The curse of Elite as Online game

yyy

Y
Making a few assumptions:

  • There are on average 100 objects in a system
  • Average of two stations per system (actually only a tiny fraction of the systems in a galaxy have human habitation, but we'll ignore this)
  • Uses IEEE extended floating point notation requiring 8 bytes

Works out to ~5000 bytes per system

Over 400 billion systems that is 2 petabytes of storage. DON'T BE ALARMED!!!

Because ever since the original game was created, they've been using whats called procedural generation. This is a set of mathematical rules on how to create a system. Therefore I'd say the storage requirements are very low. Storage would be the least of FD's problems if they ever "had" to release server side data.
 

kreuzbichler

Banned
kreuzbichler
yyy said:
Because ever since the original game was created, they've been using whats called procedural generation. This is a set of mathematical rules on how to create a system. Therefore I'd say the storage requirements are very low. Storage would be the least of FD's problems if they ever "had" to release server side data.
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true, in PG nothing of the game world is stored, just the station and the texures and geometry, you fly to system EXQWE23423 and some algorithm calculates what you see, it´s like rolling a boardgame dice, instance 20397420389f shows planet combination AEDHFEHF2304230. Unless they want to change something like the Sol system they go in and place the globes by hand.
 
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ralf_maeder

R
Despite of theoretically horrendously high data amount for storing a 400 billion star-counting galaxy on a hardisk, I think that for a single-player, offline version of Elite Dangerous there is no need to save so much data. The galaxy can be generated procedurally and just those systems, that already have been visited are stored in its current state, all other systems stay random until they have to be generated.
 
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Vasea Azure

Vasea Azure
Space engine has 1:1 galaxy 100% offline - and infinitive amount of other galaxies procedurally generated - its taking v small amount of my hard drive because I think its generates new stuff as we explore more. Off-line elite would work similar I think. It would get big eventually but I dont thing we could explore ALL of it very fast.
 
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Araviel

Araviel
ED always just generates one single system - the system you are in.
and once you leave it gets collapsed back into the seed.
this is true even for handcrafted system like SOL, the only difference is that the artwork is handcrafted and that the seed has more defined rules.
ED make use of cache for systems you have visited to, but only for things like textures to improve your load times, and this cache gets purged after time.
but the things like where the stellar bodies are located is getting regenerated every time.

what the server does is mainly SQL duty, like keeping track of your transaction, storing your save data and running the background simulation.
there is also the matchmaking server that acts as the middleman to set up the p2p (your torrent client if you like)

what could be interesting to know if we wanted to make ED into full single player is how large the SQL would be that is running the background simulation if we wanted a working background simulation in the single player. would we skip it then the ED single player would probably not take up more space than what it does today.

Samosa said:
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of star names are procedurally generated. I would be absolutely amazed if FD were hosting a 20+ TB SAN.
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yes all of them whit the exception of the 160k that are taken from stellar catalouges.
 
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SMcA

SMcA
SMcA said:
This was discussed when FD announced that there would be no off line mode.
They said if they had to close down the servers. They would make publicly available, the data and program.
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As my memory, de-calcifies. It would be released to a non-profit group to maintain a fan based version.
There was a lot of very loud discussions about this and my search skills are lacking.
 
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