Why such an empty galaxy? Procedural Civilizations, Biomes?

Colonel Kenney

Colonel Kenney
Exploring is a rinse and repeat affair. There is very little unique unless you like looking at orbital velocities and temperatures. You do look for those gems of mining locations, water worlds, earth like worlds. But even some biological sites you start to see all the same things. I know we cannot go onto the surface of planets with atmosphere.

But why can't our planetary scans reveal advanced or primitive lifeforms? Maybe just a procedural generated text with information gleaned from the scans?

  1. Find Earthlike
  2. Planetary Scan - if life detected you need to hit the planet again with a couple more probes at the hotspots.
  3. Identify major biomes and water masses
  4. Identify clumps of lifeforms on the planet
  5. Clumps are scanned for movement, organization and geometry to determine structure.
  6. If structure is found, which level of development can be determined? ( Civilization ) This is determined based on many factors. Grass huts, concrete etc.
  7. Atmospheric analysis to find out the development whether stone age, iron age, industrial or nuclear.
  8. Wireless and other emissions are listened for to determine how many languages and other information. Radio, television etc?

The computer computes a "Planetary Profile" aka dossier on the lifeforms and generates a name. OR allows us to name them? Gives us the estimated types of lifeforms on the planet and the information we can glean.

Even presence of xenon or nuclear testing. Maybe even find a civilization that nuked itself to death. This information would prove invaluable to bring back to the bubble for science teams to go and explore later. Therefore a worthwhile and profitable reason to stop and smell the flowers. Also to FIND these planets. Theoretically there should be millions of these planets out there.

My example would be

Planet Epsilon 4b
Biomes: 75% Tropical, 2% Polar 20% Ocean 3% Arid.
Lifeforms: Quadrapedal lifeforms, Freshwater mammals
Seasons: None
Technological Level: type 4 (iron age)
Notes: (Here is where a procedural narrative can be made)
The most intelligent species on the planet seems to be _____ that live in _____ style dwellings. Materials such as __ are used to construct housing, there is evidence for type of social structure. Due to the planet's unique ___ there is an abundance of __ and a lack of . The XXXX species seems to be stagnant in its development due to the lack of __ on its planet.

Something creative I'm sure FD would be really good at. Something interesting to read. Some of it could end up being hilarious. So many things so unique.

These could be tourist spots to go to. Missions to drop off beacons there to observe the development of the life.

Finally I thought surely I know of games that have done this before. But even something as simple as this website is cool to look at

anodyneprintware.com

Rimspace Planet Generator

Explore endless planets in your favorite sci-fi TTRPG
anodyneprintware.com anodyneprintware.com
 

Colonel Kenney

Colonel Kenney
Screenshot_20240813_103535.png
 

Colonel Kenney

Colonel Kenney
They need to add something as simple at PROCEDURALLY GENERATED TEXT INFORMATION about lifeforms in the galaxy. The galaxy is far too empty to be realistic.

This is the simplest solution its been done to death by other games but it also gives us more to look for to make money as explorers.

How many brain trees and bacteria do we need to find ? How about some primitive civilizations?
 

varonica

varonica
Colonel Kenney said:
They need to add something as simple at PROCEDURALLY GENERATED TEXT INFORMATION about lifeforms in the galaxy. The galaxy is far too empty to be realistic.

This is the simplest solution its been done to death by other games but it also gives us more to look for to make money as explorers.

How many brain trees and bacteria do we need to find ? How about some primitive civilizations?
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And what it does is lock the galaxy into what is there based on simplistic criteria so that when they start to roll out proper proceduraly generated life on these planets they are stuck with what is a severely restricting template. The thin atmospheric planets we have life on now didn't show anything before that because at the time....way back when horizons came out, they probably had no idea exactly what they were going to do when they opened them up. The same applies here, you would restrict them in what they could do, because players would go around and log all these details and save them and it would be a big waste of time because who knows what they could be doing in a few years time, and all that would be discarded much to the players discontent.

I mean what you are showing here is the most simplistic thing I have ever seen, it certainly doesn't qualify as procedural anything as far as I can tell, I certainly don't think they want to lock themselves into something based on proceduraly generated text information from such a simplistic program as this, when/if they launch worlds with thicker atmosphere I expect something decent, not laughable!
 

