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how big can the universe get?


tristan

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Voxels are very space efficient (storage wise) with around 0.5 bit per voxel and also planets will mostly generated, not designed, so they need only to store the changed voxels.

The limit might be the double precision for the coordinates (the position of every object in the game), however I think will not reach that limit, because the universe size should be proportional to the number of players in game.

And because you have whole planets to where you can walk in, you should need less universe then for example eve (theoretically).

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Just remember DU will start small: on one planet. It will take a while to get into space. Then it will take a while to cover the single system and only then will expansion to other systems be viable or even possible. It's a logical progression

 

Do we know what exploring the universe will look like? Too early to tell.

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"I know its infinite"

 

"How big can it get?"

 

I think you answered it yourself already

Realistically though people will only get so far over the years until theres no game anymore or no servers. But it has potential to be pretty god damn big.

I also hope to see some space nomads that decide to aim in one direction from Alioth and just keep moving further and further out for as many years as they can (only residing on planets and asteroids on the way in periods) just to challenge the thought

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8 hours ago, Zamarus said:

"I know its infinite"

 

"How big can it get?"

 

I think you answered it yourself already

Realistically though people will only get so far over the years until theres no game anymore or no servers. But it has potential to be pretty god damn big.

I also hope to see some space nomads that decide to aim in one direction from Alioth and just keep moving further and further out for as many years as they can (only residing on planets and asteroids on the way in periods) just to challenge the thought

Can't wait for 10 years post launch, hearing of "The Little War on Planet Doge". You know it's happening.

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18 minutes ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

Can't wait for 10 years post launch, hearing of "The Little War on Planet Doge". You know it's happening.

I actually wonder about this. 

 

Will it be large enough to basically allow a whole microcosmos to exist within? 

 

Examples of far-away encounters: you discover a sect-like small faction in some totally remote location or in another place or on another planet there's a post-apocalyptic war going on on some bombed planet with factions and players no one really heard of because they kept quiet in general or simply because they drowned in all the larger community news. 

 

Kinda exciting. A bit like some minor Stellaris exploration events. 

 

The bottom line likely is that you may have factions and conflicts that might be very or completely detached from your average daily or mainstream galactic politics if such a thing will later exist. 

 

Like that famous Star Wars intro: in some distant place... 

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2 minutes ago, Warden said:

I actually wonder about this. 

 

Will it be large enough to basically allow a whole microcosmos to exist within? 

 

Examples of far-away encounters: you discover a sect-like small faction in some totally remote location or in another place or on another planet there's a post-apocalyptic war going on on some bombed planet with factions and players no one really heard of because they kept quiet in general or simply because they drowned in all the larger community news. 

 

Kinda exciting. A bit like some minor Stellaris exploration events. 

 

The bottom line likely is that you may have factions and conflicts that might be very or completely detached from your average daily or mainstream galactic politics if such a thing will later exist. 

 

Like that famous Star Wars intro: in some distant place... 

In games like EVE, you are bound to one day encounter an enemy, it takes 30 minutes or so to cross 4000 light years or so in the world.

DU's speeds are not EVE's speeds of 5 AU/s of course, so the "get there to fight" prospect ,does mean that further apart playerbases wlll eventually never meet. 10 years post launch Plaet Dodge will probably never come in contact with the MemeSwarm Conglamerate. Why? Cause it's tiresome to travel the vast nothingness of space and having to stop, cause fuel is also a factor in DU.

In general, I find it interesting that two communities in different parts of the server may encounter far different scenarios in the long run - something EVE has to implement PVE to achieve, while in DU, it's probably going to go down like in the real world. One part of the server in the "far far off systems" may be an Empire, and in another corner the palyers may - somehow - make a Republiic happen - notice, a Republic and a Democracy is not the same thing. This is no different than EVE's PVE carebear things like the Amarr Empire and the Gallente Republic, two very different ideologies in the Lore.

It's just in DU, an actual player will eventually go like "yeah, I am an Emperor now, I own 300 planets and have 20000 people under me and I have wars witth 30 different orgs I can take on easily". Good luck fighting inflated egos like that xD

Which I think is what terrifies people and they ask "how big can the universe go?".

Well, it's going to go BIG enough for you to hide, but also big enough for you to make it harder on yourself. After all, nobody is going to be an Uberman like in Empyrion. You will need to train up skills to make , I don't know, a HEATING unit for example, if yo uend up ina star system with no Goldilocks planet (that's earth-like planets).

