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

This is my second, improved solution. The player will start out in a randomly generated solar system. Each system is connected to between 1 and 4 other systems. Think of them as north, south, east and west systems. If a player were to move through the north jumpgate, he will be taken to a system whose seed is one more than the system before. If he goes south, the seed for that system will be one less. 2+ and 2- for east and west respectively. The distances to those systems (in parsecs or lightyears or whatever) are calculated with the systems' seed and the direction from which you are arriving. This way, the size of the galaxy is only limited by the max and min of the number used to hold the seeds.

Warp holes to go to other galaxies will be placed a certain distance from the starting system. The next galaxy will just be like a continuation of this galaxy in that the seed numbers will be incremented in the same way and that the system that is on the other end of the galactic warp hole will just be an "east" or a "north" connection from the starting system.

By the way, this use of incrementing seeds leads to a web, unlike the above solution. Also, you can see that this method uses quadrilaterals while the above solution used hexagons, which made it impossible to create a web.

Of course, all of this is based on the assumption that all of the seeds will generate a random sequence of numbers that is different from any other sequence. This makes it so that each system is unique.