Is KSP the biggest game ever

[LadyAthena]

Umm guys... The game is called called Elite Dangerous. It encompasses our ENTIRE galaxy... You can fly to literally 300 BILLION different stars, and their planets, etc.

Soon All planets, (that's trillions of them btw) Will allow you to fly down into their atmospheres.

[Torham234]

Umm guys... The game is called called Elite Dangerous. It encompasses our ENTIRE galaxy... You can fly to literally 300 BILLION different stars, and their planets, etc.

Soon All planets, (that's trillions of them btw) Will allow you to fly down into their atmospheres.

You can do that right now in Space engine, for the ENTIRE observable universe. That is billions of galaxies, not just one galaxy. Like I said you cant really get any bigger than the entire observable universe.

[LethalDose]

I assume the OP was talking about largest game world, and not largest as in HD footprint, content, etc.

And claiming it's the largest game world is a bit of a cheat since KSP re-scales itself at various vessel speeds as part of it's "floating origin" system.

Edited April 21, 2015 by LethalDose

[anarkhon]

sorry but there is nothing in KSP so cant win,here is the boring proof (its really looks like this pic is taken from some commodore 64 game)

water looks the same about 3 years ago,1.0 dont change that,relly need some water mod

[KSK]

I'm not 100% sure but I thought in Frontier Elite you could technically fly from one star to another on conventional drives, though it would take a LOOOOOOOOOONG time even at full time warp. It was a long time ago that I played that game though so I may be misremembering.

Can't remember either but you definitely can't in Elite: Dangerous. It's a huge game map but it's not contiguous.

[Renegrade]

I'm not 100% sure but I thought in Frontier Elite you could technically fly from one star to another on conventional drives, though it would take a LOOOOOOOOOONG time even at full time warp. It was a long time ago that I played that game though so I may be misremembering.

You mean Frontier: Elite II. I don't think you can fly in between systems without the hyperdrive (I never tried, that would take a while even at c).

Still, in terms of scale, it's actually beating the pants off the other things listed here:

Space Engine:

- Requires immense system resources (FE2 ran well enough on 14mhz 680x0 machines with 1-2 megabytes of RAM and loading ONCE from a SINGLE double-density floppy, or an equivalent PC. No dynamic lagging er I mean loading BS either)

- It's bigger, but significantly smaller once you divide it's area covered by it's fat requirements

- SpaceEngine is not a game, otherwise it would be a trademark infringement on my own game. I may not have shaders, but I do have forty attorneys!

Elite Dangerous: Frontier 4

- seems to be basically the same as FE2 scalewise

- big fat requirements again

- I actually suspect that it doesn't exist, given how long it took to develop. Probably some sort of mass hallucination.

- also a massive disappointment with the focus on multiplayer. MMOs can get cancer and then die in a fire.

Minecraft

- is tiny compared to FE2

- again bloated requirements

- only advantage is that it has less areas of "nothing", although I question the interestingness of the same handful of blocks repeated over and over again (air, dirt, water, stone, mostly).

Frontier: Elite II actually simulates the full milky way galaxy with hundreds of billions of procedurally generated systems (plus I think about 50-100 hand-crafted ones) in full RSS scale. It was way, WAY ahead of it's time and very tightly coded. You can land and set up mining operations on planets, or scoop hydrogen from gas giants or stars (if suitably shielded), or trade or take on various missions etc.

[michaelsteele3]

Probably.

Minecraft is around 9000 times bigger than the Earth. Jool is around the size of the Earth in real life. Can you fit 9000 Jool's within the KSP solar system? Yes. Way more than that.

So as far as I know what is interactable n stuff, yes.

[Fel]

Minecraft is around 9000 times bigger than the Earth. Jool is around the size of the Earth in real life. Can you fit 9000 Jool's within the KSP solar system? Yes. Way more than that.

Meh, that's a lie. Minecraft is procedural; which only means that given an unlimited amount of memory and harddrive space it can be as big as you want it to be. Why not bring dwarffortress into the equation; limited by the same restrictions of memory and harddrive... or you could just skip the middle man and generate perlin noise and create a quick "terrain based" world.

So, given each block is 1 foot, and the radius of the earth in feet is actually 20,903,520 since I'm lazy and just searched for that.... just to describe the surface in terms of 1x1ft squares would cost 4994 Terrabytes.

To describe the volume would cost

~35e9 Terrabytes

I think the OP meant "the amount of land/sea you can explore, measured in square distance units", kinda like "The map of GTA V is 5x bigger than the map of GTA: San andreas" thing you see a lot in reviews and stuff.

