Are new systems procedurally generated?

[casbyness]

Another possible title for this thread could be "does my bad luck ruin things for everyone else?"

So I'm out in deep, deep space exploring systems that nobody else has been to. My question is - when I enter such systems, does the game generate their stars/planets at the time I arrive, or does it already have a rough idea of what the first explorer is likely to find?

The reason why I'm asking this is that I'm really unlucky (with finding interesting things in this game), and so 95% of the time I appear in a system all I find in a single star with no planets or anything else present. When I return to a port and log my new discoveries, am I basically ruining the game for everyone with my bad luck? Would a luckier explorer have found lots more cool stuff in those systems, but I've now locked them into only containing a single star, forever?

Hope that makes sense. Just a random thought that's been bothering me while I slowly descend into space madness at the edge of the galaxy

 

[Captain Thea Kreutzer]

Another possible title for this thread could be "does my bad luck ruin things for everyone else?"

So I'm out in deep, deep space exploring systems that nobody else has been to. My question is - when I enter such systems, does the game generate their stars/planets at the time I arrive, or does it already have a rough idea of what the first explorer is likely to find?

The reason why I'm asking this is that I'm really unlucky (with finding interesting things in this game), and so 95% of the time I appear in a system all I find in a single star with no planets or anything else present. When I return to a port and log my new discoveries, am I basically ruining the game for everyone with my bad luck? Would a luckier explorer have found lots more cool stuff in those systems, but I've now locked them into only containing a single star, forever?

Hope that makes sense. Just a random thought that's been bothering me while I slowly descend into space madness at the edge of the galaxy

Its just you having bad luck. Avoiding dwarf stars usually helps with finding better planets(disable them in the galaxy map by going to the filters the 4th option disable KMLTY and proto type stars). You arent going to find a ELW or WW every other system.

 

[Lightspeed]

I'll let others answer the procedural bit, but you may be searching in low mass regions. Take a look at this thread which discusses the coding of systems. I should imagine the D systems (see the link) would give you a great many planets. At least they do in my experience.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ecoder-Exist?p=7378591&viewfull=1#post7378591

 

[casbyness]

I should clarify that this thread isn't a whinge about my luck - I'm not bothered about what I'm finding. What I'm pondering is the more general and hypothetical point, whereby if everyone playing the game was unlucky and only found lone stars in each system would that have the effect of 'molding' the entire galaxy along those lines so there would be hardly any planets. Is there no room for FD altering systems after they are discovered to make them more interesting, or seeding a certain proportion of systems with interesting things before they are first discovered?

 

[Micha]

The entire galaxy is effectively pre-set, nobodies "luck" affects it.

The clever bit though is that it's not stored anywhere (well, a little bit of data is, but not much), but generated on the fly. At least, that is true of 99.99999% of the galaxy. It is procedurally generated; that is, there's a very clever algorithm (the "Stellar Forge") which generates not only the overall galaxy, but also all of the systems in it.

The way it works is that it takes a magic number, the "seed", plugs that into the algorithm, and that in turn spits out the system, all the planets, stars, the (static) POIs, etc etc etc. Every time somebody jumps into the system it's generated from scratch.

The 0.000001% that isn't procgenned are the handcrafted systems like Sol, which the developers created manually.

If you're interested in more details, there's some really cool presentations from FDev. They even made a livestream about it:

Spoiler

[video=youtube_share;Vz3nhCykZNw]https://youtu.be/Vz3nhCykZNw?t=667[/video]

EDIT: So yeah, your luck only affects the types of systems you find, not what kind of systems actually exist.

 

[marx]

What I'm pondering is the more general and hypothetical point, whereby if everyone playing the game was unlucky and only found lone stars in each system would that have the effect of 'molding' the entire galaxy along those lines so there would be hardly any planets. Is there no room for FD altering systems after they are discovered to make them more interesting, or seeding a certain proportion of systems with interesting things before they are first discovered?

From the point of view of the generation, it doesn't matter whether players have already discovered a system or not. The way things work is that each system has a seed, which is queried from the servers, and optionally manual overrides for the system. The generation algorithms themselves can be changed, too - it's just that you want to be very conservative when doing so. Plus Frontier can also manually add new star systems, as they've done when they imported real world catalogue data. If they want, they can also take an existing system, rename it and manually change its contents: Trappist-1 was the perfect example of this.

