Discovery Scanner 1 - Creating a Galaxy with Dr Anthony Ross 

I’m very fond of behind-the-scenes looks at how generative systems work. Because of their nature, it can be hard to make definitive statements about aspects that aren’t clearly showing their structure.

So I’m quite happy that the Frontier Developments team have started doing livestreams where they talk about how the game works, particularly server-side things that you can’t observe directly in the game. Like how the galaxy generator works.

While there have been dozens of attempts to simulate galaxies (going right back to Frontier: Elite) it is harder than it looks. The sheer scale of the generator poses some surprising issues getting the math to work. To say nothing about making it look good.

The generator in Elite: Dangerous goes way beyond the rolling-on-tables approach that the original Elite pioneered. While I’m aware of some other attempts to simulate planetary formation, this is the only one I know of that made it into a finished game. (Other than, I suppose, Universe Sandbox.)

The video is a great behind-the-scenes glimpse at how the different systems interact to create a history and context for the stars, and then use that history to directly influence the planets that get created. Which is how the generator is able to come up with so many physically plausible but entirely surprising star systems.

I doubt that a human, trying to implement an expert system for generating planets would come up with quite as many interesting features in these combinations. Double-planet pairs, complex ballets of multi-star systems, moons with orbits measured in minutes: there are a lot of functional-according-to-the-simulation things floating out in space that a designer would have tossed as implausible.

That’s one of the advantages of using a simulation or something like a neural net to generate to a spec: you have the advantage of the machine being willing to try off-the-wall creative ideas without caring if they sound plausible, as long as they fall inside the constraints. The trick is to specify the metric you actually want to measure.

Things like the Elite: Dangerous galaxy generator demonstrate how the computer can be an effective creative partner. While it can be very powerful to directly author the probabilities in a generator for a specific rhetorical end, it can be equally powerful to let go of the exact shape of the generation and let it settle in to a shape that the computer finds for you.