Everyone goes on about Elite, but Elite was just a sandbox… (an amazing sandbox)
replyThis was crazy! World gen is hard. Proc world gen is NP hard. Story driven proc world gen with persistence in 1986 was Kaku level brilliance.
I loved Starlight but I'm not sure it was procedural world generation. I mean there was a map of stars printed with the game so they weren't changing. There was a small bit of variation in terms of what one found on planets and so on...the key was it felt like an open world because it was big enough and there was nothing stopping you from doing what you liked and when (except resources).
replyIt was procedural at least in the sense that you couldn't store the data for all the planets in memory (or even store it on disk) on the 1980s systems it ran on. So you needed a way to generate the data on the fly.
replyyeah but you're dismissing the fact that this was just a pregen table of data back then. They made a map based on that, sure, but from that table came... everything else and you can't store all that data on floppy.
replySimilar techniques apply today. Pregen like 100,000 stars. Give them names and locations in the galaxy, treat them as your "locations of interest" with a seed. The rest can just be another cloud of particles with no interest and if the player visits, you can RNG whatever based on the seed. No two systems can share a seed. They can, however, share a branch.
Procedural generation can use a fixed seed, it's not too uncommon. For instance, Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall's map was procedurally generated, but is the same for every player.
replyThey bragged about it being procedural in interviews.
replyWhat I was never clear on was the degree of cherry picking they did. There were 800 worlds on something like nine disks, each unique and peppered with minerals and artifacts.
Star Control 2 (which takes many Starflight influences and also hired Greg Johnson) also used a lot of procedural generation. It has around 500 stars and 4000 worlds with minerals and lifeforms. I recall the SC2 lead programmer Fred Ford saying they used a fixed seed, and they went through many seeds until they found one that looked good. I presume Starflight was of the same mindset.
replyI wonder if QA was given the job of vetting the seeds.
replyO cool! This approach was used in WASTELAND too, on four floppies (the progenitor of the FALLOUT series).
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