Knowing how inflexible and impersonal bureaucracies end up working in the long run, you just know that there will be a star somewhere that is just on the very edge of of a sub-sub-cube with a planet that while orbiting flies in and out of that cube's coordinates for part of its orbital rotation, and so the galactic mail zipcodes for the inhabitants of that planet have to be changed twice a year and noone in the Great Galactic Administration can ever find the time to stretch the edges of that sub-sub-cube just a little bit to fix the situation.
wait, so when you mail something to this planet do you send it to the address it is at when you are mailing the package or where the planet will be when the package arrives?
It gets funny when you introduce movement and time, do you rename the star once it passes into a different cubit? Do you just always refer to them as coordinate + year, and on your delivery try to calculate back where it might have gone and hope nothing kicked it into a different orbit? And whose time would you base it on? Space travel gets so complicated
Considering the Milky Way galaxy (most galaxies I suppose) are not static and star positions are not fixed, even relative to each other - stars might drift into another quadrant. Renaming might work, since it's not a real name, but people living there might object.
Yeah i think this system works because its all relative to a point. If you just had X Y Z cords for where you were then they would need to be updated constantly and would need to be tracked in some way thats not static.
I think the thing I like most with this. Is how the system also gives you a free out of having to actually name all of it with lore. Everything is a letter sequence and only gets it's name once it's been explored/ contact has been made. Gives incentive for explorers to go out and be able to name things.
I love this idea so much! I did the math, and if there are 8,000 cuboids per side, the longest edge would be about 12.5 light years across. It's a little insane just how big the Milky Way alone is. If we do one more division of 20, each cell becomes 0.625 light-years across, or about 6 trillion kilometers. Since I was already doing it, the central bulge is about 10,000 light years in diameter (conveniently 10 times less than the length of the entire galaxy), the cuboids would be 1.25 light-years tall (or with another division of 20, 0.0625 light-years / 591 billion km).
Quite nice, watching a video of Tim pulling a video topic out of his idea book, instead of some youtubers pulling ideas out of their [something else]...
This is a fun idea, I can think of so many ways to break it in interesting ways to explore in a game! - How do you handle "planets" like Pluto, that swap distance from their sun with another planet? Do the inhabitants go to war over the naming rights? Maybe the names don't change, but they just take advantage of people showing up to the wrong planet during the times their position doesn't match their names? - Local wars over which planet in a binary gets the "-1" designation? - Some jerk "naming" a black hole and people showing up thinking it's a star system. Maybe it's been this way long enough that the name sticks but people just have to remember "Oh Kapstunnamyl is a black hole, don't go there". Lots of room to have fun there, with the bonus of in most cases you just have a good way to name your stuff.
It would have to be a galactic Atlas that maintained based on multiple local authorities. And probably renames would not happen unless something was destroyed or created.
Back in 1990's I did Space Strategy game for 3 years, where you explore the universe. I tried to do it with C++, but doing something in "galactic scale", I had so much problems with large variables, conversions and floatingpoints in current C++ version, so I decided to do the whole thing in Pascal. Nowadays it is not a problem, and I am back in C++ with Unreal.
I love this idea! I'm going to give it a try in naming sectors of a Banks-ian orbital. Mostly because I have a terrible time naming locations in things I create and I think this will help me generate something I can brainstorm from. So many names for stuff would rise out of people simplifying or mashing stuff together. The quickest example I can think of is "General/Governmental Purpose" for vehicles becoming "GP" becoming "Jeep".
Astronomers use spherical coordinates (3-tuple of 1 distance and 2 angles) for the real world galactic coordinate system, although the origin is the sun and not the galaxy center. You could turn a galactic center-version into a naming system by rounding and writing the angles as consonants and adding on the distance as a suffix (e.g. BGLCHJ-392 for (392.214, 48.0293°, 156.333°). Of course, if this was put into a game it would be arcane to a layperson, which is why your cartesian system is better, even if it doesn't translate to exact coordinates.
