Topic: Size of the Spore Galaxy (Warning, thar be math ahead)

[mrodgers]

I'm pretty sure there will be multiple galaxies, as some people have mentioned, as it's all (AFAIK) procedurally generated. It's not like someone has to sit and create all these. Algorithms are the business.

We have been told there will be one galaxy and millions of stars and planets.  Do you know how big one galaxy really is?  If the game one was a very small percentage the size of a real one you would never be able to see everything.  I wouldn't worry about running out of interesting stuff to see.

[Tonjevic]

Will Wright said something about the galaxy originally having a few hundred planets in his talk at GDC this year. He the went on to say that wasn't enough.

[Calqhoon]

I'm pretty sure there will be multiple galaxies, as some people have mentioned, as it's all (AFAIK) procedurally generated. It's not like someone has to sit and create all these. Algorithms are the business.

We have been told there will be one galaxy and millions of stars and planets.  Do you know how big one galaxy really is?  If the game one was a very small percentage the size of a real one you would never be able to see everything.  I wouldn't worry about running out of interesting stuff to see.

Yeah, but I'm sure there were other galaxies in the background on the '04 GDC demo. Maybe you'll be able to travel to them, maybe not.

And no, I don't know how big galaxies are. Other than "mind bogglingly huge", that is.

[starshard0]

Since there are over 100,000 stars in just one galaxy, I don't think we'd need to visit other galaxies. Besides, Will Wright said that there was just the one in his Gaming Steve interview. I think it was the second one.

[Calqhoon]

Since there are over 100,000 stars in just one galaxy, I don't think we'd need to visit other galaxies. Besides, Will Wright said that there was just the one in his Gaming Steve interview. I think it was the second one.

Ah ok, sorry. It's just I've heard it referred to often as a "multiverse". I guess it's just a galaxy. Still, that's a lot.

[Daxx]

http://www.mwscomp.com/sounds/mp3/galaxy.mp3

[Lu Yan]

Since there are over 100,000 stars in just one galaxy, I don't think we'd need to visit other galaxies. Besides, Will Wright said that there was just the one in his Gaming Steve interview. I think it was the second one.

Yep, that was a pretty definite no. Besides, the distances of the closest galaxies are gigantic. Andromeda is 2 million light years away. If this dash - (1mm, lets say) was a light year, and you were to walk from here to Andromeda, you'd have to walk 2.5 Kilometers, and the Milky way in this picture is only about 80-100 Meters in Diameter, while the Andromeda is 220 meters in Diameter. The Sun in this picture would be about the size of a medium sized atom (1.47e-11 meters). Earth may as well be a quantum singularity in the Big Picture of just the local Group.

Oh, and there are 100,000,000,000 stars in the Milky way; 200,000,000,000 stars in Andromeda. The Spore galaxy would be a pipsqueak, even compared to the small dwarf galaxies whose star counts still range in the millions to billions.

[Hydromancerx]

http://www.mwscomp.com/sounds/mp3/galaxy.mp3

That's one of my favorite songs

[Mcilroy]

Fun with calculators .. if the Spore Galaxy had only 100,000 soler systems and you decided to only spend 5 minutes exoloring each one it would take nearly 2 years spending 16 hours a day doing nothing but jumping from soler system to soler system . Now minus work,kids,school or what ever ..maybe you could spend maximum average 6 hours a day in spore . Now add the fact that you will probebly want to spend at least 15-30 ( so lets say 20 ) minutes exploring each soler system and the species within . This does not include any cool things like teraformimg or making first contact with other species or war. It would take nearly 4 years spending 360 days a year doing nothing but playing spore to explore the whole 100,000 systems ( There will potentially be millions since they are procedurally generated ) . I don't think anybody needs to worry about running out of systems to explore ...lol 

[slugfly]

http://www.mwscomp.com/sounds/mp3/galaxy.mp3

This was my favorite part of "The Meaning of Life" which was one of my favorite of the Python movies    Thanks a million for the link.

"and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space cuz there's bugger all down here on Earth"

[Calqhoon]

Yeah, great song, great film.

[CommunistHamster]

There's a reputable theory that the very end of the universe is lined with a marshmallow barrier which makes it impossible to go any further.

Well, since spacetime is curved, if you pointed your ship at the "edge" of the universe and put the pedal to the metal, eventually you would simply end up where you started without reaching the edge of the universe. Add to this the fact that the edge of the universe is expanding at roughly c and it is impossible to get to the edge. Plus, the devs (both of Spore and RL) have probably coded an invisible wall at the edge that you can't get through without h4xxing.

[slugfly]

well...  it is just marshmellow, so I suppose if you could hold your breath through the lack of oxygen you could eat your way through...

[Calqhoon]

well...  it is just marshmellow, so I suppose if you could hold your breath through the lack of oxygen you could eat your way through...

And survive being depressurized!

Funny thing actually; in a vacuum, marshmallows expand much bigger than their original size, so if you put mini marshmallows in one of those vacuum-pump tupperware things, they look pretty big.

[Tantalus]

Holding your breath would be disasterous, far better to breathe out and hope your lungs don't get sucked out.