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[LeoLeonardoIII]

Fun Fact 29: Banned for wishing for a high-rated avatar!

Not Very Fun Serious Fact 29: A natural gas drilling company caused a mud volcano that has destroyed a swath of Indonesian countryside and several villages. It continues to pump out mud at an astonishing rate and cannot be plugged.

EDIT: Not actually completely a Fun thing.

[Armok]

(There is actually one meaningful way to have a galaxy: have each star be just a dot with a few bytes of data, and generate it procedurally if and only if the player visits it. Think Noctis.)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Digitally, it's more feasible. But if a star isn't generated until you visit it, then there is no connectivity between systems, and you can't really say your game / fiction is really about a whole galaxy. It's just about a series of disconnected star systems. And until you've done the generation then you don't even have that: you just have a funky little bitmap. That's like me showing you a picture of the Milky Way and saying that's a fleshed-out fictional setting.

But even then, with exactly two bytes per star system, your galaxy takes up over 186 gb of storage space. If you average four planets / features per system, one moon/feature per planet, and give each of those two bytes of description, you've inflated it to 1.67 tb of data. But you need little spacer bytes that say "move on to describing the next body" so between each needs to be a byte at zero.

Our solar system would look like this:

Single Medium Yellow Star
Tiny Rock Planet, No Moon
Small Gas Planet, No Moon
Small Rock Planet (Atmosphere), One Small Rock Moon
Loose Asteroid Belt
Small Rock Planet, Two Tiny Rock Moon
Huge Gas Planet, 62 Tiny Rock Moon
Large Gas Planet (Rings), 33 Tiny Rock Moon (1 Atmosphere)
Large Gas Planet, 27 Tiny Rock Moon
Large Gas Planet, 13 Tiny Rock Moon

If every system had that level of detail, you're looking at about 27.8 tb of data.

And I'd say to have a meaningful interaction with Earth you'd need to know more about it than that it is a small rocky planet with an atmosphere. If you accounted for space to tell what the main atmospheric composition was, the presence of liquid water, biology, civilization, not even getting into any names or specifics, you're still looking at a galaxy of well over 300 tb of data.

But even that doesn't actually give you a setting. You need to name civilizations, determine what civs they know about and how they feel about them, what their tech levels are, how peaceful they are, what atmospheres they breathe, etc. At that point you might as well call it 5-10 pb of data for your galaxy.

Don't even try for ship floorplans, names of countries or famous individuals, social movements, general maps of planets, and so forth.

Space is just too big to try talking about a galaxy.

(there are actualy ways around those problems to, but they are rather technical. One example is that you could describe 1 group of 1000 stars, then you just have several copies of that, with randomly generated diferences only when the player actualy examines them so it dosn't seem like it's the same. Thats just one example, and that could be combined with loads of other techicues. or if the drawbacs from that spesific techniue are to limiting for the curent aplication, using some of the other would still be enought.)

[qwertyuiopas]

(there are actualy ways around those problems to, but they are rather technical. One example is that you could describe 1 group of 1000 stars, then you just have several copies of that, with randomly generated diferences only when the player actualy examines them so it dosn't seem like it's the same. Thats just one example, and that could be combined with loads of other techicues. or if the drawbacs from that spesific techniue are to limiting for the curent aplication, using some of the other would still be enought.)

(((((Noctis turns a single number into an entire galaxy. What you would then do is continue the data seeding to produce civilizations and other components, with the civilizations being affected by nearby systems. You have to generate them each time you use them, but that way you have a deeply described civilization, with the only issue being that they can only "interact" with nearby civilizations, and more importantly, cannot change those interactions or evolve in any way.

It works by using the 3d coodrdinates to produce an input to a function that uses the input to decide if a planet exists through pseudorandom methods only relying on the input to determine the output, and weighted to be more likely in the denser regions of the centre of the "galaxy".

Take this one step further, and fully save just the last thousand or two systems the player has meaningfully interacted with in full detail, then another hundred thousand vaguely. (The hundred thousand basically saying how well known the player is or something simple). The player will take a long time to fill up this cache, so they will never notice a civilization "revert" (10 minutes to properly interact with a system * 1000 systems = too much time).

Add to this the probability of a given civilization existing somewhere, and you get maybe one in ten systems with inhabitants, and you can give the player the feeling of an entire galaxy to explore while only saving the details for a few thousand.)))))

[Rashilul]

Fun fact 30: ^ They do this in every thread. ^

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Ah but that's not really a galactic story.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Let's say you have a Star Wars story and it describes ten planets throughout. The characters do not set foot on an eleventh planet. It is meaningless to say that the story is set in a galaxy. It's a galactic story in the same way Lord of the Rings was. It doesn't matter how much empty space was traveled through.

The characters of LOTR interacted with various types of terrain, dungeons, civilizations, battles, etc. and it can legitimately be said that the story is on a national scale. It cannot be described as a continental or world-spanning story.

WoW is set on several continents but those continents are actually the size of large islands in terms of real-world measurement. Morrowind was a few square miles or so. You can't call Morrowind or WoW a game about a world. They're games on an archipelago scale.

GTA4 was set in a very small but very built-up town. But it was really a game with a scale of the streets of a tiny town. You couldn't go inside except a couple specific places.

