500 million unique stars in a couple of hundred lines of code. David Braben did it in the early 90's, and I thought to try my hand at it, too.
Starmap zoomed up on a star sector:
The names of the stars are pseudo-randomly generated out of three syllables glued together. I think I accidentally invented a whole new language.
Zooming out just a little bit...:
A bit more...:
When zoomed out far enough, a galaxy image overlay kicks in with the individual star generator disabled:
One quarter of the entire galaxy:
The starfield density variations are based on a 1024x1024 grayscale image of a real galaxy, NGC 5457, taken by the Hubble space telescope. The algorithm loads and parses the actual image pixel-by-pixel, and the amount of stars generated in any area depends on the brightness of a pixel. Each pixel represents an area of 8x8 star sectors (one of which being highlighted green in the screenshots), so the entire galaxy has some ~67 million star sectors, each having 0 to 63 stars.
Every individual star seen in the screenshots are created on-the-fly while scrolling and zooming the starmap. Scrolling is quite fast even with tens of thousands of generated star blips on the screen.
Here's a small stripped-down Win32 demo of Ananta, featuring only the scrollable starmap and galaxy generator. Everything else in the game has been disabled for the purposes of this demo. Please give it a spin! :)
http://ananta.googlecode.com/files/ananta_procedural_universe_demo_20080518_win32_bin.zip
Starmap zoomed up on a star sector:
The names of the stars are pseudo-randomly generated out of three syllables glued together. I think I accidentally invented a whole new language.
Zooming out just a little bit...:
A bit more...:
When zoomed out far enough, a galaxy image overlay kicks in with the individual star generator disabled:
One quarter of the entire galaxy:
The starfield density variations are based on a 1024x1024 grayscale image of a real galaxy, NGC 5457, taken by the Hubble space telescope. The algorithm loads and parses the actual image pixel-by-pixel, and the amount of stars generated in any area depends on the brightness of a pixel. Each pixel represents an area of 8x8 star sectors (one of which being highlighted green in the screenshots), so the entire galaxy has some ~67 million star sectors, each having 0 to 63 stars.
Every individual star seen in the screenshots are created on-the-fly while scrolling and zooming the starmap. Scrolling is quite fast even with tens of thousands of generated star blips on the screen.
Here's a small stripped-down Win32 demo of Ananta, featuring only the scrollable starmap and galaxy generator. Everything else in the game has been disabled for the purposes of this demo. Please give it a spin! :)
http://ananta.googlecode.com/files/ananta_procedural_universe_demo_20080518_win32_bin.zip