Jason Schupfer wrote: Funny thing is our own real universe may not be infinite if time and space distorts due to dark and non-dark matter so it folds back into itself.

I've given up on our own real universe as the theories about its size/contents/age seem to be changing monthly these days.

Getting back on track...

Atarun wrote: The number of hours of play before you discover a sector would thus just be a random seed, not a reflection of a time that would make sense inside the universe itself.

How would this work if you were to turn around and head back to where you came from? If there is no persistance then a new (different?) seed would be generated which could skew travel times between known sectors?

ChainsawHands wrote:

JoshParnell wrote: Factions and stations are likely to stay in existence for quite a while, planets pretty much forever,

Planets will be in existence only "pretty much" forever? Procedurally generated Death Stars confirmed!

Will planets be in orbits? If so, then the time component comes into play again because if the orbits are wide enough the planets position within that system could be vastly different to what you remembered last time you visited.

Deej wrote:Getting back on track...

How would this work if you were to turn around and head back to where you came from? If there is no persistance then a new (different?) seed would be generated which could skew travel times between known sectors?

OK. Many things.

There will be persistence. You won't generate the entire universe at once, but the system will keep track of sectors you have discovered.

The seed doesn't change. You pick a seed for the universe and it remains the seed for that universe forever. If someone else uses the same seed, they will technically "generate" (not at once, but progressively) the same universe.

Now say you arrive in a sector with two factions that just started a war after putting 100 hours into the game. If you give that universe's seed to one of your friends and tell him to go to that sector, it'd be a little weird for him/her to find the exact same two factions having just started a war, even though s/he would have just gone there directly and put only, say, 10 minutes into the game to do so. Also, if you rolled back to an earlier save (I'm not sure that will be allowed by the game, but even if it isn't, you still might theoretically lose data and thus involuntarily roll back in time), went to some other places in the universe and went back to that sector after, say, 150 hours instead of 100 hours, it would be weird for those two factions to have just started a war. Weird because it would break immersion by signaling that really all of the universe is generated as you explore it and all those factions do not exist until you meet them. It would work perfectly well if the whole concept was "You are in a dream world, go explore." but here the universe is supposed to be living without you... so Josh said he will use some tricks to slightly modify the situation depending on your path through the game, meaning you won't find a sector in the exact same situation no matter what happens between launching the game and reaching that sector.

Thanks Atarun, I think you nailed all the answers

Yes, there's a pretty big conceptual difference between large and infinite. It was a significant challenge to figure out how to generate a universe that is guaranteed to be infinite, yet still has some interesting structure (i.e. connected "regions", clusters, etc). I guess at the end of the day it probably won't matter to the player whether they have 200 billion systems to explore or an infinite number, but, for some reason, it matters to me

Also, Infinity is an awesome example of a procedural game, and I have been a supporter and forum-goer over there for a long time!

Just a quick thing on save game size, i agree that 'probably' it won't be an issue as we have lots of available cheap HD space these days. Having said that i still can't get my head around exactly how a game like Elite 2(and 3, and maybe 4) could keep track of all the data on the constants that would be put into a relatively tiny save file size, or in a game like Morrowind that 'remembers' where i (or the AI!) places every item. I think the save files for Frontier (Elite 2 onwards) came in about the 100kb mark(!) and for Morrowind they are between about 1,5 Mb and 10 Mb as the game progresses, just to give a range of size types that are both easily manageable.

There is a 'bug' in Morrowind where by if you have more than 250 odd save files it can cause CTD's but that seems to be related to some code limit around the magic number of 255(or 256)?

Atarun wrote: It's interesting, but it might make the universe much harder to relate to. It also begs the question of how to track things if there is no time. How do you stamp the logs? How do you track your teams to make sure they aren't going on vacation on company's dime and nothing bad happened to them? Do people make appointments at all? How?

I think it'd be a lot easier to factor time in your model. Game-time, I mean. But of course, if centuries go by in-game, then it brings the question of how long exactly can those people live? Are they all immortal? If they are, why can they die of some things (like their ships exploding with them inside, I assume) but not age?

As far as logs are concerned the log time could easily be generated. in fact a very famous series dose this exact trick for its logs. star treks star dates are formula based and could be 'logged' based of your own system clock. done behind closed doors and done automatically to record specific events would make way for unique logs of your adventures.

while nothing fancy to look at it dose show what i mean a bit better than i can describe. XD
http://www.hillschmidt.de/gbr/sternenzeit.htm

On the theme of persistence, what if... I damage a large mothership M near planet X, zoom off to planet Y (a significant distance away) for a while, then go back to planet X. Will ship M still be there, and damaged in the same way?

Matfink wrote:On the theme of persistence, what if... I damage a large mothership M near planet X, zoom off to planet Y (a significant distance away) for a while, then go back to planet X. Will ship M still be there, and damaged in the same way?

only if they had no way to recover from the damage or if someone else dident come by and haul it off.

Dadalos wrote:only if they had no way to recover from the damage or if someone else dident come by and haul it off.

Are you on the dev team? Do you know that ships can be 'hauled off'?

Matfink wrote:

Dadalos wrote:only if they had no way to recover from the damage or if someone else dident come by and haul it off.

Are you on the dev team? Do you know that ships can be 'hauled off'?

no im not on the Dev team I like many of you am just an excited fan. in regards to my statement i was mearly speculating on it as a possibility. josh has said that the ai work will be extincive and that they will have their own priorities and goals. and hes supportive of the idea of caro haulers being able to pull extra cargo containers like todays freight trains do. so putting two and two together dose open the chance that while your away some other slavage crew or even rescue team to show up and move the ship while your not there.