Someone is making the computer game I want to make, and doing it pretty much exactly how I would do it. Infinity: The Quest For Earth features a procedurally generated galaxy and planets with procedurally generated terrain.
This lets you see a whole planet from space and then fly down to its surface and see hills and mountains, like this:
Procedural generation of 3D environments reduces everything to a formula. It works for galaxies as well as mountains. This way you don’t need to store the location of every star in the galaxy in your computer’s memory. You plug your location into the formula and out pop the locations of nearby stars. To make the galaxy interesting and the right shape you use random number generators and probability functions. The random numbers aren’t really random, or you’d get a different galaxy each time. Instead you seed the random number generator with the same starting value each time so that it always generates the same galaxy.
The author of Infinity describes this in some detail, and there’s a video, which you really have to watch in HD to see the level of detail.
(I think if you wanted to simulate an entire universe down to atomic scale you’d do it something like this. But of course, the universe is real, we’re not living inside a simulation, continue reading…)
Infinity will have Newtonian physics, which I think is essential to immersion in a space game. The use of aeroplane-physics in Eve online is the main problem I have with that game. And I can only assume it will have a realistic galaxy with stars and solar systems on a realistic scale. This is rare in space games. The only time I’ve seen it done properly is in Frontier: Elite II.
So I hope Infinity is completed, even if it takes a long time. Although its author gets the community to supply artwork, it’s a one-man closed-source project, and they have a habit of disappearing.
Procedural generation is very interesting, although it is fifteen years since I have looked at any such mathematics and it has probably adanced a bit since then.
Of course, what would be really cool is Einsteinian physics when dealing with galactic scales, quantum mechanics when examining the very small, and a Blue Screen of Death when you attempt to dive into a black hole.
Einsteinian physics would be interesting, but problematic in a multiplayer game.