this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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No Man’s Sky update adds ‘trillions’ of planets (www.theverge.com)
submitted 1 day ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 6 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] birbs@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

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:

  1. Amount of water overall (oceans and lakes)
  2. Amount of mountains
  3. Amount of Forrest on the land
  4. Amount of life forms
  5. Temperature
  6. Amount of moons/rings
  7. Size
  8. Amount of rivers
  9. Whether the landmass is one big continent or multiple small islands
  10. Amount of volcanoes
  11. Amount of caves
  12. Amount of iron (or any other resource)

Congrats, if you now add a does the planet rotate toggle you've created trillions of planets.