Don't forget, you can label singular/binary/trinary star systems with asterisks. But yea, this is a really cool system! Makes naming (and finding) things easier and readable.
You could use The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to widen the palette of sounds. Recently been playing around with using a relational map of Wiktionary entries for how close words are in concept or usage frequency together - which can create "gradients" of concepts through the octtree. The reasoning was that we tend to name things in clusters of related concepts like deities which themselves are related to more foundational aspects of nature or social constructs.
Ok so it sounds like what is needed is a 'locality sensitive hashing algorithm' my initial thought would be to use a hilbert curve; but there might be something that spirals better. Honestly since galaxies can have multiple formations it might be better to let the center of the universe or 'most massive point' be able to set the hashing algorithm for its points. So starting at the 'center of the universe' you draw a space filling curve that intersects all super massive black holes (ie galaxies) and other errant objects. all objects orbiting these masses (ie that will complete a full revolution based on their current trajectory) will be excluded from the 'center of the universe' list. each object in the list (ie super massive black holes and such) will define a space filling curve that most accurately represents their revolving objects (which excludes smaller objects that are rotating around other objects) Basically you sort objects based on what they are orbiting and let the parent object define the best algorithm to represent where their children are. In order to respect cultures and sentient civilizations you allow for exceptions to naming based on whatever sentient species can file a complaint with the Intergalactic Galactic Cartographers Society. This way you can easily search for sentient planets by also searching for exceptions to the naming convention.
Numbers for planets and lower case for moons sounds like Wayne Barlowe's Expedition. In that Darwin was the name of the system, Darwin A and Darwin B were the binary stars, and Darwin IV was the planet (out of 6) that supported life. The discovery of alien life is what led to the system being named after Charles Darwin
I'd rather use angular coordinates than a grid, seen as galaxies are round, but it's a good idea. I like that, since stars that are close together share some of their first consonants, you can say stuff like "the DaMoCa Sector" and intutitively convey exactly which region of space you're referring to.
I can't imagine all the ways how hilarious the system based on the English pronunciation can be. - Honey, are you sure we are going to the right coordinates? We're drifting through this gas cloud for 2 weeks already - Yeah, ain't we going to Gownkavikpelt to visit your cousin? - Darling, it's Gowncaviqpelt.
I did something similar once - but I made several overlapping systems that had different "sounds" so that different cultures had their own names for star systems, and which was used depended on the political control (which didn't change). I also explored the way that nearby stars had similar names due to sharing common coordinates, and made that explicit by making names like "oofarnu in the blarfh sector".
You can have a planet that orbits two stars. Its called a restricted three body system. Basically 3 bodies of equal mass can't realistically orbit eachother for very long, however with some circumstances meet you can have two bodies orbit eachother and then generally a 3rd body that is small and far away can orbit both of them and be stable. You see this in starwars and it's totally physically possible for that to be true. Also makes sense why the place is just a desert, hard for things to grow with no water.
Sensible system but i would go with polar coordinates instead of Cartesian. So divide the galaxy by radius is to 20 cylinders, name them form b in core to z in periphery, then divide each cylinder in to 20 angular slices named form b to z. Repeat to process on each slice to get subdivisions. To improve stability of names as starts orbit the galaxy each main cylinder can be given velocity equal to average axial velocity of stars within the cylinder. Advantage of polar coordinates is that more densely populated part of the galaxy (core) would have smaller sectors, and more sparse ports of the galaxy in the rim would have bigger sectors, overall reducing the number of desolate or overcrowded sectors.
Hi Tim! I remembered that you talking about some UI/UX changes you wanted to change in Fallout/Fallout2 if you had the opportunity. I recently ran across a channel that made videos of UI/UX redesigns, so I asked if they would have a go at modernizing the UI/UX of Fallout/Fallout 2. And they just released a video on it! The video is titled *"I modernized the Fallout 2 UI"* and the channel is _Loreworx_ . I'll post the link in another comment just in case TH-cam removes it with their auto-moderation.
