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[Nivim]

Spoiler: "Ridiculously long discussion on galaxy sizes." (click to show/hide)

Fun Fact 24: Any fiction or game involving space on a scale of even a tenth of the galaxy is meaningless because it's so huge. There are at least 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Which means if in your guidebook you detailed each star system with just one page of text, and you can fit 269 pages in an inch of book thickness with one solar system on each side of a page, the book would be almost 3,000 miles tall. Earth's diameter is almost 8,000 miles.

If you were to read that book at one page per minute, continuously without sleep 24 hours a day 7 days a week, you would finish over 190,000 years later.

And this is one page of text per solar system. Go ahead and try defining our solar system, including Earth and all its biology and civilization and history, in just one page.

I say this scale is meaningless because our stories involving galaxies always focus on just a few people and planets, and even then only on extremely limited parts of those planets.

You could easily tell the story of Star Wars without anyone in the cast visiting more than a half-dozen solar systems. You have just a few scattered planets visited, a moon or two, a couple bars, etc. In a stretch you could set it in just one solar system.

In terms of a game, just try designing, even in a crude overview using randomized tables like in Traveller, just one quadrant of a galaxy. It's pointless.

And unless you hit all those places, you might as well not even talk about the galaxy at all. It's just a buzzword that makes the fans titter.

(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.)

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.)

(((((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.)))))

Ah but that's not really a galactic story.


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.


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.

You know, there is a procedural game that will use that fact to make sure the players never run out of room. The development is going well, even though Brebion isn't as close to the future players as Toady. Oh, and it's called Infinity.
:tcaF nuF

[Neruz]

Fun Fact 67: Dolphins are dicks.

Fun Fact 68: So are people.

[Myroc]

Fun Fact 70: Fun Fact 65 has been mentioned twice.

Fun Fact 71: I just denied everyone the possibility of making a perverted "Fun Fact 69" joke. Muhaha.

[EagleV]

Fun fact 72: Lice are so fertile, they get born pregnant.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Fun Fact 72B (Because the next one legitimately ought to be 73): If you ever hear something that touches off your logic-sensor, check Snopes for corroboration. It's not peer-edited so in some circles it could be viewed as a more reliable source than Wikipedia. It's also pretty entertaining to read.

[Myroc]

Fun Fact 74: We went 65 twice, i just corrected the order. The next Fun Fact should be 75.

[Rooster]

Fun Fact 75: Number/Answer games are extremely popular on forums

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Fun Fact 76: Americans have what we call football and there are about 300,000,000 of us. The rest of the world disagrees and there are 21 times as many of them.

[Cthulhu]

Fun Fact 78:  Fun Fact 66 is false.  Bonobos have sex for pleasure, as do pigs.  There are a lot of animals that have sex for pleasure.

[Tack]

Fun Fact 79: Neither Bonobos nor pigs kill for pleasure.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

It would also be more appropriate to give the fact as "of animals which have been reliably and thorhoughy researched, ..." because I doubt there have been many studies on whether pink salmon or musk oxen like sex or not.

[Tack]

These are fun facts. Not credibly researched and backed up facts. I expect them to be true, but I expect people to be able to read them in a sentence.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Fun Fact 80: Your ability to tell the truth is not related to your butt-size preference.

[Cthulhu]

Fun Fact 79: Neither Bonobos nor pigs kill for pleasure.

Fun Fact 81:  "2+2=5 and 3+3=6" is a false statement.  If one point in a statement is false, the statement is considered false.

[Tack]

Fun Fact 79: Neither Bonobos nor pigs kill for pleasure.

Fun Fact 81:  "2+2=5 and 3+3=6" is a false statement.  If one point in a statement is false, the statement is considered false.

Fun Fact 66: Dolphins and humans are the only animals that have sex for pleasure, or and kill for fun.

Jill, and Tracy are the only girls who wear dresses and hats

Congratulations on forcing me to make an extended argument on a fun fact.

"We also employ subjective terms such as 'willingly' and 'regularly' in claiming that bonobos and dolphins are the only other animals who "willingly (and regularly) engage in sex with each other"

Even though its thoughts are a bit divided on this.


Next time, PM people with the true information, so they can sort it out and possibly change it. I don't want to have arguments in a thread meant for "lol, did you know that I can't clap one-handed?"