 

[Sapyx]

There is ultimately a single "Seed", from which the entire galaxy is extrapolated. Kind of like that gag in the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy books, where the Total Perspective Vortex extrapolates the existence of the entire universe from measuring the parameters of a single piece of fairy cake. Only instead of extrapolating it, the Stellar Forge seed actually creates the galaxy. Every procedurally-generated star, planet and asteroid is already "there", in the seed, ready to be activated once the appropriate algorithms are run on it. So it doesn't matter if you, me, Allitinil or nobody is the "first" to discover that system, it will appear the same to whosoever discovers it first - and the same algorithm is run for subsequent visitors, so it appears the same for them, too.

That's the beauty of procedural generation: you can create a truly vast universe, without having to save an equally vast bunch of randomly-generated data in a vast database somewhere. If you use use the same seed, and the same algorithms, the same system will pop out at the end, every time - no database required.

Which is also why they can't easily change anything the algorithms have created. If it existed on January 1st 3300, then it still exists, and will continue to exist as long as the same seed and algorithms are in place. But change the seed, or change the algorithms, and you effectively delete the entire galaxy and replace it with one that may look almost, but not quite, the same. Which we explorers would notice and get kind of upset about, since it would erase all of our discoveries.

 

[marx]

Which is also why they can't easily change anything the algorithms have created. If it existed on January 1st 3300, then it still exists, and will continue to exist as long as the same seed and algorithms are in place. But change the seed, or change the algorithms, and you effectively delete the entire galaxy and replace it with one that may look almost, but not quite, the same. Which we explorers would notice and get kind of upset about, since it would erase all of our discoveries.

Hm? It's easy enough to change things. Frontier can manually alter the contents of a specific system, or change its seed entirely. If you wanted galaxy-wide alterations, that would be problematic because of the players. But adding stuff on top of what's already generated is also entirely possible: see Notable Stellar Phenomena for the most recent example. OP's question was "Is there no room for FD altering systems after they are discovered to make them more interesting, or seeding a certain proportion of systems with interesting things before they are first discovered?", to which the answer is that there is room, especially since it doesn't matter whether a system is already discovered or not.

 

[Jackie Silver]

I think the limitation is that the
Oooh
penny drops
The stars and fine positions of the systems are generated very quickly for the Galmap
therefore
The first part of the Forge code is very quick to run, so the actual "what stars do we have" bit must be very quick and gives us an angle. Hmm. Thinks.

What I was about to say before that was, "well, FD would be able to keep a series of revisions of the system generation code and invoke different ones depending on which revision the system was first visited at, except that the details of the stars are already visible on the Galmap" - now, they still could do that, but they have to keep at least the star-generation code consistent across revisions.

 

[dm06]

Yep, with this luck it is better for everyone you to stay in one system and do not ruin the game for others.%)

 

[CMDR Beni Stingray]

so 95% of the time I appear in a system all I find in a single star with no planets or anything else present.

Might be a stupid question but do you use the discovery scanner who shows you all the planets and establishes the orbital plane?

 

[varonica]

Hm? It's easy enough to change things. Frontier can manually alter the contents of a specific system, or change its seed entirely.

Yes they can move stuff around, but only within the limitation placed on them by the stellar forge, they can't increase or decrease the total mass of a system itself as that would affect surrounding systems, so there are rules that even the devs can't break when it comes to altering systems. There's a tech talk about how the forge works that is quite interesting and I would recommend it if you want to find out how it all works. The devs altered a system to reflect the newly discovered Trappist-1 system, as luck would have it there was a system near the right spot that had the correct mass so it was easy to do, otherwise it would have been more difficult or even impossible.

 

[Micha]

Yes they can move stuff around, but only within the limitation placed on them by the stellar forge, they can't increase or decrease the total mass of a system itself as that would affect surrounding systems, so there are rules that even the devs can't break when it comes to altering systems.

I'm not sure that's the case. My understanding from talking with Dav and others is that the Stellar Forge does its thing first, then anything handcrafted replaces the procgenned stuff. So basically the galaxy we see is "Stellar Forge" - "manually deleted systems/regions" + "handcrafted stuff".

For example, they've added new star catalogues into the galaxy since launch (I'd need to research to find out exactly which ones and where); those stars are -in addition- to the existing systems in those sectors. So those sectors actually end up having more total mass than "allowed" under the Stellar Forge rules.

----

They could very easily change the seeds and algorithms and regenerate the entire galaxy, similar to what NMS has done several times. The problem, as has already been pointed out, is that this would completely break continuity for players.

 

[casbyness]

Yep, with this luck it is better for everyone you to stay in one system and do not ruin the game for others.%)

Thanks, lol...

A bit late now though. I've reached Beagle Point and am now planning my return trip, which will likely cause yet another long corridor of damage to potentially interesting systems

 

[count_headshot]

I'm really stupid at math so... is it like this:

A system nobody has ever been to does not exist. It's just a point on the map with certain overarching variables set (like galaxy region, therefore rather star type x then y etc).
As soon as the first Cmdr enters the system, it's randomly 'created', planets and all.
After that first visit, it's 'there' and the same forever.

