Do planets already exist?.

voodoochile73 · Dec 28, 2018

I thought i'd put this question out there having recently gone exploring and having left the bubble for an extended period for the first time.

Being the first to travel to new systems and using the FSS to open the system up and discover it all is great. But how does it work?. Have the planets asteroids and moons already been designed/decided and are just sitting there waiting for someone to find them or are they only born when someone first arrives there? (i've heard of prcedural generation but i dont know to much about it)

So if i visit a new system on any given date would that generate the exact same planets etc as if someone else visited that system for the first time on any other date or are the planets randomly generated ONLY when someone first lands there?.

For immersion purposes i'd rather it be the former but i suspect itss the latter.

da_wae · Dec 28, 2018

voodoochile73 said:
I thought i'd put this question out there having recently gone exploring and having left the bubble for an extended period for the first time.

Being the first to travel to new systems and using the FSS to open the system up and discover it all is great. But how does it work?. Have the planets asteroids and moons already been designed/decided and are just sitting there waiting for someone to find them or are they only born when someone first arrives there? (i've heard of prcedural generation but i dont know to much about it)

So if i visit a new system on any given date would that generate the exact same planets etc as if someone else visited that system for the first time on any other date or are the planets randomly generated ONLY when someone first lands there?.

For immersion purposes i'd rather it be the former but i suspect itss the latter.

They're all pre-generated AFAIK.

777Driver · Dec 28, 2018

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Et5Ivi_yIg&t=53m50s

53m 50s if it doesn't work for you.

But yeah, quote above sums it up!

sam445 · Dec 28, 2018

Systems are all already "pre-calculated" to some extent. The Stellar Forge is a rather complex and long process. Nonetheless, they only have saved the result of the Forge up to some extent to save on space. So they always re-create the system from the Forge result everytime somebody enters a system. That, even if somebody already is in the system.
The exception to that is special systems that are saved exactly as-is.

But to the end user experience, it changes nothing. Two persons that enter the same system at different times will always have exactly the same stellar system with the difference of the movent of the planets (planets and stellar objects move on their orbit and spin).

Mo Ronik · Dec 28, 2018

I'll venture a guess but it's only a guess. Each star has a marker in the program and when it is first discovered it gets run thru a random system generator that says how many planets, if any, and what types they are. Then it's put in the known data base and becomes in instance for the next person that happens upon it. Until it's discovered it is just a marker waiting to be activated. Am I close? Ehhh, probably not.

Para Handy · Dec 28, 2018

Mo Ronik said:
I'll venture a guess but it's only a guess. Each star has a marker in the program and when it is first discovered it gets run thru a random system generator that says how many planets, if any, and what types they are. Then it's put in the known data base and becomes in instance for the next person that happens upon it. Until it's discovered it is just a marker waiting to be activated. Am I close? Ehhh, probably not.

Not really close, no. There are some good explanations around, the video linked by 777Driver is one and the Discovery Scanner stream is well worth watching if you have never seen it (download if poss, well worth having):

[video=youtube;Vz3nhCykZNw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz3nhCykZNw[/video]

[alien]

the100thmonkey · Dec 28, 2018

One of the reasons for the hyperspace animation is so that your game client can contact the galaxy server with the destination system and receive the seed file generated by Stellar Forge.

The game client then reads the seed file and calculates the kinds of planets present in the system, their properties and their initial locations, and then applies a bit of maths to determine where the bodies are now. It's also why the states for systems with factions are managed on a different server and persistence (or, more properly, the lack thereof) is an issue in the game. It's why you can jump out of an instance and back into a new version of the same PoI.

It's a remarkable system.

Alec Turner · Dec 28, 2018

Mo Ronik said:
I'll venture a guess but it's only a guess. Each star has a marker in the program and when it is first discovered it gets run thru a random system generator that says how many planets, if any, and what types they are. Then it's put in the known data base and becomes in instance for the next person that happens upon it. Until it's discovered it is just a marker waiting to be activated. Am I close? Ehhh, probably not.

Nope. Outside of the stuff we do (trade and BGS state information, first discovered tags etc) nothing is (or needs to be stored). The entire galaxy, right down to the contours and placement of surface rocks on every landable planet can be generated (and re-generated) reliably and precisely by your PC on demand. That's the glory of procedural generation. It's how Braben and Bell managed to create a galaxy on a microcomputer with just 22k of memory and the same principles still work the same in Elite Dangerous today.

starman · Dec 28, 2018

There is no spoon.

Sapyx · Dec 29, 2018

In Douglas Adams' HHGTG series, the torture device known as the Total Perspective Vortex extrapolated the existence of the entire universe from a single piece of fairy cake. The ED universe is very much like that: every procedurally-generated star, planet and asteroid, every contour of shoreline on the surface of ELWs, every crater on every airless moon, can be extrapolated by the Stellar Forge from a single "seed" number. Just plug in the seed number, the ID number of the star system you are in, and the time, and the Stellar Forge generates the entire star system. "Time" is an important factor because the Stellar Forge initially generates what the star system would look like at "time=0" (presumably January 1, 3300) - the system then has to "fast-forward" to the current game time.

The only star systems that get entered into any kind of "galactic database" are the relatively small number of hand-made systems (about 100,000, we are told). This includes almost all of the 20,000 inhabited star systems in the Bubble. The hand-carved and procedurally-generated galaxies have to be merged into one seamless whole. And this is how the Stellar Forge attempts to work around this: first, the galaxy's "mass distribution" cloud for each sector, subsector etc is laid down. Then, the hand-placed stars are "condensed" out of that cloud of mass. Whatever mass "left over" once the hand-made stars have taken their share gets turned into procedurally-generated stars and nebulae.

This is also why FD cannot simply "add a new star" when real-world science discovers something new and shiny in the real-world galaxy that isn't in the game yet (like UY Scuti). To hand-create the TRAPPIST-1 system after the game launched, they had to take a procedurally-generated brown dwarf in approximately the correct location and turn it into a small M-class star - but they had to keep the new system's mass exactly the same as the brown dwarf, otherwise the Stellar Forge would delete every procedurally-generated star in the inner bubble and replace them with a new set.