this vain illusion of endless space...

[lysan]

The closest galaxy are 70,000 light-years away from the Milky-way. Just to get there would be a huge undertaking, even with the technology used in ED. The FSD are only able to jump max 50 - 60 LY in one jump, and it will need a star to make multiply jumps.

Our FSD works in the SC mode more or less like the Alcubierre drive.

"Rather than exceeding the speed of light within a local reference frame, a spacecraft would traverse distances by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it, resulting in effective faster-than-light travel. Objects cannot accelerate to the speed of light within normal spacetime; instead, the Alcubierre drive shifts space around an object so that the object would arrive at its destination faster than light would in normal space."

This would also explain why we don't get splattered all over the cockpit with these insane speeds.

When its time to make a hyper jump, the FSD work in a different way, I don't know if there is a technical explanation in the lore of Elite, however one explanation could be the Einstein-Rosen Bridge.

 

[Frank]

Thank you for this thread. Thanks for the reminder of what an absolute jaw-droppingly awe-inspiring galaxy Elite is set in. The amount of real astronomical information that's been injected into the simulation, and the way the random number generation has been shaped to model the behaviour of real stars is a massive achievement that the Frontier Development team can truly be proud of.

Great work! <applause>

 

[DWorth]

The problem with Elite: Dangerous is that when you start telling people about it, you start to sound like Roy Batty from Blade Runner
.
.
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... etc. etc."

 

[DaggerSnake]

Eh sounds like the OP likes video games, just doesn't like space. Probably not the game for him.

 

[noodle]

I'd rather have a couple of well-designed systems with some more generically to explore where the game shows all its offerings. Doing so would make Elite sharper, more attractive to a larger player base that is currently turned off by the game's emptiness and lengthy character.

Apples and oranges. You don't like it, many of us patently do. I wouldn't have been half as interested in Elite if it wasn't designed this way. Sure, I'd like to see more content, but a huge part of the draw for me was the 1:1 scale galaxy. Just because you don't like something, it doesn't automatically make it bad. I'm not gonna buy Star Citizen then hang out on the Star Citizen forums griping about how much better the game would be with a 1:1 galaxy.

 

[cptdavep]

Actually for a space game procedural generation is perfectly appropriate. The real galaxy isn't hand crafted (not according to science at least...) so as long as their maths is right, or as close as possible then we should have a pretty good approximation of the real galaxy to fly around in, not some designers fantasy world.

Sure there are problems and omissions, like where are the comets, why no white dwarfs outside of the observable systems, probably not enough variety of planets especially earthlikes which all look too similar etc etc... but overall I think they've done a stellar (ahem) job and I look forward to seeing how it'll improve with the various planetary landing updates.

 

[Kristov]

FD should approach exploring as PvU, Player vs Unknown. Where players interdict the unexplored and shoot it with scans while making pew pew sounds.

I want a "map this planet" scanner, which activates at really low altitudes so you'd have to weave and bob through valleys and around mountains. Highlighting interesting areas where you could land and investigate. This could be sample drilling, soil collection, simple photography of noteworthy places. We've been talking about minigames, when the thing Elite really shines is the ship mechanics in normal space. Add the gravity of a planet and the excellent flight mechanic itself becomes the minigame. The skill of the pilot determines the worth of the scan.

Oh well, and maybe we can discover pies in the skies.

The best way to actually map a planet would be from orbit, not from flying around it at 30,000 feet, NASA and others have shown that repeatedly now in our own system after all. Now, going down for soil samples, etc, that's something I'd love to do, map it from orbit and get a general idea of what's there mineral/lifeform wise, but for detailed info boots on the ground is required, again, NASA and others have shown this is the best method repeatedly. We've mapped Mars from orbit so well we know it's topography better than our own Earth(oceans hide a lot), but we don't know what's DOWN there, so we've sent rovers to find out. And after how many rovers did we FINALLY find evidence of free flowing water on Mars?

We'll just have to wait and see, there's any number of ways to make exploration more involved, thing is, MOST of those ways are actually mind numbingly boring things that do nothing but require you to spend hours and hours waiting while various sensors and computer systems chew through data to figure out what's there. I'm all for realism in most aspects of the game, but THAT much realism I'm not looking for. Making me spend some time to do multiple orbits around a planet to properly scan it, I'm good with that, that's not hours, it's maybe 5 to 10 minutes, but making me spend hours doing multiple orbits, yeah, that's not going to go over well with anything but a very very small minority, and that's not a good design decision. Making me do the 5-10 min orbital thing and then land for a full exploration to get all the possible data, so that I need to spend a few hours exploring the planet from it's surface, I'm good with that, I'll be DOING something besides flying circles or sitting still while the planet rotates under me. Thing is, how many OTHERS will be good with spending a few hours at ground level to get the full data for resale?