Greasetrap42

Greasetrap42
varonica said:
And what it does is lock the galaxy into what is there based on simplistic criteria so that when they start to roll out proper proceduraly generated life on these planets....
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This "simplistic criteria" can quite possibly be generated by the exact same procedural algorithms that would later be expanded upon and used to generate these hypothetical fancy-dancy graphical atmospheric planets that cmdrs will likely never get to visit in the next 10 years. It would mean FDev would need to think ahead a little bit with some future vision.

Anyway, saying Frontier shouldn't add content because it might cause programming challenges 10 years from now is pretty silly. Nothing has been stopping FDev from making poor short-sighted decisions that they need to walk back so far.
 

Greasetrap42

Greasetrap42
Colonel Kenney said:
They need to add something as simple at PROCEDURALLY GENERATED TEXT INFORMATION about lifeforms in the galaxy. The galaxy is far too empty to be realistic.
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Ball park figure; how many technological civilizations do you think there are in the real Milky Way, and how did you arrive at that figure?
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To the best of our knowledge Earth is the only planet in our Galaxy with life, how more realistic do you want it?
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The game doesn't need to be realistic. Just believable based on what we already know about the ED galaxy. And fun.

We know that outside human space there are thousands of planets that are:
  • ELW. Outdoor worlds with human breathable atmosphere and indigenous life.
  • Gas Giants with Ammonia Based Life.
  • Gas Giants with Water Based Life.
  • Terrestrial Worlds with carbon-ammonia based life.
  • Terrestrial Worlds with carbon-water based life.

And there are at least two previous space traveling civilizations.

Edit:
And of course hundreds of thousand of thin atmosphere planets with exobiology samples.
And also the floaty-things found at NSPs.
 
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Kalizandra

Kalizandra
I would definitely support more exobio forms, new plants to scan etc.
Maybe even some hand placed remains of ancient alien civilisations. I still think the Guardian ruins are some of the most atmospheric, well-conceived content that Fdev has done. Still give me the creeps to this day if i'm poking around for mats, or just sightseeing.
 

Colonel Kenney

Colonel Kenney
Greasetrap42 said:
The game doesn't need to be realistic. Just believable based on what we already know about the ED galaxy. And fun.

We know that outside human space there are thousands of planets that are:
  • ELW. Outdoor worlds with human breathable atmosphere and indigenous life.
  • Gas Giants with Ammonia Based Life.
  • Gas Giants with Water Based Life.
  • Terrestrial Worlds with carbon-ammonia based life.
  • Terrestrial Worlds with carbon-water based life.

And there are at least two previous space traveling civilizations.

Edit:
And of course hundreds of thousand of thin atmosphere planets with exobiology samples.
And also the floaty-things found at NSPs.
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I agree - I just want MORE information about them.

Lets come up with interesting facts about the life that we can search for and READ. Eventually when they catch up and are able to do something like a no mans sky, they can make those things.

I just would like another higher payout for finding something unique as far as life. The galaxy is far too empty and uninteresting.

Wouldn't it be nice to find an earthlike with hints of nuclear destruction and ruins, and old satellites orbiting that you could get datapoint about their civilizations?
 

Colonel Kenney

Colonel Kenney
Kalizandra said:
I would definitely support more exobio forms, new plants to scan etc.
Maybe even some hand placed remains of ancient alien civilisations. I still think the Guardian ruins are some of the most atmospheric, well-conceived content that Fdev has done. Still give me the creeps to this day if i'm poking around for mats, or just sightseeing.
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There are only so many braintrees you can scan before it becomes mind numbing. Make life infinitely variable and interesting.
 

Sapyx

Sapyx
The Drake Equation isn't designed to give you an accurate "number of intelligent species in the galaxy". It's designed to illustrate exactly how much we don't know about the circumstances of planets and life in the galaxy, and how much we need to know before we can possibly give a sensible answer to this question. Don't forget, the Drake Equation was written back when we didn't even know if planets were a common thing in the universe, and there was still strong hope that these newfangled "radio telescopes" would pick up LGMs any day now. So we have a better handle on some of the parameters than Drake had, but we're still ignorant of many of them. In a sense, the Drake Equation is better at working backwards: turn on the radio, count how many LGMs there are, then work out the odds of a civilization existing and how long they last.

