Random Planets and Settings

[Miro Beero]

Would be cool to be able to start up a new game, but specify that all planets are random and all planet characteristics are random.

Everything is an 'unknown' when visiting a planet for the first time.

I'm not sure how hard that would be to implement.

[vexx32]

The planets are, to a degree, procedurally generated. In order for something like this to be feasible, you have to set up a system that can come up with a decently plausible planet... every time. There's some experimentation currently going on with an API for planet building, and some of the results are insane. Like... porcupine-planet-insane. You'd need to find a way to have such a restricted randomness that you get feasible-looking planets every single time. Not an easy thing to manage.

[lajoswinkler]

I'm not really ok with that. Constant things become subcultural icons in the gaming community.

Look at Minecraft - every world is unique, so people resort to servers and constant maps. Planets are like fixed points (pun not intended) in the KSP universe.

[vexx32]

Oh, aye. Thing is, though, if they do work on this kind of thing, it doesn't have to be random. They could create an entire galaxy procedurally, just having the same starting seed values, and then everyone has the same planets... but there'd be an awful lot of them. Of course, if you try to generate an entire damn galaxy on first load or something, it'll take hours to load first time. But yeah, it's possible. It'd take up a ton of hard drive space, too...

[lajoswinkler]

Felipe Falange said this:

Do you have plans to add more solar systems, or even randomly generated solar systems?

Falange: That’s something we get a lot, and it’s actually something that I’m not very particularly [interested] about implementing. It’s not that can’tâ€â€we could, theoretically. But I think that KSP being a game where you can build your own spacecraft, play the game in your own way, and have essentially a completely different experience from everyone else… the only thing tying these experiences together is that the universe is the same. So if we were to add procedurally generated planets outside the current solar system, you would end up with places and destinations that don’t exist for anyone else. And then it would fail in terms of you being able to relate to someone else’s experience. You wouldn’t be able to say, “Hey guys, I landed on Duna, this was really cool!†And everyone knows what Duna is and what it stands for. Instead, you’d get, “Hey guys, I found this planet, it looks kinda like this.†And people would be like, “Oh... I’ve got completely different planets on mine.â€Â

(http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/12/23/kerbal-space-program-dev-on-random-solar-systems-the-joy-of-failure-and-the-cult-of-steam/?ns_campaign=article-feed&ns_mchannel=ref&ns_source=steam&ns_linkname=0&ns_fee=0)

I completely agree with him.