this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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Why is trillions in quotes? Did they add them or not?
I write a planet generator. All of the planets are the same to begin with, so realistically I can only generate "1" planet. Then I add one toggle which is random, if it's on the planet will be completely water. I now have "2" planets. Now I add another toggle for one huge mountain, I can now generate "4" planets (dry,water,dry-mountain,water-mountain). Keep adding toggles, sliders and parameters until you have "trillions" of possible planets and you're done.
The funny thing is that the changes are cumulative, so if I release a game that can generate X planets and I add a binary toggle I can now claim I added X planets to the game. If I add a slider from 0-9 then I added 10X planets. So since No Man's Sky already had a giant number of planets, adding trillions of them could mean something as stupid as they added a new resource to the game so now every planet can have that resource in different amounts.
I thought I'd check which 2^N gets you to a trillion, it's N=40. So you can have 40 parameters per planet and add one more, then suddenly you've created an extra trillion planets.
And that's assuming just toggles, if each parameter has 10 levels you only need 12, then add one toggle and you get trillions. Heck, I can name 12 parameters that have at least 10 different values off the top of my head:
Congrats, if you now add a does the planet rotate toggle you've created trillions of planets.
It’s a procedurally generated universe(s). These systems haven’t all been pre-generated, but will rather be generated to explore when a player visits a system for the first time.
Right, but that still counts. Although I guess it's kind of an "if a tree falls in the forest" question. If the world doesn't exist unless you find it, was it really there before?
The point is rather how meaningful this statement is. It doesn't really matter if your algorithm can come up with trillions of ways to place trees, if it's the same handful of trees it's still gonna feel samey after the third time.
Hmm, true