Space is big...but how big?

[Hero2Zero]

For the Trollers: I am not interested in your opinions. Sorry.
For the technically minded: I would be interested in hearing your opinions. I am a programmer and could understand the concepts.

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The Star Trek concept is, as we all know, "to explore strange new worlds" etc. but I wonder how this will be handled. There can be no "strange new worlds" without the "new worlds" part. I see a technical conundrum here.

Assume that all known, canon planets (Earth, Vulcan, Romulus) are hand crafted areas, how are the strange new worlds going to be created. Creating a large number of planetary surfaces by hand would be an impossible task. However creating the worlds algorithmically would be a technical feat in that you really can't reliably have a computer place plants and animals (assuming the planet was one with life) on the landscape in an interesting way without human tweaking. Not to mention placing fun things like ruins and artifacts to discover.

Building millions of stars wouldn't really be that difficult nor would creating the planetary bodies themselves (search for a program named "accrete" on Google or Yahoo), it's just the exploration part I wonder about. No one would really want to explore a lifeless ball of rock very often.

By way of comparison EVE online has thousands of worlds but you can't set foot on any of them. Easy mode.

Mankind has thousands of generated worlds and systems but the game operates at a more spartan level than the Trek license implies. No animals or plants or interesting features, just minerals and such.

Note: Please notice my post says it would be a technical feat, but not impossible. I'd really be interested in a Dev response to this post if we could get one. It would be an interesting tidbit of information about the games design without giving away the whole thing.

[warrendeath]

Space is unlimited, it can reach out beyond anything we have ever imagined. That in my mind is pretty simple to guess.


Live long and prosper,

Warren

[Hero2Zero]

Space is unlimited, it can reach out beyond anything we have ever imagined. That in my mind is pretty simple to guess.


Live long and prosper,

Warren

LOL. Thanks Warren. Maybe you should read the post and not just the title in the future though. :D

[Drake1444]

How big? Like this <----------------------------------------> big; I mean biiiiiiiig. :D

No I'm sure the game will be like Eve; you can just keep going and going at impulse without running into an invisible wall. But that also means that you won't run into anything else either.

Just those little balls of lights that stream by the ships as they travel. You know the ones that are supposed to be stars but look really close to the ships?

[warrendeath]

LOL. Thanks Warren. Maybe you should read the post and not just the title in the future though. :D

Then don't ask a question, without wanting an answer. Logic proves to be unefficient for you and thus is the reason I'm posting to you.:)

Live long and prosper,

Warren

[Kinjiru]

Ultimately, it will depend on how detailed the unexplored sectors will be. It's fairly easy to generate a star system on the fly, for example:

12 planets, 2 have 2 hard, rocky moons, 1 gas giant, 1 class m, large asteroid belt between 5th and 6th planet.

But the real challenge will come in overall size of each, what are they made of, is the class M planet inhabited, if so, by what creatures, are any sentient, what technological level are they, et cetera.

Breaking that down further, are they humanoid, do they live in cities, or hunter gatherer clans, what are the cities/towns like, do they farm, what crops...

Basically an infinite number of variables can be involved. I can speculate that we;'ll prpbably see a bunch of low-tech societies, simply because there would be less variables involved in generating them. The post-warp advanced societies will probably have to be hand-crafted, so I wouldn't expect as many of those.

I can also speculate that we'll run into alot of old destroyed technological society artifact filled planets, where they can basically randomly generate the terrain and randomly place "loot" artifacts.

In closing, they can be as infinitely detailed as the Devs want to get, but I wouldn't count on thousands of extremely detailed undiscovered worlds.

[USS_Paragon]

I see where you are coming from. If the in game galaxy is constantly not expanding and creating new places or natrual events, then eventually the galaxy will be completely discovered and charted. Exploration will take a back seat while wars for territory will take the drivers seat (if we actually could fight over territory...):D

[phazah]

well considering the number of stars we have charted now, with just using that information, we have enought to keep us busy for awhile :)
but with that information we know the star type (Sol (our sun would be a G2V)) and then they can be creative...
they would have to generate the number of planets, each planets classification(type m for example) and then if it has life, sentient life, and pre or post warp technology, then form its landmasses and go from there....

i think their server farms are going to have very huge databases, and really really large hard drives :) (note the terrabyte drive prices will be dropping from the mass production :) )

[HyorD]

Have you ever played Noctis (http://www.anywherebb.com/)? This masterpiece is only about a Mega-byte large, but uses an algorithm to generate and distribute over 78 billion stars, most of which have planets, many of which have explorable surfaces. Now, while varied, these stars and planets are perhaps not all that exciting, but it gives you an idea of what you can accomplish through automation.

