While I do want the Galliventurer universe to be procedurally & randomly generated, I don’t want it to be truly random. There needs to be a modicum of probability involved. Some weighting so that some things are rarer than others. After all we can have too many diamond covered planets or uranium based suns – as you can see I haven’t actually started thinking too much about the composition of the planets, stars, etc.
Keeping this probability based random selection in mind, I’m going to be using a dynamically weighted series of arrays to randomly select properties for entities in the Galliventurer universe. Using something very similar to (or based on) this article by Michael Czechowski https://observablehq.com/@nextlevelshit/rejection-sampling-in-javascript. The main bit of complexity here will be the values of a randomly selected property will affect the weights of the next selection. For example the size of a star will greatly change the weight of the probabilities for the temperature (which determines it’s colour). Another example would be a star that is randomly selected to be large, will greatly skew the weights to have more orbiting planetary bodies.
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Note to self – try to make the next post not be publish near midnight 🤦♂️🥃
[…] will be based on a few lists of properties and randomly matched together (see other post here about that). This will undoubtedly produce some things that probably won’t be strictly […]