Game Realism - Should it Matter?

Something I've been battling with recently when contemplating the procedural universe generation for Galliventurer. How realistic should the properties of celestial objects be? In the real world/universe, star's are visible colours because of their size & temperature, which in turn is based on: their age, elemental composition, and the type of fusion happening within. But should the universe of Galliventurer be limited to these factors? There will already be the stretching of realism with faster than light travel, more attractive and habitable planets than you can shake a laser at, not to mention alien races that you'll be able to understand, communicate & trade with.

star forming nebula

When playing a game about flying through the great vast emptiness of space, the idea is there shouldn't actually be too much emptiness. Emptiness is boring. Nothing happens in the empty, nothing good anyway. The fine line will be in finding the balance between not too much stuff, but also not too much empty. Before I tackle those particular hurdles, we also need to think of a coordinate system to allow for the player to navigate where they are without a point of reference. All realistic models (that I can find and have any hope of understanding) use Earth as the reference.

But Earth is a long forgotten myth in Galliventurer, we've been out amongst the stars for eons. Long enough for degradation of knowledge and technical regression. But let's leave that for another post.

So the tl;dr of it all, to begin with at least, the procedural generation will be based on a few lists of properties and randomly matched together (see other post here about that). This will undoubtedly produce some things that probably won't be strictly realistic, but it will be a start at least. As for the co-ordinate system, I had an idea to have each new celestial object have a list of the closest systems, this will allow for a triangulation (of sorts) as to where the object or system fits into the universe. This co-ordinate system should also help for displaying a map of the discovered universe - soon to be displayed on the website!

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Random Generation That's Not So Random

While I do want the Galliventurer universe to be procedurally & randomly generated, I don't want it to be truly random. There needs to be a modicum of probability involved. Some weighting so that some things are rarer than others. After all we can have too many diamond covered planets or uranium based suns - as you can see I haven't actually started thinking too much about the composition of the planets, stars, etc. Keeping this probability based random selection in mind, I'm going to be using a dynamically weighted series of arrays to randomly select properties for entities in the Galliventurer universe. Using something very similar to (or based on) this article by Michael Czechowski https://observablehq.com/@nextlevelshit/rejection-sampling-in-javascript . The main bit of complexity here will be the values of a randomly selected property will affect the weights of the next selection. For example the size of a star will greatly change the weight of the probabi

No Language

I worry there isn't words to describe the depth of my feelings. One four letter word isn't enough. It feels too small, too fragile, to contain such an ache. A strand that cuts through to the very core of my soul and anchors me to you. The breadth of comfort with you, the depth of my entwinement cannot be limited to such a word. Sitting at the center of my life, you ground me when the rigors of everyday life threaten to throw me asunder to the void. I am yours always, you are my forever.

Where's the Fun?

When Galliventurer was first conceived in the bowels of my brain it was during a particularly good session of playing No Man's Sky. I had just traversed several different planets finding old ruins and exploring as I went. The exhilaration I felt zipping around in space and then landing to explore - it was this feeling and the want to continue that on my phone, which persisted for days & weeks, was the main reason I even considered starting development on Galliventurer. No Man's Sky is possibly one of the most ambitious, fully realised games in history - yes it took them a while to get there, but I don't see Star Citizen releasing anytime soon - so it goes without saying Galliventurer will not be anywhere near that ambitious. A small glimmer of space flight amongst the stars with endless exploration. But then what? Subin Kim's freighter concept This has been a constant thorn in my frontal lobe since my first flight through the current build of the game. Sure you ca

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