Now, as for creating interesting milieus: I would actualy not mind having quite a bit of instanced content for randomly generated missions. For instance, if you have a mission that takes place in a particular region on Vulcan, that region could be randomly generated when you and your team beam down there; that's not too difficult.
Now, it sounds to me as though Cryptic will be generating planets ad civilizations using algorithms, because they've indicated that you can go where noone has gone before and make first contact with species that noone else has encountered before. Now, what if you can't beam down to most of the planets that you can see while flying around (either it's a hazardous environment, or you can't beam down because of the Prime Directive), but when at a Starbase you can receive a mission and then warp to a mission instance (you could also bring your party members there) that would be generated at random? The missions would follow templates; the difficult part would then be creating a fair amount of fairly dynamic templates, but that's still a lot easier than having to hand-craft millions of strange new world and new civilizations, and it still allows us to boldly go where noone has gone before.

Missions like these would just be glorified grinding; the real treat would probably be to explore the hand-crafted areas. Think of the hand-crafted content as Emmy-winning episodes, and the instances as filler ;)

[DurMan667]

<Insert Douglas Adams reference here>

When it comes to the life-forms on any given planet, the overwhelming majority of the intelligent life sould be humanoid. Practically every species you see in Trek is humanoid.

The wierd stuff is the domain of Star Wars =P

[Aogos]

How big was the original 'ELITE' game or was it the ELITE 2 I'm thinking of? That had all the known stars at the time and how old is that game, 20 odd years old?

[AbaddonIX]

Well we dont know much about how big space will be,if planets/systems will be randomly generated but here is a thought,they can use some computer algorhym to generate let's say 100-200 planets/systems and their surfaces etc. and after they have randomly being generated,they can assign a 2-3 devs to customize the generated planets,like adding artifacts and such.

[RayDX]

Ultimately, it will depend on how detailed the unexplored sectors will be. It's fairly easy to generate a star system on the fly, for example:

12 planets, 2 have 2 hard, rocky moons, 1 gas giant, 1 class m, large asteroid belt between 5th and 6th planet.

But the real challenge will come in overall size of each, what are they made of, is the class M planet inhabited, if so, by what creatures, are any sentient, what technological level are they, et cetera.

Breaking that down further, are they humanoid, do they live in cities, or hunter gatherer clans, what are the cities/towns like, do they farm, what crops...

Basically an infinite number of variables can be involved. I can speculate that we;'ll prpbably see a bunch of low-tech societies, simply because there would be less variables involved in generating them. The post-warp advanced societies will probably have to be hand-crafted, so I wouldn't expect as many of those.

I can also speculate that we'll run into alot of old destroyed technological society artifact filled planets, where they can basically randomly generate the terrain and randomly place "loot" artifacts.

In closing, they can be as infinitely detailed as the Devs want to get, but I wouldn't count on thousands of extremely detailed undiscovered worlds.

Procedural generation is a very bad, but inevitable choice. If I have understood the dev STO preview at Las Vegas, it's based on the Champions Online's engine. That's the second generation of their engine (first is CoH and CoV) and it's designed to be more data-driven and artist friendly... And also more general. In this case, where it's necessary to create the feeling of infinity on an engine with finite capabilities will require a lot of abstracting from the programmer's point of view.

First of all, seamless rendering of such a vast, pardon me... Infinite area is impossible without dynamic data streaming which drags along a LoD system so the data can be prioritized. Even with that in place, it won't be enough. The game will probably dissect itself into multiple little parts that create the outer sum. And traveling between those parts at warp will probably be a perfect opportunity to load data in. I doubt it that there will be free roaming in terms that you actually point your finger and the ship warps there. New worlds could possibly be obtained from information vendors on stations or perhaps a long-range scan from the "outer rims" of the known space.

As I've said couple of lines above, procedural generation is a bad, but inevitable choice. The team will have to develop a system that will place the new world in world space coordinates and prepare all the necessary mesh data and missions around it. Things that will require subjugation to procedural generation will undoubtedly be the parameters of the terrain generation system, atmosphere, perhaps even texturing of the terrain. However, since it's all random it will require a lot of input from the artist to prevent the MassEffect's catastrophe with their generated planets, that really sucked.