So, if some algorithm had randomly decided that Beagle Point should rather look x + y + y +y than x + z+ y+ whatever when Erimus Kamzel entered it first it would look different today - for everybody?




My layman line of thought would have been: make a huge database, fill it with 400 billion random auto-created star systems, handcraft the ones with actual content and hope there's a backup when the main database breaks.

This is why I'm not a programmer

 

[Sapyx]

I'm really stupid at math so... is it like this:

A system nobody has ever been to does not exist. It's just a point on the map with certain overarching variables set (like galaxy region, therefore rather star type x then y etc).
As soon as the first Cmdr enters the system, it's randomly 'created', planets and all.
After that first visit, it's 'there' and the same forever.

So, if some algorithm had randomly decided that Beagle Point should rather look x + y + y +y than x + z+ y+ whatever when Erimus Kamzel entered it first it would look different today - for everybody?




My layman line of thought would have been: make a huge database, fill it with 400 billion random auto-created star systems, handcraft the ones with actual content and hope there's a backup when the main database breaks.

This is why I'm not a programmer

No, it's 100% not like that. Entirely the opposite. A database that huge would take half an hour to interrogate every time we tried to open the galaxy map, or hyperspaced to a new star system.

An unvisited sytem's content is already "predestined" by the Seed, whether anyone has ever visited it or not - so that whoever and whenever it is visited first, or second, or for the billionth time, it will always look the same. (not "exactly" the same, as a discovery at different times will show the various planets at different positions in their orbits. The Stellar Forge actually generates what the star system looks like at "time = 0" (probably January 1st 3300), then the system is fast-forwarded, pushing the planets around on their railway-track orbits until the current game time is reached).

Or look at it this way: when you're in a procedurally-generated system, the Stellar Forge calculates what the system should look like, based on the seed and the algorithms, and creates the various planets etc for you to fly around in. When you leave the system again, the entire system disappears back into the potentiality of the seed - it is never saved onto a "database". The only "databases" that are accessed are the list of planets and their First Discoverers (and now First Mappers), which is kept separate to the actual database of hand-coded star systems, and your own personal database of visited and explored systems, which is presumably kept as part of your commander save files on the servers.

Or look at it another way: if you were to break into FD's office (or hack into their systems) and steal the precise parameters of the Galactic Seed and the Stellar Forge algorithms, you'd be able to run those algorithms in the privacy of your own offline computer - and be able to predict, with 100% accuracy, what any procedurally-generated star system in the galaxy would look like in the live game, before anyone actually playing the game has ever visited it. This is the power, and the weakness, of procedural generation: run the same algorithm on the same seed, and the same result will always be generated, each and every time.

Or, looking at it a third way: It's like calculating the billionth digit of pi. It doesn't matter who does the calculations, or when, or where - if the calculating algorithms are the same, then the answer to the question "what is the billionth digit of pi" will always be the same. The billionth digit of pi might "look like" a random number, but it isn't - it wasn't randomly generated the first time someone ran an algorithm to calculate it; it's always been there in the potentiality of the number pi, waiting for the algorithm to be run. And the second time the digit is needed, the calculator doesn't then extract that digit from a billion-digit database; it works out what the digit should be, from first principles, every time the calculations are run.

 

[ECLIP5E]

I’m not all that privy to the technicality of the Stellar Forge, however from what I gather the procedural generation of the systems in Elite Dangerous is something similar to the procedurally generated worlds in Minecraft, right?

 

[Zieman]

I’m not all that privy to the technicality of the Stellar Forge, however from what I gather the procedural generation of the systems in Elite Dangerous is something similar to the procedurally generated worlds in Minecraft, right?

It all began back in 1982 when two students in Cambridge Jesus College wanted to make a computer game, and discovered they could use an algorithm based on Fibonacci sequence to bypass that era home computers memory limits. The story continues:

Source: https://youtu.be/Vz3nhCykZNw?t=667

 

[OldSchoolPlayer]

Another possible title for this thread could be "does my bad luck ruin things for everyone else?"
...
Hope that makes sense. Just a random thought that's been bothering me while I slowly descend into space madness at the edge of the galaxy

My answer: No.
If "my" bad luck affects the game, the game would be dead by now....

 

[marx]

I’m not all that privy to the technicality of the Stellar Forge, however from what I gather the procedural generation of the systems in Elite Dangerous is something similar to the procedurally generated worlds in Minecraft, right?

Only in that both use procedural generation. However, the Stellar Forge is far more complex than Minecraft's worldgen.