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

If you really want to return to a fixed state, i don't think procedural generation from a single value is the right way to go.

Let's assume, you have a fixed grid of 256x256 systems in each plane and 16 planes in the universe. Each plane has up to 512 trading stations and up to 8 links to other planes. All trading stations and links are on a fixed position. Your initial seed value has to be at least 2^76 to encode all possible universes. Add some more objects (planets, ships,...) and the number grows exponentially.

Edit: It's a bit less if you don't allow more than one trading station or link in each system. I'd use some permanent storage, maybe an embedded database like Firebird or sqlite. Incidentally i'm currently developing such a game.