This is really good... as an exercise in creating something unique. But for functionality, it comes up with too weird stuff. For human use (and I mean in-game-universe humans) the coordinates (in whatever system the game uses to place them) + something that a planet name generator spit out are better.
If I was implementing this, I would do a frequency analysis of English or other words to create a probability map of what vowels and consonants go together, and use that to auto insert vowels. If the designers want names that sound more Latin or a combination of languages then just sub in or add those dictionaries to the frequency analysis program
This is nice but I see two caveats: - You might end up creating offensive words, so you would need a dictionary of "bad" words and possibly rearrange the vowels so they don't create offensive words. - All planets always have at least 9 letters (probably even 12), which is not ideal. You can't have a planet named "Heragon KV" for instance. This is an interesting problem though, I might take the time to find a solution that adresses those issues
i honestly think this would work better as a sorta letter-based zip code. planets, galaxies and star systems could have "human pronounceable" common or official names with these things attatched
Well, I would choose dwarf galaxies with a handful of stars because I couldn't fill a world with 100 billion stars with content. The latter never works. You can see it in Elite Dangerous. Even for Star Citizen, which is only supposed to have a small number of systems, it takes forever to develop.
I always thought we should give quadrants something like IPv6 addresses. IPv4 was only 2^32, but IPv6 is 2^128 or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. And with the format of them (e.g. 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334) there's a built in hierarchy structured around the eight groups of four hexadecimal digits.
Hey Tim given your proposed naming scheme, what would be the galactic coordinates of the real-world solar system containing Earth in your system? I figured that would be a fun one to show off to people since it's where we all live!
Binary moons as a concept is so cool to me. and if they could be habitable 10x so. Apparently stable binary moons may be possible with a planet like Neptune.
But then the galaxy changes over time.. but then time is relative.. argh! I suppose there could be a 'canonical instant' chosen for the coordinate system, and in the future, navigation systems would have to run orbital simulations in reverse to figure out the original quadrant of a particular body. Potential for a story featuring Y2K-like bug in the ship computer messing up the navigation royally. This approach is, however, is about an 'absolute' coordinate system. I wonder if there could be relative coordinate systems. For example where each body self-assigns itself a random number in some range, and those numbers are distributed to near-by bodies to eventually form routing tables. To disambiguate number overlaps, one could say n1 near n2 and n3, instead of just n1. Those random names could be encoded in the same way you are proposing, giving them colorful names. Thank you for the food for thought, though. Now I am thinking about applying the relative addressing principle as a potential Internet Protocol alternative...
Ive just started being the GM in a space setting. It started as a playtest, so I'm still worldbuilding and I'm kinda stuck on if I need a star map. Im a professional Surveyor, so not having a map kinda goes against everything I stand for, but on the other hand, Im a bit paralyzed by the thought of having to map out the whole thing. Also to decide if I should go for known or made up galaxy, and if I should stick with one sector. For now I'm just moving the ball forward one meter at the time, making notes as I make up new stuff, so it can stay coherent, but if I want an armed conflict going on between factions in my world, I kinda need to figure out of we are dealing with megacorps in a small sector on a handful of planets or empires spanning multiple sectors. Dunno if I'm just rambling, but I would love your two cents on it.
My guess is this would only be useful for naming stars on discovery - stars would leave their cubes at different rates depending on location, and it's not that useful to have a stellar naming system where star names change over time. Perhaps in 10,000 years gowncaviqpelt would become gowncaviqpelve but it stays gowncaviqpelt because it's in 10^25 different databases by that point and changing the name would suck.
You mentioned extending the consonant chain to get more galaxies included at the end; I could see adding Greek letters beforehand to differentiate different galaxy clusters. Which sure only has 24 vs English's 26, but has a cool factor. this also made me think of Stargate, and how in that universe there's a little under 2 billion coordinates just for the Milkyway.
