Today, Braben has returned to the game of his youth for a sequel, Elite: Dangerous. This time, he used astronomy rather than the Fibonacci sequence to arrange his galaxy. “I wanted to make the galaxy as accurate as possible so that the results of that exploration would make sense to people,” Braben said. “In the game, every single star in the real night sky is present, some hundred and fifty thousand of them, and you can visit each one. Even the clouds of stars that make up the Milky Way are included: some four hundred billion stars, their planetary systems, and moons are present, all waiting to be explored.”
The positions of the stars were drawn from the numerous publically available sky surveys, which Braben and his team at Frontier, the Cambridge-based game developer, collated and merged. They used procedural models based on physics to fill in gaps where data was missing or incomplete. “As you move farther from Earth, the data becomes increasingly sketchy, but the galaxy still runs by the same rules,” Braben said. “The hundred and fifty thousand star systems are taken from real-world data. But once you move beyond a few hundred light years we can only see the very brightest stars individually, so we use procedural techniques to augment the data.”
