Mysterious change of systems? Thargoids, angry deities or stellar forge fraud?

Haggis McMoose · May 5, 2015

Hi everyone,

as a contributor to the "post your earth-likes" thread glynie, the OP of said thread and my humble self stumbled upon a strange phenomenon:

A star system that I have visited on December 25th, 2014 has undergone some serious changes when compared to the present layout (data collected this morning).

System in question: Synuefe RD-H B30-0

Quite a big system when I visited, aaaand a natural earth-like in it (5th planet):

glynie's screenshot from today's visit shows a different system, although some similarities still remain (star classes, general layout) aaand the earth-like vanished:

So, what happened? Thargoid "doomray of gas giant annihilation (TM)" or a snooker match between two blind local deities? ...or have there been any major changes to the stellar forge AFTER release at December the 16th?

Oh wait, maybe the earth-like was inhabited... and they did a raaather stupid experiment... like glueing 2 cats together back to back and throwing them out of a window... or colliding hadrons at great speeds...

Haggis McMoose,
reproaching re-creation!

Whiterose · May 5, 2015

perhaps the planet was populated and they are an advanced race who can shield their planet from scanners, and make it invisible to the mark 1 eyeball.

neXib · May 5, 2015

I think the game started out with all procedurally generated systems being made when you entered them. Just the star types and stuff were saved and you got first discovered for the entire system. I expect they started saving the smaller details later. When first discovered came maybe.

That's just my guess though, might as well be doomray of gas giant annihilation

Kancro Vantas · May 5, 2015

Disturbing and unnerving finding indeed.

mono · May 5, 2015

OT slightly, I had a black hole system this morning. A quick scan and view of the system map later and... All the planets and their moons were pictured as black holes. Was still the same after scanning a couple (of gas giants).

Haggis McMoose · May 5, 2015

mono said:
OT slightly, I had a black hole system this morning. A quick scan and view of the system map later and... All the planets and their moons were pictured as black holes. Was still the same after scanning a couple (of gas giants).

Was the black hole the only "stellar object" in the system? If so, some systems indeed are black if there is no light source in the system... and Hawking radiation won't do! So no glitch there IF there were no other stars...

Haggis McMoose
defying darkness

mono · May 5, 2015

That's a very good point and an oversight on my part. The BH was the only star in there.

mono
missing the obvious

mossfoot · May 5, 2015

The procedrual generator forgot to carry the one.

Saint242 · May 5, 2015

As I understood it, the devs will sometimes change star systems to match real world stellar data, when new real world data becomes available (i.e. if astronomers find a new exoplanet around Alpha Centauri, the devs will modify the Alpha Centauri system in game to add that planet).

However, this looks like a pretty distant system so I doubt there's any real world exoplanet data about it. So that's kind of a mystery.

Dommarraa · May 5, 2015

Having written procedurally generated games in the past, nothing is saved, that's the point of them being generated. However, change 1 tiny expression in the generating code, and everything looks utterly different. This looks more like a slight change to a lookup table with an even slighter difference in the weightings. Hell, it might even be down to a floating point arithmetic hole or even different cpus

neXib · May 5, 2015

Dommarraa said:
Having written procedurally generated games in the past, nothing is saved, that's the point of them being generated. However, change 1 tiny expression in the generating code, and everything looks utterly different. This looks more like a slight change to a lookup table with an even slighter difference in the weightings. Hell, it might even be down to a floating point arithmetic hole or even different cpus

Considering the stars are the same it looks like something like that, but perhaps in different layers for stars and planets. But how would it work, do you generate it, then some value is the representation of that exact system so that when you regenerate it you get the same items?

Considering that first discovered is saved somewhere I imagine you have to start storing more at that point?

BlueTeamMember · May 5, 2015

If this game has longevity, then the expansion of Human space will creep into systems that might not conform to what the game mechanics like to work with. They might have to do some tweaking that deletes or rearranges what is there now.
It's their universe, I just play in it.

Brieus · May 5, 2015

Haggis McMoose said:
Oh wait, maybe the earth-like was inhabited... and they did a raaather stupid experiment... like glueing 2 cats together back to back and throwing them out of a window... or colliding hadrons at great speeds...

Haggis McMoose,
reproaching re-creation!

No, no. It's strapping a piece of toast (butter side up) to the back of a cat that gets you in trouble.

mossfoot · May 5, 2015

Brieus said:
No, no. It's strapping a piece of toast (butter side up) to the back of a cat that gets you in trouble.

Trouble? That's just antigravity 101.

wiblflibl · May 5, 2015

This thread gives me LOLs. Thanks everyone. Please continue

CaptainKremmen · May 5, 2015

Personally, I think that should be ticketed as a bug.

Dommarraa · May 5, 2015

neXib said:
Considering the stars are the same it looks like something like that, but perhaps in different layers for stars and planets. But how would it work, do you generate it, then some value is the representation of that exact system so that when you regenerate it you get the same items?

Considering that first discovered is saved somewhere I imagine you have to start storing more at that point?

It starts with Random Number Generators do not generate random numbers at all. They give a fixed sequence of apparently random numbers. You "seed" a RNG with a specific value, then you will always get the same sequence of numbers from it. So all a system needs is a single number to set the seed, then run the Procedural Generator which will use the RNG. The program never changes, the sequence of random numbers never changes, so you always get exactly the same system generated, but if you have a different seed for each system, no 2 will ever be the same.

All they need to store is System ID, Object ID and User ID to record 1st discovered.

400 Billion seeds is still a too big pile of data, and I dont even think they have that. By looking at the large scale chunkyness of the galaxy map in certain places, I think each sector (1000x1000ly) is a set of parameters which define the type of sector (Core, Arm, Rift etc) and a seed. Even the systems within that sector (and their own seeds) will be procedurally generated. The data for the entire procedurally generated galaxy could probably fit in a couple of Meg.

Madrigor · May 6, 2015

Are you sure there is only one system with that name? I'm asking, because when I was in the IC 1805 cluster a few weeks back I found this:

Had to scan only one system and got the other one for free.

Haggis McMoose · May 6, 2015

Just to give some additional info:

At the moment I cannot get into the system view of mentioned system. The icon is NOT RED, so the game acknowledges me having explored the system... but when I try to enter system view, the game doesn't finish the access process (tried for about 20 mins without any luck). This is no game freeze, however. I still can cancel the process via ESC.

So obviously the system layout discrepancy causes some serverside issues as well...

Anyone else experiencing those problems?

It's a shame your earth-like jewels aren't safe from celestial annihilation!

Haggis McMoose
angry apostate

Edit: @madrigor: I am quite sure I got the right one. "Search system" yields only 1 result... aaand I scanned the system in transit to Barnard's loop, so not that big a chance of hitting a potential twin. As mentioned above, the game declares the system as explored by offering me the system view option. Good point, though!

Varrag · May 6, 2015

I think I saw something similar couple of months ago: system I bookmarked (on the paper... sigh) as my goal have had triple B-type stars - according to description on the galmap. A week or so later, when I've got closer and wanted to set a waypoint for route planner, I've noticed that the description changed to something like one B-type and two stars... can't remember the type but definitely different than B. I didn't make a big deal out of it, just dismissed it as a glitch in Stellar forge or something.