It is a clever system. If it was similar to real life I'd just have it so the co-ordinates are only really used for further reaching stars beyond the explored space in that game. Then have the co-ordinates still used for charting but have a second system that uses a 'seed' to gather human words/names from a dictionary (Could even be words used within the lore of the game). To generate a random name for the planet instead. That way it would give more realism to 'people' naming planets without the scientific stuff behind it. Then when you run out stuff for the dictionary it would just apply the co-ordinate system designated name instead.
Im aware of the concept of voxels, i really enjoyed the implementation in the EverQuest Next/Landmark engine, am i wrong that this "fractal" approach to position mapping represents a "voxel engine"?
This is brilliant, but what about using a syllabary such as japanese instead of english, this would mean each syllable would have 40 combinations instead of 20, reducing potential necessary syllables, 40^8 gives 6.5 trillion cubes, or 40^7 is 163 billion cubes It also already would be pronounceable since a syllabary is meant to work well in nearly any combination. The downside would be planets or stars would need a separate name or identifiers since you couldn't just add vowels, unless you reserved a few parts of the syllabary to handle the edge cases (i believe I left 8 over) I'm sure other solutions using the writing systems of other languages are also possible, ie korean.
This idea, whilst good, would have problems with clusters. e.g. especially where you have 100s of stars in only a few cubes. What you need is something like a hash functions avalanche effect, where nearby things are lexigraphically far away. One thing you could do is feed those coordinates into some kind of what-three-words algorithm so all of your planets are named stupid things like fish-eye-potatoes or whatever.
What I think is a problem with this system is that even if your "grids" are rotating around the galaxy's centre of gravity, it doesn't account for the stars drifting over time. This co-ordinate system would also need a time reference. Granted, in the average human lifetime an object is unlikely to complete its transition from one co-ordinate cube to another, and if in your game you can cross the galaxy in negligible time, then your co-ordinate system will be fine for (say) the first great Era of human galactic conquest… Joining up the co-ordinate letters with vowels to make pronounceable words is an interesting idea! But again I see a problem. All the stars close to any point in the galaxy are going to have extremely similar names, differing by maybe only a letter here or there, and I think that lends itself to confusion and error. A three-dimensional system like the "What 3 Words" 2D co-ordinate system (maps out all the land on Earth in 3mx3m squares, assigning each a random combination of 3 words) plus a time (e.g. since Big Bang or any other arbitrary point) would work, but naming your stars and other objects would be like some foreign lord arriving at your medieval court and having their full list of names, ancestry, heraldry and titles read out for half an hour! 😊
Reminds me of some sort of spatial hashing trick a bit like this to store positions as strings in a sql database for easy searching. As described, all stars nearby would start with very similar prefixes. Is that what you want? Maybe you could have shorthand names for nearby stars by omitting the similar prefix.
but what about binary star system with planets that switch between them and what about nebula objects that span regions greater than one cell and what about objects that move out of the cells? and then i feel like generally having objects that are close together having different names is easier if you live there - its only useful if you don't live there instead of being a grid it should be based on clusters with arbitrarily chosen constants so like a galaxy has a constants or two and then the arm the the galaxy has one or two and then different regions in the arm have a couple constants (like how dense the planets are together) and then things near certain land marks (like nebula or black holes or idk) have different constants and then solar system clusters have different constants and then the solar systems have different constants and then the bodies have different constants and then moons have different constants etc and then the constants are put in reverse order - so most specific to least that way if you are only staying in a single solar system then you can address all the objects by a nickname which is just the first part of their full name so if someone is traveling from a moon jopalkiseekafikeojadobais on one planet to a moon mawilkiseekafikeojadobais on a different planet in the same solar system they can just say "I am going from jopal to mawil" overall the system is simpler reduces most of the issues i described - except to know the name of something you need to have an up-to-date map instead of just the coordinates but irl you need a map not just coordinate to know somethings name so id say thats ok - this is still a programmatic method of assigning names
You decided to not use Y in the consonant set, should H stay in our not? Also, I feel like a galaxy would lend itself better to a polar coordinate system, but I've only been thinking about this for about 5 minutes.