I would argue though, that the reality of GTA: SA comes out better when compared to something like TES: Oblivion. Oblivion uses a completely procedurally generated map [dev notes] (excluding some of the handmade portions, mostly the towns)... but doesn't do anything with what it has. Oblivion looks great... but is ultimately very empty because it lacks actual creative content.

GTA: SA may have several procedural elements, but it is utterly crazy packed with content. Inside jokes and humor line the state left and right, everything from the billboards to the people walking by is "creative content."

I mean, if you want the "biggest game ever" and consider procedural to be fine, (http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Game:Alone_in_the_dark/Game/0/0/0) have that ;p a black box that is "procedurally generated" and claims to be an infinite world size even though it loops.

Edited April 21, 2015 by Fel

[Bill Phil]

Since Elite: Dangerous has stars that haven't even been explored yet, I'd say it's the biggest.

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Fel, Minecraft has a size limit. 30,000,000 in any direction it starts to only render.

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You mean Frontier: Elite II. I don't think you can fly in between systems without the hyperdrive (I never tried, that would take a while even at c).

Still, in terms of scale, it's actually beating the pants off the other things listed here:

Space Engine:

- Requires immense system resources (FE2 ran well enough on 14mhz 680x0 machines with 1-2 megabytes of RAM and loading ONCE from a SINGLE double-density floppy, or an equivalent PC. No dynamic lagging er I mean loading BS either)

- It's bigger, but significantly smaller once you divide it's area covered by it's fat requirements

- SpaceEngine is not a game, otherwise it would be a trademark infringement on my own game. I may not have shaders, but I do have forty attorneys!

Elite Dangerous: Frontier 4

- seems to be basically the same as FE2 scalewise

- big fat requirements again

- I actually suspect that it doesn't exist, given how long it took to develop. Probably some sort of mass hallucination.

- also a massive disappointment with the focus on multiplayer. MMOs can get cancer and then die in a fire.

Minecraft

- is tiny compared to FE2

- again bloated requirements

- only advantage is that it has less areas of "nothing", although I question the interestingness of the same handful of blocks repeated over and over again (air, dirt, water, stone, mostly).

Frontier: Elite II actually simulates the full milky way galaxy with hundreds of billions of procedurally generated systems (plus I think about 50-100 hand-crafted ones) in full RSS scale. It was way, WAY ahead of it's time and very tightly coded. You can land and set up mining operations on planets, or scoop hydrogen from gas giants or stars (if suitably shielded), or trade or take on various missions etc.

Elite Dangerous is Frontier 3...

Frontier also had less than the Galaxy. Dangerous simulates the Galaxy.

[Fel]

Fel, Minecraft has a size limit. 30,000,000 in any direction it starts to only render.

Minecraft has a hard limit on size only due to addressing issues. With infinite memory and infinite harddrive space it can be as big as you want it to be; heck, it's java! Just pass the burden on to sun to deal with allowing the program to address in infinites and deal with all the problems that converting code between architectures creates. (As well as changing their own virtual machine since it likely isn't designed for infinite addressing... but hey! Not my problem.)

Of course, if you don't actually change anything, procedural can easily be done with extremely light requirements. Perlin scales very very nicely, and creating a world that uses Perlin noise to constantly generate new terrain isn't impractical... just boring. But I was trying to make a point about procedural content, not the semantics of infinite space.

[Bill Phil]

Minecraft has a hard limit on size only due to addressing issues. With infinite memory and infinite harddrive space it can be as big as you want it to be; heck, it's java! Just pass the burden on to sun to deal with allowing the program to address in infinites and deal with all the problems that converting code between architectures creates. (As well as changing their own virtual machine since it likely isn't designed for infinite addressing... but hey! Not my problem.)

Of course, if you don't actually change anything, procedural can easily be done with extremely light requirements. Perlin scales very very nicely, and creating a world that uses Perlin noise to constantly generate new terrain isn't impractical... just boring. But I was trying to make a point about procedural content, not the semantics of infinite space.

Minecraft has a hard limit, though.

That's the problem, infinite memory and processing power and the like do not exist.

Perlin noise is quite a useful tool, but Simplex is better. Less operations.

[LethalDose]

If you're disqualifying games on the basis of procedural generation, then you need to DQ KSP as well; the craters on the Mun, and I suspect several other bodies, are procedurally generated.

[Moss]

In terms of detail/ granularity, my belief is that the upcoming No Man's Sky will be a strong contender for the biggest game ever.

[StrandedonEarth]

Is this only talking about continuous maps, or does requiring reload screens count? IIRC the dozen or so planets of Star Wars Galaxies were each fairly big, and then there were the space zones. But you couldn't go from one area to another without a load screen.

I was so annoyed when Sony Online Entertainment pulled an EA and utterly wrecked that game.

[NovaSilisko]

Perlin noise is quite a useful tool, but Simplex is better. Less operations.