On top of this pile certainly goes the scene organization, it will take a lot of modifying to adjust to the STO setting. But octrees ain't that bad =)

[Kahul_Bane]

Infinity game that is in dev has probly the best eng. to look at this concept, but the origainal concept the MR Rodenberry had the whole thing existed our own milkyway galixie, all of it.... so that is about the size it needs to be.

Not the whole univers, just our galixie. :)

[RayDX]

Infinity game that is in dev has probly the best eng. to look at this concept, but the origainal concept the MR Rodenberry had the whole thing existed our own milkyway galixie, all of it.... so that is about the size it needs to be.

Not the whole univers, just our galixie. :)

Infinity is a great example of procedural generation which could be brought to perfection if a commercial team would come "to play".

[Kahul_Bane]

Infinity is a great example of procedural generation which could be brought to perfection if a commercial team would come "to play".


amen!!!

it is funny too, the tech vids on youtube and such for it are over 2 yrs old, and no one is trying to buy it from him?????? could you imagain if that eng was used for STO, wow...

[PAw]

How long is a piece of string.

is the only knowledge i can impart.

[lumin]

I've mentioned this game in other places, but Noctis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis) is something Cryptic can learn from.

The galaxy in this game is even larger than the Milky Way Galaxy - over 78 billion stars. Each of the system can easily have 30 planets with moons as well. I don't think there is a game in existence with a larger galaxy. The planets are suprisingly varied, from liquified lava worlds, to lush forests, to mars-like worlds with rolling hills. Nearly every world can be landed on (other than gas planets).

The game was developed by one freelancing guy and the entire game is under 1 MB. If one non-paid guy can do it, why can't Cryptic?

[RayDX]

How long is a piece of string.

is the only knowledge i can impart.

The Federation is in your debt. : )

[Picards_Fish]

Lumin's game sounds cool, lets go play that!

Oh ok but I'm sure there are more ways as time goes on to create algorithmic planets that will function correctly AND be diverse or varied to make it fun to explore. Hopefully Cryptic will create a new successful one or build on top of an already successful method

[Allardyn]

For the Trollers: I am not interested in your opinions. Sorry.
For the technically minded: I would be interested in hearing your opinions. I am a programmer and could understand the concepts.

-----------------------------------

The Star Trek concept is, as we all know, "to explore strange new worlds" etc. but I wonder how this will be handled. There can be no "strange new worlds" without the "new worlds" part. I see a technical conundrum here.

Assume that all known, canon planets (Earth, Vulcan, Romulus) are hand crafted areas, how are the strange new worlds going to be created. Creating a large number of planetary surfaces by hand would be an impossible task. However creating the worlds algorithmically would be a technical feat in that you really can't reliably have a computer place plants and animals (assuming the planet was one with life) on the landscape in an interesting way without human tweaking. Not to mention placing fun things like ruins and artifacts to discover.

Building millions of stars wouldn't really be that difficult nor would creating the planetary bodies themselves (search for a program named "accrete" on Google or Yahoo), it's just the exploration part I wonder about. No one would really want to explore a lifeless ball of rock very often.

By way of comparison EVE online has thousands of worlds but you can't set foot on any of them. Easy mode.

Mankind has thousands of generated worlds and systems but the game operates at a more spartan level than the Trek license implies. No animals or plants or interesting features, just minerals and such.

Note: Please notice my post says it would be a technical feat, but not impossible. I'd really be interested in a Dev response to this post if we could get one. It would be an interesting tidbit of information about the games design without giving away the whole thing.

If your familiar with coding, they hinted in the web cast they were using a form of generation to create "strange new content". I suspect it would be a similar way that the CIV games useed when generating a world, though hopefully more advanced.

For a star system example, you could just set parameters for each aspect such as number of planets, type of planets, asteroid field (T/F), Anomoly types, etc, etc. The could then be populated using a set of predefined values such as Planet types 'M', 'N' , etc etc each with a different chance to occur.

Object orientated is Phun

[Quantum_666]

A concern I have is the dimensions of the stellar enviornment that will be available. Alot ov space sim games seem to have a limited Z axis giving the navigatable space map a boxy cieling and floor. This realy limits the amount of realizm and hinders tactical ability. I would love to see the enviornment have near infinate X, Y, Z dimentions.