Tim, buddy, friend... stars move. They aren't static. The whole galaxy rotates. Naming stars based on their coordinates relative to each other is non-sensical at best. That being said, we can name stars based on their size, numbering them from 1 to 100 billion using a rank system, where the biggest star is ranked #1, therefore named 000000000001. Then, we can give them prefixes based on Greek gods relative to the star category ( I'm not going to look up the names right now ). Basically, we could call the biggest stars Cronus stars or something like that, with the smallest stars being named after one of the lesser gods or whatever. We would call the biggest star, Cronus 000000000001 or Cronus 1.
With billions of stars in a galaxy, what is the likelihood of two players ever meeting in a multiplayer exploration game? (This is something I didn't like about Elite Dangerous when it came out in 2014 - flying around without much interaction with other players - just NPCs [or NPShips]). Should players be constrained to a subset of planets to force interactions?
You pronounce Vs and Ws as if they never left Latin (or have it as an option). Things like making Qs into Ks phonetically and following the with E or I sounds could also be done.
I disagree that the system for naming needs to scale to hundreds of billions. A lot of the stars will likely be unimportant, and can just be referenced by some alphanumeric code. The more important ones will likely be named in one of the hundreds of ways we historically have named things. If you look at how we name cities you have a huge amount of duplicates, Portland being both the biggest cities in Maine and Oregon or Vancouver being just north and south of Washington at the same time, but that's fine we've delt with such things for at least thousands of years and likely will into the future. As far as systems to assign an alphanumeric code to star systems this one seems workable I just doubt that outside of boreoarctic processes anyone would actually use those names.
So if you have a binary moon, how do you arbitrary and consistently decide which one is 1 or 2. What is the rule so that anyone who stumbles across the system with directions to -2, how would they know which one is -2?
My serious answer is that the moons are numbered based on their distance from their mutual orbital point, which I think works out to be the same as the larger mass moon is 1 and the smaller one is 2. This should work unless the two moons are exactly the same mass, which is statistically unlikely. My non-serious answer is that Chairface Chippendale will carve a giant 1 and 2 into each moon.
@@CainOnGames Due to the potential difficulty of determining the mass or orbital distance rapidly by beings of various technological levels, I do feel that carving 1 and 2 makes more sense in the big picture. Unfortunately, the question then becomes Roman or Arabic numerals?
@@CainOnGames we would have to include the Red Shift and Blue shift into the naming scheme. Also we would have to discuss the naming of the binary when one of the objects consumes the other. Maybe a -3 at the end of the name.
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Knowing how inflexible and impersonal bureaucracies end up working in the long run, you just know that there will be a star somewhere that is just on the very edge of of a sub-sub-cube with a planet that while orbiting flies in and out of that cube's coordinates for part of its orbital rotation, and so the galactic mail zipcodes for the inhabitants of that planet have to be changed twice a year and noone in the Great Galactic Administration can ever find the time to stretch the edges of that sub-sub-cube just a little bit to fix the situation.
wait, so when you mail something to this planet do you send it to the address it is at when you are mailing the package or where the planet will be when the package arrives?
It gets funny when you introduce movement and time, do you rename the star once it passes into a different cubit? Do you just always refer to them as coordinate + year, and on your delivery try to calculate back where it might have gone and hope nothing kicked it into a different orbit? And whose time would you base it on? Space travel gets so complicated
@@VraccasVII This is when you say screw delivery and just put a space station mail box office. If you want your stuff, come get it yourself.
Considering the Milky Way galaxy (most galaxies I suppose) are not static and star positions are not fixed, even relative to each other - stars might drift into another quadrant. Renaming might work, since it's not a real name, but people living there might object.
Yeah i think this system works because its all relative to a point. If you just had X Y Z cords for where you were then they would need to be updated constantly and would need to be tracked in some way thats not static.