I commonly see "Simplex Perlin" just abbreviated as "Perlin", so it's hard to tell what people are referring to sometimes. I know I end up guilty of that periodically.

[Fel]

If you're disqualifying games on the basis of procedural generation, then you need to DQ KSP as well; the craters on the Mun, and I suspect several other bodies, are procedurally generated.

Well, actually, I'm fairly certain that EVERYTHING planet wise, is procedurally generated with touch ups; the craters are only real time procedural generation. Then again, KSP only have 2 layers of procedural (simple height maps and rocks) which should count against it... but doesn't really change that you have procedurally generated worlds with very little on them.

Note... all I'm trying to say is that procedural generation CAN create a world of infinite size; it can create a galaxy of infinite size... but it doesn't work as well for creating new unique content. Eventually someone is going to have to create the content that the player "really wants" at which point all that land simply becomes scenery between the "content" and the player.

Edited April 21, 2015 by Fel

[Asharad]

Starmade is pretty huge, both in terms of the vastness of space, but also in terms of planet/asteroid surface/volume. Much larger than KSP.

That's what I was going to say. Starmade is huge.

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Ok then, what about the Universe Sandbox?

[UnionPacific1983WP]

Minecraft is the size of Neptune. So... yeah. KSP is bigger.

[Windspren]

Meh, that's a lie. Minecraft is procedural; which only means that given an unlimited amount of memory and harddrive space it can be as big as you want it to be. Why not bring dwarffortress into the equation; limited by the same restrictions of memory and harddrive... or you could just skip the middle man and generate perlin noise and create a quick "terrain based" world.

So, given each block is 1 foot, and the radius of the earth in feet is actually 20,903,520 since I'm lazy and just searched for that.... just to describe the surface in terms of 1x1ft squares would cost 4994 Terrabytes.

To describe the volume would cost

~35e9 Terrabytes

I would argue though, that the reality of GTA: SA comes out better when compared to something like TES: Oblivion. Oblivion uses a completely procedurally generated map [dev notes] (excluding some of the handmade portions, mostly the towns)... but doesn't do anything with what it has. Oblivion looks great... but is ultimately very empty because it lacks actual creative content.

GTA: SA may have several procedural elements, but it is utterly crazy packed with content. Inside jokes and humor line the state left and right, everything from the billboards to the people walking by is "creative content."

I mean, if you want the "biggest game ever" and consider procedural to be fine, (http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Game:Alone_in_the_dark/Game/0/0/0) have that ;p a black box that is "procedurally generated" and claims to be an infinite world size even though it loops.

First of all, 1 block is 1 meter. Second of all, in 1.8 they implemented a world border at 30,000,000 blocks that you can't pass.

[problemecium]

I don't think loops count here, so Alone in the Dark is out.

Minecraft isn't infinitely large. Even if you hacked out the world border code, the game breaks down after a few billion blocks at most - and I don't mean that lightly. First the terrain generator breaks; then the collision boxes break so you fall through the world unless you're able to fly; farther out, the renderer and control inputs cease functioning and you can't play the game at all, even if it manages not to crash altogether.

It's been harped on, but I'll cast my affirmations that A: EVE Online has the largest hard-coded game world as far as I know, and the largest playable space of any "finished" game; and B: Space Engine takes the real cake here, if procedural worlds count, as every planet and star has a fully generated, explorable surface with granularity down to less than one meter, and the game contains billions of planets in each of its billions of full-size galaxies, extending throughout a space larger than the visible universe and possibly larger than the entire universe.

[Fel]

First of all, 1 block is 1 meter. Second of all, in 1.8 they implemented a world border at 30,000,000 blocks that you can't pass.

So, do you routinely walk up 1 meter high stairs? Or are you 4 meters tall? Whomever says it is 1 meter is taking serious artistic license with the sizes.

Minecraft isn't infinitely large. Even if you hacked out the world border code, the game breaks down after a few billion blocks at most - and I don't mean that lightly. First the terrain generator breaks; then the collision boxes break so you fall through the world unless you're able to fly; farther out, the renderer and control inputs cease functioning and you can't play the game at all, even if it manages not to crash altogether.

Yeah, Java sucks... I don't know why people are hung up on that, I was trying to make a point about how procedural generation is an utterly lame way of classifying world size. So you just past the umpteenth mountain, size without content is meaningless. Since procedural is little more than a looped set of instructions and some random data, pointing out the extreme of a game that just loops a black screen was meant to convey the absurdity here.

Edited April 22, 2015 by Fel

[Nobody_1707]

Blocks in Minecraft are officially 1 meter cubes, according to Mojang (who should know) and Minecraft Steve is a little less than two meters tall.