnight to support AMD CPUs. Unfortunately whilst the game code no longer relies on anything above SSE 2, Havok Physics still requires "Supplemental SSE 3," which was not supported until "Bobcat" and above. We're discussing with Havok.

Alt-Tab has improved

• Some systems/configs were crashing or not pausing correctly on Alt Tab. This should now be resolved.

Shader Caching

• Framerate was initially stuttering due to shaders not being correctly cached by the GPU on some systems. We have replaced the GPU caching system. You may notice some stutter during the Galactic Map intro to the game (the very first time you run), but it should be smoother from then on (this will be fixed in future). This is particularly true on ATI cards

Mouse Jitter

• Smoothing on mouse movement has been improved to prevent hitching or stuttering, and is now adjustable through the Options menu in "Mouse Smoothing."

Max FPS Cap

• On some CPU/GPU configurations, setting Max FPS to 60 or 30 was not giving 60 or 30 FPS (causing stuttering). This has been improved.

Improved Performance

• On CPUs with 4 threads or fewer, performance has been improved.

Intel GPUs

• The game will now let you know if you are trying to run with an unsupported GPU. This will hopefully flag for some users that their high-end GPU has not been selected.

Gsync

• Gsync has been disabled by default, which was causing an issue for some users.

Despite No Man's Sky's relatively rough PC launch, the game had a huge debut on Steam.

For more on No Man's Sky, check out GameSpot's review and what other critics are saying.