 

[Herik]

I think that's only true as of now because it's been done to death and honed to all kinds of insane qualities. Procedural generation just hasn't been pushed often enough in any of these categories. Once there is enough accumulated skill and knowledge in creating equally good procedural generation it will trump hand made simply by only requiring the push of a button on a finished algorythm to generate a new experience instead of years of extra work.

THIS^^; so much more to be tried and tested with PG algorythms. And not just galactic simulation; procedural generation can also be applied to mission scripting and even low level game engine design; -follow Josh Parnell and his early work in 'Limit Theory' development. I'm repping you.

 

[Herik]

Procedural technology sure won't progress fast ...

I do think creating a procedural algorithm includes a lot of artistic choices though. If you don't make them it won't be good.

edit: and of course you better always prototype with some hand crafted templates to roughly figure out what you want your algorithms to create. Most game development is exactly that (concept art > digital object for example).

He does not have the game yet ... and even then it's completely fine.

Yes Yin Yin, In 'No Mans Sky' one of their videos shows 'Sean Murray' discussing PG Maths and their games application of it, in particular displaying one of his visual tools using the tech. The point being he has made 'tools' (which appear quite comprehensive) to assist in his use of PG...

 

[Boff'in]

Yeah starcitizen is hand craft.

No mans land, tosses everything to the math and has...welll...endless space.

Elite dangerous is between that.

It's got the math and the procedural generation, but it's trying to imitate the galaxy with that math.

It's trying to simulate how planets and solar systems form.

I think we'll get a big boost with horizons over the "detail" that stellarforge is going to create.


my brain started to unrwavel over the size of our galaxy.
430 billion stars.

When you see the star field just stream by and then you zoom in, pick a point, find the star, the planets, the moons, and if any of them are airless, pop down and spend hours,days if not weeks just driving round the circumfrence.
at that point, you start to question if God was ever really bothered by people eating meat and not fish on friday.

 

[nexxo]

When the question arises whether a PG galaxy can be exciting, I refer people to Langston's Ant.

Langston's Ant is a very simple computer simulation. Imagine a chequerboard stretching out in all directions without end. Somewhere on this board is the "ant". It moves from square to square. Its moves are governed by a very simple rule: if it lands on a black square, it flips it over to white and turns left. If it lands on a white square, it flips it over to black and turns right. That's it; that's all. Simple, no?

Indeed, every time the program is run, for the first few hundred steps the ant moves in a predictable pattern, changing the board in a predictable pattern as it goes along. No surprise there. However after a while its pattern becomes random, and differently so each time. Then after another few thousand steps, it falls into a diagonally repeating pattern and carries on like that indefinitely (as far as we know so far).

The point is: nothing about the simple rule that dictates how the ant moves suggests that this pattern was going to occur. There is no indication of it in the code. The only way to find out was to run it and see what happened.

This is a basic truth about reiteration: simple rules can give rise to complex, often unpredictable patterns. This is called emergence.

Now imagine the rules underlying the procedural generation of the ED galaxy. They are many and hugely complex, and based on our current understanding of how the real galaxy formed and evolved over aeons. A vast complexity of physical laws and rules interacting and reiterating over unimaginable time spans, in a non-linear emergent dance of energy and matter and weak and strong forces, and space and time. What do we really know about the patterns this can give rise to? What signs can we glean of the myriad variety of worlds and stars that can emerge, hidden in this code?

We can't. Not even Frontier's coders can. Not even astrophysicists can, not even people like Steven Hawkins. It is beyond our human understanding. All we can do is run the code, and discover what emerged from the dance, in all those 400 billion systems. That is what the explorers in this game are doing: they are not just playing a game of exploring, they are actually exploring what the galaxy may look like, based on our current understanding of its rules. They are, in their own way, actually doing science.

Reflect on that, the next time you point your ship towards the big black. You are not just playing an explorer; you are an explorer.

 

[YinYin]

-follow Josh Parnell and his early work in 'Limit Theory' development. I'm repping you.

Already do. Life's been tough on him.

 

[Ziljan]

You mean the 2 very small planetoids in that screenshot, with a 402km radius? Those aren't even remotely close to the size of Luna, I'm not sure where you are getting that idea from at all. Pilatock 3 c a is the planetoid that shot was taken on if you missed that, the On The Horizon thread gives the name and someone went there and got a screen of the info. Yeah, something that small, I expect it to be oddly shaped. Something the size of Luna, I expect to be spherical, lets not get the two confused, ok?