So the proper answer would be "the further you go from the rest of the playerbase, the less the chance to encounter other people, but also, the less the chance of rescue coming if you die and got no power on your ship aka Fuel, you will respawn back on the Arkship... a long way's off of where you were". Which also means, another person in the future, will find a derelict ship, with no crew on board, long abandonded. Spoopy.

 

Which eventually ties back to the original arguement you made good sir.

 

Rome and the Han Dynasty in China co-existed at the same time period. They never met - and thank the Spaghetti Monster they didn't, I live in Greece,  the Chinese would have obliterated us with their ancient rockets :V. But in-between Rome and China, a variety of cities, cultures and wars errupted, than were minor footnotes in global history, but interesting to study nonetheless. Rome wass a Republic back then, China was a Dynastic Monarchy that is was of the mindset "Absolute Power". They would have viewed Rome at first like "oh, good, great allies" but once Rome got a wiff of them golden statues, Rome would go "BRING DEMOCRACY TO THEM! WITH ALL OF OUR LEGIONS! :V " .

It's like history's repeating itself, don't you think?

 

I personally will be looking for the day some giant organisation will have its own version of the Persians' side of the Battle of Marathon, or the victorious version of the same scenario on Operation Overlord (Normandy beach for any 11 year old who doesn't know what Operation Overlord was xD ).

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But ... but we got star gate isnt it ? I thought the only way to go to another star system is go though the Star Gate which is very expensive according to NQ, it suppose only big organization can get it but still hard for them to build on. So i think we dont have much called the 2 side of universe and will long distance make hard to contact even 10 year later.

But i like the idea you will die at far far away from the spawn and then some day, another people will find your ship which abandon, lonely, float in the space and history about you with that ship, hmm yeah it make me feel excited. Like find a ship which make in 2019 when you are in 2027 =]].

 

So we may got the Star war scenario but i dont think DU will big or information will be so late that will take 4 day to a week to get it.

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8 minutes ago, ShioriStein said:

But ... but we got star gate isnt it ? I thought the only way to go to another star system is go though the Star Gate which is very expensive according to NQ

That's where you are wrong mate. Star Gates are something that will come in an expansion after launch, they will be expensive yes and you probably need to build a gate on each side you want to travel to (no venturing off to a random location for free).

They have talked about prior to warp drives or its equal we are looking at weeks of constant travel through space to move from system to system, by no means impossible just a huge effort. Also when such tech exists like drives that lets you go faster than before it would probably take a bit less. Neither reliant on Star gates.

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1 hour ago, ShioriStein said:

But ... but we got star gate isnt it ? I thought the only way to go to another star system is go though the Star Gate which is very expensive according to NQ, it suppose only big organization can get it but still hard for them to build on. So i think we dont have much called the 2 side of universe and will long distance make hard to contact even 10 year later.

But i like the idea you will die at far far away from the spawn and then some day, another people will find your ship which abandon, lonely, float in the space and history about you with that ship, hmm yeah it make me feel excited. Like find a ship which make in 2019 when you are in 2027 =]].

 

So we may got the Star war scenario but i dont think DU will big or information will be so late that will take 4 day to a week to get it.

No, you need only probes so you can Jump to them with Jump Drives or whatever.

Gates connect together, Probes are ONE WAY jump, if you jump through you can't jump back without a probe sent back to your original star system. You jump with the probe and build the gate on the other side.

So, any player, with the skills trained and the equipment, can jump from system to system on their own. Which also means, that's how PvP in large scales will go down, since you can't use Stargates the owners don't allow you to use.

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Derelict ships will become even more fun if you are able to save text logs in items or in containers, giving you a ship log or similar. Or if this can be some integrated component of the ship systems like a black box.

 

Especially explorers will likely keep an in-game log others can read in case things go wrong or to have a shareable journey for others regardless of that. 

 

Of course you could also apply this to the other scenarios such as the remote faction wars and so on, on the ground. 

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The answer probably is  "until floating-point errors become so bad the game crashes." It depends on how the server files are stored really.  A quick google search for "ntfs max partition size" shows 

 

Quote

For example, using 64 KB clusters, the maximum size Windows XP NTFS volume is 256 TB minus 64 KB. Using the default cluster size of 4 KB, the maximum NTFS volume size is 16 TB minus 4 KB.
-Wikipedia

 

The servers will probably use some form of Linux, which often use ext4 nowadays. A quick google search for "ext4 max partition size" shows similar results.

