“I can even count them,” Romanyuk says, “galaxies, nebulae, star clusters, stars (including normal stars, giants, white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes), and planetary objects (planets, moons, asteroids and comets).” So, in 2005, he began methodically populating his simulator with sets of data from astronomical catalogs. The universe may be vast, populated with innumerable bodies, but there aren’t all that many types of objects. The Milky Way alone has 100 billion planets with surfaces hidden from even our strongest telescopes. “You can model a planet off its general parameters like mass, radius, and temperature,” he says, but the topographies of most distant bodies are impossible to replicate because we have few clues to what they really look like. “The idea to use procedural generation came naturally,” Romanyuk tells Digital Trends. He could, however, develop algorithms to fill in the gaps and expand his to an incredible scale. Russian astronomer-cum-game developer Vladimir Romanyuk knew he could never write enough code to represent the entire universe.
The number of planets are, quite literally, countless.īut the universe is bigger than that. The newest algorithm generates 10 trillion galaxies and some sextillion stars.