As for the ED lore answer: the answer is that, in this universe, life and even "complex life" (dinosauroids, six-legged cows, etc) is relatively common - heck, life even occurs in a surprising percentage of gas giants - but sentient life is next-to-nonexistent. One can even speculate the reason for this: the Thargoids, who are apparently the oldest sentient lifeform in the galaxy and have been diligent in exterminating other sentient lifeforms before they can leave their homeworlds and become a threat. Humans and Guardians being the only two known to have somehow slipped under the Thargoid radar and built a rival interstellar civilization before the Thargoids noticed. The Thargoids seem to have no objection to life in the galaxy existing, so long as it's not smart.

So, from a Drake Equation perspective, all the factors up to fL are quite good (planets are common, life is common), but fi is quite low, and fc is brought to near-zero by Thargoid intervention, giving us a present final answer of "two" - Humans and Thargoids.

Complex and Sentient life is only likely on worlds that have thicker air than the ones we can currently land on. DB wanted to go dinosaur hunting in ED, so that kind of lifeform may yet be in the end-goal. Procedurally-generated sentient life is going to be much harder. This isn't 1984 any more; players aren't going to be satisfied with some single-paragraph procedurally-generated lifeform description on an info screen ("Lave is most famous for its vast rain forests and the Lavian tree grub"). They're gonna want to go down and see these things for themselves. Then get in a Scarab and blow 'em all up. And procedurally generating sentient aliens that walk around and flee in terror from gunfire, is much harder than procedurally generating a paragraph.
 

Felix DiCestria

Felix DiCestria
Colonel Kenney said:

How Many Aliens Are There? | Ask An Earth And Space Scientist

“What if we could talk to aliens?” In 1961, astronomer Dr. Frank Drake gathered a group of scientists to talk about how many alien civilizations could be living in our galaxy. To help these scientists think, he made a math equation which predicts the number of intelligent alien civilizations in...
askanearthspacescientist.asu.edu askanearthspacescientist.asu.edu
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Item 5; "A Life bearing planet has a 1% chance of developing intelligent life".

Example Earth has had life for around 4 billion years, intelligent life (Homo sapiens) evolved 300,000 years ago. Expressed as a percentage 0.0075%
 

varonica

varonica
In the end it comes down to this, the galaxy isn't empty, it's just not data we are allowed to access yet for one reason or another. Out of game of course it's because FDEV aren't ready to take that step, in game you could argue that the pilots federation restrict access to that information by limiting what we can access, such as the many restricted access areas scattered around the galaxy. There may be intelligent life on some of those permit locked systems and in those permit locked regions, but they don't want us idiots blundering in and shooting everything up like we did with the Thargoids!
 

AceMcKool

AceMcKool
Felix DiCestria said:
Item 5; "A Life bearing planet has a 1% chance of developing intelligent life".

Example Earth has had life for around 4 billion years, intelligent life (Homo sapiens) evolved 300,000 years ago.
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That we know of. Other intelligent species could have evolved and been wiped out without a trace many times over in those 4 billion years and we wouldn't know. We ourselves won't make it to 400,000 years by the looks of it. Imagine how many other species may have had the same fate.

Also, intelligent life doesn't necessarily equal development of technology and/or civilization. There could be entire planets inhabited by highly intelligent dolphins and we wouldn't know by just flying over and looking out the window.

But I see your point in this particular case, and I also see the OP's point. After the 100th Concha Labiata sampled one goes "Really? This is it?".

This conversation alone is proof that the game has so much potential for expansion, and it's a shame that pretty much every star system in-game is a copy/paste rendition of the previous one.
 

varonica

varonica
AceMcKool said:
But I see your point in this particular case, and I also see the OP's point. After the 100th Concha Labiata sampled one goes "Really? This is it?".
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Oh I am not arguing that point, I wanted proper procedural life from the very beginning, not the ersatz form we have now, however the OP's suggestion just puts roadblocks in that path that FDEV would then need to program around to actually do that. It's not procedural life, it's just text messages pretending, it's like the current life we have, pre-assembled then procedurally scattered across the entire galaxy. The life itself isn't procedural, the distribution is, and personally I don't think we have the ability to do what I would like to see, unique procedurally generated life forms across the galaxy. Even the OP's example would eventually lead to repetition across 400b planets.
 
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