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Originally Posted by Drauk  I bet they used controlled random generator for that. Basically instead of storing all the data about planet, you just store several seeds for RNG per planet. |
Per some Wiki research, I think this is the case. They didn't store an entire galaxy of pre-made planets on a handful of floppies; they stored the code for random planet and resource generation on a handful of floppies. Still very impressive, and in some ways even more impressive. Certainly more clever.
This is a bit of a tangent, but often I find myself thinking that modern-day game developers could really use a few lessons from the past. Learn to do more with fewer resources. Don't make every game some massive, 5-gig behemoth of code, files, etc. It seems that, every year, games get bigger and bigger. I realize most of this has to do with increasing amounts of video, audio, and graphics resources -- so perhaps it can't be helped. But I also get the feeling that not every game
needs that much video. I'd gladly take Civ 4 without the cool intro movies. I'd be happy with GalCiv2 with fewer cutscenes. Not every game needs to be a "movie."
The game industry is presently obsessed with becoming the new Hollywood, and with making "movies" out of their games (literally and figuratively), so this trend is probably not going away any time soon. But it gets annoying every now and then. Games aren't movies. Games are a unique medium that should be celebrated in its own right and not squeezed into the ill-fitting shoes of a different medium altogether.