CBJ wrote:Some of you seem to be forgetting that a key feature of the game is that the whole universe goes on existing, with ships flying around doing what they do and stations manufacturing things the whole time you're playing. We are very careful to minimise the performance impact of far-away objects when you are not nearby, but they still have an overhead and they can't just sit idly on your hard disk. There are therefore limits to how big the game universe can be, and more importantly how much it can contain, regardless of how the map is generated or designed.
Procedural generation is not a magic solution to this; all it does is provide a way of randomising things, albeit in a semi-predictable manner. As has already been stated, we have chosen not to do this with the map itself, because we want to exercise control over the design of the structure of game universe. We are, however, generating some of the content of that space in a manner that would probably be considered "procedural" in the sense that people are using the term.
While not a solution (in my suggestion/example, anyway) it does make things easier in that UFJD-style sectors can be generated 'on demand', only if and when the player chooses to fly there, so there is initially zero overhead. And since they're unpopulated/deep space kind of locations, there won't be a lot of active assets or NPC traffic going on to keep track of once you leave. So the significant impact on the simulation would largely be limited to those the player currently has ships or bases in, or has encountered enemy forces in and chosen to leave.
It's still plausible that this might bog things down to a game-breaking point if the player expands the size of the universe by generating a ton of them and filling them up with assets (or there's a way to draw NPC traffic there by building stations, etc.) but I think that's the same situation as the old X3 complexes that could kill entire sectors or the game save entirely by growing out of hand.
At any rate, this is very much a 'would be nice to have someday' feature, I'd rather X4 released in a more complete and bug-free state before even thinking about implementing anything like this.