Did a little more research and it turns out the potato radius of planets is <200 km. A 402km radius planet should be spherical, so Potato Pilatock 3CA is wrongly potatofied, and should be quite spherical. I'd love to hear back from FD on the potato radius of their model??

- - - Updated - - -

I want a "map this planet" scanner, which activates at really low altitudes so you'd have to weave and bob through valleys and around mountains. Highlighting interesting areas where you could land and investigate. This could be sample drilling, soil collection, simple photography of noteworthy places. We've been talking about minigames, when the thing Elite really shines is the ship mechanics in normal space. Add the gravity of a planet and the excellent flight mechanic itself becomes the minigame. The skill of the pilot determines the worth of the scan.

Oh well, and maybe we can discover pies in the skies.

I like this!

 

[ngen]

It's the argument of procedurally-generated vs hand-made. Hand-made wins in nearly every way (gameplay, looks, detail, story etc...) BUT if you haven't tried it the ENORMOUS scale of ELITE is a powerful thing. There's an epic-ness to even the simplest stuff and there's something quite powerful about being in the middle of nowhere looking at something nobody else has ever seen.

Creating a whole galaxy is a huge achievement, and although I think you're basically right in what you say, I still love Elite to bits. It's got a special something. And it's not like you're only allowed to buy one space sim!

This is so very true.

You would think that its boring, but the sheer achievement of long distance exploration is often enough. The satisfaction of getting back to civilization after being away for days or even weeks is indescribable. You find yourself lonely out there, even though its only a game you start to yearn for a space station and familiar surroundings.

... and yes in time I hope that there will be more gems out there to find. Lost civilizations, ancient ships and what not. But the power of the vast nothingness is still enough for now.
Besides, exploration is a small part and certainly not for everyone - there is plenty to do in the bubble.

 

[Windscreen Smudge]

Did a little more research and it turns out the potato radius of planets is <200 km. A 402km radius planet should be spherical, so Potato Pilatock 3CA is wrongly potatofied, and should be quite spherical. I'd love to hear back from FD on the potato radius of their model??

- - - Updated - - -



I like this!

Under what circumstances would it de-potato? Are we assuming no outside gravitational influences, no meteor impacts, and a uniform construction throughout?

Edit: Nevermind, the article covers this very subject.

Such a definition fits most objects in the Solar System but there are one or two oddities that don’t fit the bill. the asteroid Vesta, for example, is both potato-shaped and larger than 200km across. Lineweaver and Norman explain this away by suggesting that it may have been deformed by a collision relatively late on in life.

So yes, an object of that size has to lead a normal and quiet life to de-potato into a sphere.

 

[Komemiute]

that its creators are so fond of holds back its potential from the beginning.

Hi guys,

I want to say in advance, I'm a mature player who played the original Elite back in the 80s and also Elite Frontier and I played many of the space combat sims that came out over the years. I haven't yet checked out this game, but I guess I will soon. I'm a fan of sandbox games that don't force a story or an image onto you and are not sensationalistic in their nature like so many games today.

to the point: I understand that exploration is part of Elite, but I never bought the hype of endless space. What does that do for the game? We all know it's just procedurally generated. I could aswell check out the generator and the assets that it compiles. It always bugged me about Elite that it plays this card. After all it's just a game and a game world imo shouldn't be bigger than the substantial content it has to offer, or it becomes a string of endless repetition. And why would I want to explore that further?

I'd rather have a couple of well-designed systems with some more generically to explore where the game shows all its offerings. Doing so would make Elite sharper, more attractive to a larger player base that is currently turned off by the game's emptiness and lengthy character.

You're in for a treat with Star Citizen. It does exactly what you want.

 

[nexxo]

Did a little more research and it turns out the potato radius of planets is <200 km. A 402km radius planet should be spherical, so Potato Pilatock 3CA is wrongly potatofied, and should be quite spherical. I'd love to hear back from FD on the potato radius of their model??

As mentioned in another thread, not entirely true. The spherical contraction equilibrium differs depending on the hardness of the material involved. For rock it is 600km diameter or larger; for the much softer ice it is 400km diameter or larger. Of course we also have to factor in the object's spin, the centrifugal force of which will cause an equatorial bulge, resulting in an oblate sphere. Then there is the deforming activity of large meteorite impacts.

Frontier has gone to great lengths to get the galaxy looking realistic so far; I don't think they are going to mess up on something as simple as this.