Mathematical question: procedural generation of a galaxy

Question

I\'m going to make a space/trading/combat game that is completely procedurally generated. But, I know that storing all of the details of the whole galaxy in memory is unfeas

Answer 1

I can vaguely recall this being done before. During the early 90's fractals were all the rage and I remember one company offering worlds to game programmers. The had created a whole infinite universe full of galaxies with suns and planets, event down to the valleys and textures of places on the planets. They were offering to find suitable virtual real estate to game developers. The game developers would get the software to render and use this, together with the exact coordinates to their propery in this fractal universe.

I've googled for a few minutes for "fractal game world planet universe" and such, but haven't found them. It might have been Pandromeda, but I can't quite remember.

You should study fractals for this idea. All you need is a continous field of numbers that you can recreate from a seed and then present those numbers as stars, planets and satellites with different properties.