For something to be on a galactic scale, you have to feature meaningful interactions with many things in that galaxy. Procedural generation is fine, but you can't generate just as much as the player might encounter. At that point you're absolutely not playing a galaxy-scale game. You're playing a 1,000-solar-system-scale game.

I'm not saying that's not enough. It's far more than plenty! I'm saying that calling it a story on a galactic scale is disingenuous because it draws people in who are excited by that level of scope when it is not present.

EDIT: Also, if you have 1 in 1,000 system natively inhabited, you have to save cultural details for a minimum of one hundred million civs. That assumes every inhabited planet has no more than one native civ. You can't let the civ history cache drop and then expect the game to re-generate the civ procedurally again because the history is dependent on factors beyond static values like XYZ location and input seed.

EDIT2: Fun Fact 31: One of the two men who were the first ones to explore the Marianas Trench (the deepest portion of the sea) was named Piccard. His father was Swiss though, not French.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Now I can see how you could generate a history, too, and civs, etc using a seed. You would divide the galaxy into sections and subsections, and you load only what's in your subsection. The game re-generates the entire eight subsections around you every time you change subsections.

The problem with this is first that you can have no impact on the game. You can save changes you make to the player profile but that would quickly balloon out of control: imagine the havoc a single RPG character wreaks when he plows through a town stealing and buying and selling. And if you don't save those changes to the player profile he can mine the same asteroid for space-fish over and over, or kill the Prime Gulash of Krenucky multiple times.

Secondly if the game regenerates only the subsections immediately adjacent, they are not affected by subsections farther out. Imagine that the Borg are two subsections away. The game history shows everyone happy and healthy. You pass close enough to load the subsection with the Borg origin / homeworld. Suddenly the history of the Borg takes effect and the whole region is full of them. Farmer Ben is now six feet tall and wears black rubber implants. Scoot a light-year back in the other direction and the game reloads, and the Borg no longer exist for the purposes of the galaxy.

You can extend the load distance or reduce inter-civ impacts. Extending load distance increases system resource requirements by the square of the additional distance. There are practical limits you reach quite quickly. And if you make everyone completely isolated from each other so they can't affect each other, you are no longer playing a galactic game. You are playing a Gulliver's Travels style game involving multiple star systems. Gulliver did not travel around the world. He traveled between a few tiny islands.

[Tack]

Fun fact for the very far above.
This isn't for philosopy - it's for random tidbits of information which amuse people. Get to it and stop derailing.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Hey I leave fun facts and started spoilering my diatribe!

Fun Fact 33: The name of my city is unique - there are no other cities in the world named Tacoma. There is a light pickup of dubious quality.

[Myroc]

Fun Fact 34: Myroc is not pronounced "My rock".

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Please elaborate with the correct pronunciation in a future Fun Fact. I am curious.

Fun Fact 35: There's a million of us, just like me. (-The Real Suga Baby)

[Frelock]

Fun Fact 36: Glass is actually a liquid at room temperature; it just has such a high viscosity that it takes centuries for it to be noticeable.  This is why extremely old church windows are thicker at the bottom than they are at the top.

[Armok]

Fun Fact 36: Glass is actually a liquid at room temperature; it just has such a high viscosity that it takes centuries for it to be noticeable.  This is why extremely old church windows are thicker at the bottom than they are at the top.

This is a myth. The actual answere of what state glass is in is slightly more complicated than most materials, but closer to solid than liquid, and the thickness of church glass is due to the glassmaking techniues of the time.

[Virex]

Fun fact 37: pitch on the other hand exhibits liquid properties at a human time scale at room temperature, but it's viscocity is so absurdly high that it can be shatered by striking it with a hammer. It takes the pitch in the famous Pitch Drop experiment of Queensland University about 100 months to form and let go of a drop.

(note for the chemistry nerds here: In cases like this, "Liquid properties" would probably better then saying it's a liquid, since one could atribute the forming of drops in resins and bitumens to creep. Actualy in cases like this, liquid and solid lose a bit of their meaning.)

[Luke_Prowler]

Fun fact 38: Marijuana is actually less addicting than cigarettes and beer. If it was legalized in the US, hemp (the plant that Marijuana it made from) would put cotton out of business.   

[Frelock]

Fun Fact 39: Astronauts were not allowed to use the moon buggies if one astronaut was walking; a lunar hit-and-run would not have been good press.

(I got my last fun fact from a geochemist; funny how some scientists still believe everything they read.  However, since glass has no structure of any kind, I might call it a liquid too.  Definitions are fun.)

[Virex]

Fun Fact 40: you can heat watter and other liquids to well above it's boiling point, in which case you get a superheated fluid. This happens if you gradually heat the liquid in a clean container containing no dust or other things the boiling can start on.
If you disturb a superheated fluid, for example by adding sugar to your superheated coffee, some of it will turn into gas rapidly. Remembering that vapours typically take in about 1000 time as much volume as their corresponding liquids variant and you can guess the consequences.

(To be more precise, the formation of a vapor needs present gasses to start. Dust particles and sand can contain minute pockets of gas where the evaporation can start, and so can rough surfaces. A clean, smooth container could well lack these pockets of gas, facilitating superheating. Also, repeatedly heating and cooling liquids removes gass from it, making superheating easier.)