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Re: Question: What exactly is the generated universe?

#16
I like how Escape Velocity (Nova in particular) does its 2D maps. There is a sense of organization, but there's sufficient disorder to make the map "interesting". Also noteworthy is that "power centers" are immediately obvious on that map, which I guess is a sign of good cartography. Even more interestingly, if you ever played the game, you can see how culture personalities align with their various "shapes" on the map.

http://www.robobunny.com/images/evnova/full_map.png
Image The map in the original EV, on the other hand, looks more like X3 (i.e not as good):
Image
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Re: Question: What exactly is the generated universe?

#17
I'd still advocate that any inter-system connectivity should not be regarded as permenent i.e. they're all man-made and liable to change as the galaxy develops. That means any map would need to be coordinate-based rather than symbolic, though the current links would be shown on the map at any one time.

As for large features like nebulae, that could be doable by having a "galaxy room" which represents the larger-scale contents of the galaxy. It would be populated by features such as nebulae, dust clouds and clusters - the sort of things that should be visible from a very long distance. These could be generated based on initial "galaxy shape" options and would be fixed. [Are there plans for the player to configure a galaxy shape at new game time? Maybe worth a thread?]

When a player enters a system room, that will represent a location in galaxy space. A background image could be generated based on that POV in galaxy space, showing bright vivid nebulae and dark patches of dust as appropriate. That means the background will change slowly as the player travels through the galaxy.

I don't think it's feasible to include individual stars, as they are procedurally generated anyway. The problem: if you start at system A and travel in one direction, you end up at B. Arriving at B will trigger the generation of more stars beyond B, some of which *should* be visible from A if they're bright. However, when the player started at A such stars hadn't yet be generated, so could not have been placed on any background image. Thus it's inconsistent to include stars.

However, a "star density" cloud could be included. This would not be made up of actual generated stars, but just a generic "Milky Way" effect based on the probability density of where stars would be. Effectively this would be like a fixed nebula but with a "stellar field" visual appearance.

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