Hard to convey how effective Starflight’s game design was within the limits of the day.

The embedding of the story within what was almost entirely free-form exploration & adventure across a huge galaxy was masterful.

You could feel how close the creators were to the edge of what was possible with the save game system: Basically, the disk was a memory image. As you played the game would rewrite itself, so if you got stuck there was no “reset”. The documentation was emphatic: Only play with a copy of the original disk!!

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reactordev 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Everyone goes on about Elite, but Elite was just a sandbox… (an amazing sandbox)

This was crazy! World gen is hard. Proc world gen is NP hard. Story driven proc world gen with persistence in 1986 was Kaku level brilliance.

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scandox 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I loved Starlight but I'm not sure it was procedural world generation. I mean there was a map of stars printed with the game so they weren't changing. There was a small bit of variation in terms of what one found on planets and so on...the key was it felt like an open world because it was big enough and there was nothing stopping you from doing what you liked and when (except resources).

	▲	jhbadger 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It was procedural at least in the sense that you couldn't store the data for all the planets in memory (or even store it on disk) on the 1980s systems it ran on. So you needed a way to generate the data on the fly.
	▲	reactordev 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		yeah but you're dismissing the fact that this was just a pregen table of data back then. They made a map based on that, sure, but from that table came... everything else and you can't store all that data on floppy. Similar techniques apply today. Pregen like 100,000 stars. Give them names and locations in the galaxy, treat them as your "locations of interest" with a seed. The rest can just be another cloud of particles with no interest and if the player visits, you can RNG whatever based on the seed. No two systems can share a seed. They can, however, share a branch.
	▲	slongfield 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Procedural generation can use a fixed seed, it's not too uncommon. For instance, Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall's map was procedurally generated, but is the same for every player.
	▲	hinkley 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		They bragged about it being procedural in interviews. What I was never clear on was the degree of cherry picking they did. There were 800 worlds on something like nine disks, each unique and peppered with minerals and artifacts.

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a1r 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

O cool! This approach was used in WASTELAND too, on four floppies (the progenitor of the FALLOUT series).