Re: Could someone explain:
Does anyone recall Frontier: Elite II? That came on 2x 1meg floppies and the map size on there was ridiculous. There were (literally) millions and millions of systems.
Once I jammed my cursor keys down on the system map and went away for a while. When I got back it had reached grid -1124, 295 or something, and it had still only moved a few pixels on the (full screen) galactic map. To put that to scale, each grid reference had maybe half a dozen 3D systems in. Only the nearest few hundred grid references actually stored system information other than the word "unexplored" but the amount of information was mind blowing.
When I reloaded the game another time and checked back, though, the system data was exactly the same (even at -1124, 295), so if it was generating the systems dynamically, it wasn't doing it randomly. It *must* have been generated on the fly by some kind of fractal routine. Veeeery clever. Shame the rest of the game was so buggy.
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"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"Uh, I think so Brain, but how are we gonna teach a goat to dance with flippers on? "
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