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by edg-l 1541 days ago
If you have ever played Elite Dangerous, you will be unimpressed by this.

The stellar forge (which is a system used to generate the roughly 400 billion star systems which are present in the 1:1 scale Milky Way galaxy in Elite Dangerous) is actually something incredible: https://elite-dangerous.fandom.com/wiki/Stellar_Forge

If you ever played the game and opened the map and zoomed out you know what I mean (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpZZnrwRyME).

5 comments

If you have ever played Elite Dangerous, you will be unimpressed by this.

I've played Elite Dangerous, and I'm still impressed by this ... because this runs in a browser, at 60fps on my Macbook, with a cold start time of about 8s (and half of that is streaming in a 3MB JSON file of all the star data). That is quite impressive.

Agreed, it work impressively well on my very average specs office laptop. It doesn't have any GPU yet it even stayed quiet.
As far as I understand from your first link, the Stellar Forge is a system used to generate data, not display it. It generates fantasy/hypothetical star systems, it's not about displaying efficiently existing data.

Looking at your second link, the youtube video doesn't show something more impressive than the submission. At 00:10, the stars need time to load up, though it's nice that they load gradually rather than displaying a "loading" screen/message. At 00:20 you can see the density of the stars is quite sparse, the screen is mostly black, and stars seem to appear only once you stop dragging. Maybe it's an issue with the video bitrate, but it's your link and you decided 720p video is good enough to show the alleged superiority of that system. At roughly 00:30-00:40, you can see the galaxy view doesn't display ~100k stars, it displays some kind of textures of them, and that's why during the zoom in/out everything get blurred to hide that fact. At 00:40-00:50 you see stars suddenly appearing multiple times after zooming in and dragging view. At 1:30 you can see very clearly the stars are loaded in cube chunks, which rules out their sudden appearance to be an issue with low bitrate. At 02:00 you can see a loading message and a switch to a symbolic view of a star system, rather than a smooth transition to a realistic view of that star system.

So I find the submission quite impressive, and the Elite Dangerous star view less, but still also impressive.

I play ED and this is pretty impressive.

It's built in three.js and comes in at about 3MB running in a browser sandbox.

The world isn't either/or. Both can be impressive.

Space Engine also does something similar but takes it one level above, it has billions of galaxies too.
I spent a lot of time in that game exploring the galaxy before I discovered a system that nobody had discovered before. Pretty fun!
The community is great too. There is a group of people dedicated to rescuing players who ran out of fuel in deep space. It's impressive to me just how altruistic people can be.

A shame the company ended console support.