 

 

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Wouldn't it then make sense for each star system to be its own 'map' then, to avoid Floating Point errors? Also from what I understood, although the planets are procgen, that doesn't mean that the whole universe is; from what I gather the developers will add stars/planets as the userbase (and their means of travel) expands.

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Every star system IS it's own map or rather "game object". Not every thing in the entire universe will measure it's distance only and always to the absolute zero point in the universe.

However, those star systems themselfe have a distance towards other star systems. That's where the floating errors will start.

Theoretically, you could just use non-floating numbers for the distances between star systems, but I'm not sure if that is possible in their single shart system.

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19 minutes ago, NanakotheNarcface said:

Wouldn't it then make sense for each star system to be its own 'map' then, to avoid Floating Point errors? Also from what I understood, although the planets are procgen, that doesn't mean that the whole universe is; from what I gather the developers will add stars/planets as the userbase (and their means of travel) expands.

Have you thought of the LOD part? You know, Voxels or not, if you can't see it, the game won't load it, and if you don't have to load it, the game has not to... you know... procedurally generate it.

Also, are you sure you understand what Procedural Generation means? 

it's like saying " I know this car is self-driving, but the way I understand it, it's a car, so I have to drive it" At a certain point, you either don't understand what a self-driving car is, or you meant something entirely different.

Planet generation is automated on an algorithm. And the devs have means of slowing down playes so the procedural generation can work properly, that's why they keep saying "probes will take a week to a month to get to a new system", probs are nothing but a timer until you can "jump" to a new system.

 

You may say "but is there a way of predicting what a collection of planets will be around a star?"

Yes., Yes there is. There is even a formula figured out for if a planet will have life on it or if it's gonna be barren. Science! :V

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1 minute ago, CaptainTwerkmotor said:

Have you thought of the LOD part? You know, Voxels or not, if you can't see, the game won't load it, and if you don't have to load it, the game has not to... you know... procedurally generate it.

Also, are you sure you understand what Procedural Generation means? 

it's like saying " I know this car is self-driving, but the way I understand it, it's a car, so I have to drive it" At a certain point, you either don't understand what a self-driving car is, or you meant something entirely different.

Planet generation is automated on an algorithm. And the devs have means of slowing down playes so the procedural generation can work properly, that's why they keep saying "probes will take a week to a month to get to a new system", probs are nothing but a timer until you can "jump" to a new system.

 

You may say "but is there a way of predicting what a collection of planets will be around a star?"

Yes., Yes we do. We even have a formula figured out for if a planet will have life on it or if it's gonna be barren. Science! :V

3

I was referring to having everything generated and in-game at release, waiting to be found (like in Elite Dangerous or NMS) vs making planets by procedural generation, but added in one at a time by devs as and when they're needed (like in Star Citizen). I was under the impression that it might be the latter, but I just rewatched the AMA video on this and it looks like it might actually be the former.

 

AMA is here, btw:

 

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If you are referring to the first question in the video:

although it definitive sounds like they will create the entire universe before launch, it wouldn’t make much sense. I you can’t interact with a system at all, then why bother creating it?

And although the planets are generated, you probably still need some time to fine tune them or add non-generated things to them.

 

Scanning far distance planets will very most likely not reveal that much detailed information about that planet, so it might be enough for them to just generate them without fine tuning them.

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8 minutes ago, NanakotheNarcface said:

I was referring to having everything generated and in-game at release, waiting to be found (like in Elite Dangerous or NMS) vs making planets by procedural generation, but added in one at a time by devs as and when they're needed (like in Star Citizen). I was under the impression that it might be the latter, but I just rewatched the AMA video on this and it looks like it might actually be the former.

 

AMA is here, btw:

 

Yeah, that is the case. 

Anyone who can understand how these processes work, can understand as well why they are precise on the "it may take a week or a month for a probe to get to a new system" either way.

I mean, game developement was always about smoke and mirrors. Sending the probe in DU is just you asking the server to make a new star system to explore, so I still stand by my very first  reply on this thread, it's as big as the players can make it.

I'd even advocate for NQ to introduce Wear and Tear on ship elements, so people may "Break" their Jump Drive and get stranded without the necessary components to make a new Jump Drive, so they can just make exploration actaully difficult.

Sure, food may not be there - at launch at least - but that's no excuse for not having durability on ship parts.

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