Disk size of Elite Dangerous in the future

[Commander Keen]

Good morning Guys

I would like to ask something which i guess no one outside frontier will be able to answer but im really really curious

With the amount of star systems (although procedurally generated) how will HDD space going to be managed? I had a quick look at the current PB directory structure and sizes and found interesting things.
some examples:

IBootis folder is approx 6MB
LP98132 approx 6MB
Eranin 6MB as well & Dahan the same

I do not know what files in those folders represents but in theory if similar sizes are required for each individual system then 1GB would cover about 166 star systems. Probably more/less than that as different systems will need from time to time some unique content which will make them different to the others.So with 100GB of disk space you can have like 16600 systems. Yes it is probably more than i will be able to explore in my lifetime but you know where im going i hope. The number of GBytes needed for 400 000 000 star systems is scary.
Disclaimer: I do realize that (probably) only visited systems will be created and stored locally on our drives, but still i would like to know other people opinions on this. Also i know nothing (NOTHING) about procedural generation but what about the size of the seed needed for generating galaxy map of that size?i guess it will be a lot if every star needs to have some kind of description and unique features. Anyone knows something more about this please? Thanks very much

 

[mckayi]

Hopefully FD will improve the procedural coding for the systems to get them to a smaller size! I suspect that eventually each system will not even require its own folder....I,m sure it will change and reduce in size....

 

[JackWeaver]

The systems that have folders are overriding the full procedural generation. I would expect that there might be a few hundred like this. The Sol system will probably be larger as it will need to closely match our expectations. The vast majority will be created entirely procedurally and will not require any additional disk space.

 

[-zalamander-]

Well if I calculated correctly that would be 30,120,482 Bluray disks at least for the stars + 1 for the game it self.

But yeah I suspect it is just 1 disk. Frontier Elite 2 was just 1 disk for Amiga if I remember correctly and there was loads of stars in that game too.

[Words Redacted]

 

[Machival]

Disclaimer: I do realize that (probably) only visited systems will be created and stored locally on our drives, but still i would like to know other people opinions on this. Also i know nothing (NOTHING) about procedural generation but what about the size of the seed needed for generating galaxy map of that size?i guess it will be a lot if every star needs to have some kind of description and unique features. Anyone knows something more about this please? Thanks very much

That's not how seeds work. The seed is just a number, or an alpha-numeric sequence if that's a valid input, that's used by the pseudorandom number generator to generate an apparently random range of numbers. You could use the same seed in Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, or any other game, if you were so inclined. The real space occupier is the ruleset by which procedural generation is conducted, which itself will be a heck of a lot smaller (space wise) than the space taken up by the art assets.

 

[Commander Keen]

cheers

thanks guys

 

[Roobarb]

Frontier Elite 2 was just 1 disk for Amiga if I remember correctly and there was s***loads of stars in that game too.

Actually, I think it was 2 disks. One for loading, one for data. IIRC.

 

[Frog]

So, will the C=<64 version also come on tape? I won't get a floppy disk drive before Christmas.

Sorry, this game sets me back 30 years all the time...

On topic:

Could it also be possible that the game creates such a folder for each system you visit, to keep track of political and economical variables for example, to be matched with what is saved server side for that system, of course? I would imagine that even the most dedicated player would have trouble visiting more than some 10.000 systems, and this amount of data could easily be stored locally.

 

[X2Eliah]

A small number of systems are manually coded (e.g. what we see in the current beta, and most systems in close proximity to our Solar system), and take up space (as you said, 6MB or so); the ones that are further out and make up 99.9(....?..)90% will not have this manually-set data, and will generate everything out of the procedural seed properly.

This *could*, indeed, be the user-specific save data, though. In that case.. there's nothing to worry about - given the lifespan of the average human being, you won't simply have time to criss-cross Elite's galaxy to make a significant impact this way, I think.

 

[Reconcilliation]

Without any input from a dev, my guess is that the filesize is mostly just the 'backend' required for procedural generation.

I imagine solar systems will be generated and loaded into memory on the fly, then discarded again once you leave.

 

[Scoob]

I assume final size depends on how many bespoke assets there are. The universe framework is procedural, however, there will still doubltess be many hard coded points of interest in core systems. Additionally of course there's the shared graphical assets, sound effects etc. which will all add up.

In the original Elite games, were were largely happy with monochrome dots for suns, much the same for planets, all stations looking alike. However, things will be much different in ED.

Hopfully they can keep the size down, I suspect many will be wanting to snag a digital download before their box arrives, but we shall see.

Scoob.

 

[Memnoch]

The vast majority will be created entirely procedurally and will not require any additional disk space.

And as humanity expands and new stations are built, these changes from their initial settings will need to be stored somewhere.

 

[Saxxon]

Without any input from a dev, my guess is that the filesize is mostly just the 'backend' required for procedural generation.

I imagine solar systems will be generated and loaded into memory on the fly, then discarded again once you leave.

This ^

 

[Tonberry]

This is an interesting question and one I had not even considered.

I would expect the release client to be between 10gb and 15gb, although with game textures and sounds currently hogging the most storage space in other games (im looking at you titanfall, with your 35gb of audio files...) elite may even end up smaller.

I remember reading about Limit Theory's size recently (a game also procedurally generated) and the dev stated that a screen capture of the game would be larger than the game engine itself at around 4mb...

 

[Irregular programming]

2.5 inch

 

[Commander Keen]

no complaints at all

Just want to add that even if ED is 4TB for initial install ( i know i know )
i will have absolutely no problem with it. Please frontier dont limit yourselves because of few gigs up or down. I was just interested how its going to work. but will dedicate all space (or buy new drives) if neccessary. no problemo

 

[Mark Allen]

The several MB of data per system at the moment is pretty much all temporary data that will vanish longer term. For example with some of the procedural textures there's a bit of the pipeline missing, it all works but isn't integrated into the game - so you get some lumps of data for each system generated here and compiled statically until we finish the pipes.

All the data for the layout of stars/systems/planets is elsewhere and MUCH smaller. Without giving away much, if you're already poking at the released client's resources have a look in Shared\StellarForge\Galaxies\MilkyWay\. That's less than 50MB total - and includes seed information, the huge database of known fixed stars (the biggest part) and somewhere around 7,000 system layouts. Not just the 5 you can get to .

As for final disk size? I have no idea, sorry . It will in the vast majority be ship/weapon resources though.

 

[Commander Keen]

Thank you

Thank you Mark i appreciate that. Sounds great

 

[Tinman]

The several MB of data per system at the moment is pretty much all temporary data that will vanish longer term. For example with some of the procedural textures there's a bit of the pipeline missing, it all works but isn't integrated into the game - so you get some lumps of data for each system generated here and compiled statically until we finish the pipes.

Is this why the planetary textures are quite low res currently when close enough to them due to static pre-rendered textures being used?

If the textures are procedurally generated in a dynamic way they should in theory just generate more details as we get closer (of course depending on how far you'll take this in the first release). Currently this isn't really happening.

 

[Slone]

Frontier Elite 2 was just 1 disk for Amiga if I remember correctly and there was loads of stars in that game too.

I still have the box of the Atari ST version ; there are two disks, but only the first one was required to load the game (unless I remember it wrong). The second one was just for saved games.