Space Courier: Now with more Anaxides

I just made that name up.

The space courier "game" now populates the galaxy with a sampling of 100 planets, drawn from a list of... I forget now, something around 1570 potential systems. There's one big file that associates a name with a planet color - I had been thinking that I might want to have a lot more specific information about a planet, but I think just saying that Tattooine is a yellow planet, and Barsoom is red is sufficient. Given that, I should probably just make a big list of yellow planets, red planets, and so on.

I borrowed some names from familiar fiction, which feels like light trespass, but I'm not investing a lot of gameplay in the fact that planet #90 is named, let's say, Gelidus. If somebody wanted to send me a cease-and-desist, I'd be OK with renaming it. Gallidous, maybe.

But, to thin out the use of potentially legally uncomfortable use of trademarked names, I looked for other proper nouns - I recalled hearing about a difficult to pronounce name applied to a planetary body outside Pluto's orbit. That sketchy description didn't immediately yield to my Google search attempts, but with persistence, I found that the name I was looking for was "Quaoar". Oh, and starting there, "Sedna" is also a perfectly good name. Hm, so is "Palomar", though it doesn't sound so entirely other-worldly. But cultures name stuff after scientists, so, sure.

And, from there, it was a short leap to looking at the names of Greek gods on Wikipedia, and I had a list of over 1500 planet names before I clicked on the link to see also "List of minor Greek deities".

Every now and then, I'd insert a name that came from my own imagination, often a variation on a name I was taking from Greek myth. "Chicocrates", for example, came to mind when I was entering "Hippocrates". And, from there, "Harpocrates" and "Grouchocrates". Humor is hard.

So, if you play the game today, you can fly in a galaxy of 100 planets, pulled from my list of 1500 names. It seems like I ought to be able to be smarter and populate sectors of space from my list of planets in such a way that the player can fly from sector to sector, and only have a few sectors in memory (one most of the time, but up to four near a corner) at a time. Maybe, if I get procedural name generation working, the player could fly for very long distances (limited by the precision of an IEEE floating point number) without running out of universe. That'd be something.

Brainstorming Feature Level 1 (1500+ planets):
Shuffle the list of planets, based on a random number seed. Partition the planets into sublists of 100 each, which will be used to populate "sectors". Within a sector, position the 100 planets based on a seeded value. Place the sector tiles together in an easily-reconstructed fashion (a square grid would be easy, or maybe a hex grid, if I was feeling fancy). With care, it would be possible to create a single sector without building any of its neighbors, thus keeping memory use low.

Brainstorming Feature Level 2 ( many, many, more planets):
As above, but use procedural name generation (also here) so that the planet names aren't limited to my imagination (or my ability to crawl Wikipedia). Populate a sector with planets seeded by the coordinates of the sector and a single universe constant.

In any case, my notes for keeping track of trades and economic data seem like they're sufficient to provide "local history", to give the player's actions an impact on the world (if you do a tight trading loop between adjacent systems, you'll quickly expend the goods available for trading).

Having a vast universe to explore is interesting, but before long, I'll need to actually allow the player to buy and sell stuff. That's next.