I think the thing I like most with this. Is how the system also gives you a free out of having to actually name all of it with lore. Everything is a letter sequence and only gets it's name once it's been explored/ contact has been made. Gives incentive for explorers to go out and be able to name things.
Add the vowels when it's discovered.
gowncaviqpelt confirmed for ow2
I love this idea so much! I did the math, and if there are 8,000 cuboids per side, the longest edge would be about 12.5 light years across. It's a little insane just how big the Milky Way alone is. If we do one more division of 20, each cell becomes 0.625 light-years across, or about 6 trillion kilometers.
Since I was already doing it, the central bulge is about 10,000 light years in diameter (conveniently 10 times less than the length of the entire galaxy), the cuboids would be 1.25 light-years tall (or with another division of 20, 0.0625 light-years / 591 billion km).
Quite nice, watching a video of Tim pulling a video topic out of his idea book, instead of some youtubers pulling ideas out of their [something else]...
I would probably try to split the names to the sectors instead of full name of a star: Pelt-4c of the Sector Caviq of the Sector Gown
That's a very good idea!
This is a fun idea, I can think of so many ways to break it in interesting ways to explore in a game!
- How do you handle "planets" like Pluto, that swap distance from their sun with another planet? Do the inhabitants go to war over the naming rights? Maybe the names don't change, but they just take advantage of people showing up to the wrong planet during the times their position doesn't match their names?
- Local wars over which planet in a binary gets the "-1" designation?
- Some jerk "naming" a black hole and people showing up thinking it's a star system. Maybe it's been this way long enough that the name sticks but people just have to remember "Oh Kapstunnamyl is a black hole, don't go there".
Lots of room to have fun there, with the bonus of in most cases you just have a good way to name your stuff.
It would have to be a galactic Atlas that maintained based on multiple local authorities. And probably renames would not happen unless something was destroyed or created.
Back in 1990's I did Space Strategy game for 3 years, where you explore the universe. I tried to do it with C++, but doing something in "galactic scale", I had so much problems with large variables, conversions and floatingpoints in current C++ version, so I decided to do the whole thing in Pascal. Nowadays it is not a problem, and I am back in C++ with Unreal.
I love this idea! I'm going to give it a try in naming sectors of a Banks-ian orbital. Mostly because I have a terrible time naming locations in things I create and I think this will help me generate something I can brainstorm from. So many names for stuff would rise out of people simplifying or mashing stuff together. The quickest example I can think of is "General/Governmental Purpose" for vehicles becoming "GP" becoming "Jeep".
This timing yo
This is a really cool and clever idea for a large scale galactic naming system
if you always want this timing he posts at 8am EST everyday! i love it it's always the best thing in the morning
Astronomers use spherical coordinates (3-tuple of 1 distance and 2 angles) for the real world galactic coordinate system, although the origin is the sun and not the galaxy center.
You could turn a galactic center-version into a naming system by rounding and writing the angles as consonants and adding on the distance as a suffix (e.g. BGLCHJ-392 for (392.214, 48.0293°, 156.333°). Of course, if this was put into a game it would be arcane to a layperson, which is
why your cartesian system is better, even if it doesn't translate to exact coordinates.
Don't forget, you can label singular/binary/trinary star systems with asterisks. But yea, this is a really cool system! Makes naming (and finding) things easier and readable.
You could use The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to widen the palette of sounds. Recently been playing around with using a relational map of Wiktionary entries for how close words are in concept or usage frequency together - which can create "gradients" of concepts through the octtree. The reasoning was that we tend to name things in clusters of related concepts like deities which themselves are related to more foundational aspects of nature or social constructs.
Yeah, that might solve the issue of stars being named by what sounds good - to English speakers.
Ok so it sounds like what is needed is a 'locality sensitive hashing algorithm' my initial thought would be to use a hilbert curve; but there might be something that spirals better. Honestly since galaxies can have multiple formations it might be better to let the center of the universe or 'most massive point' be able to set the hashing algorithm for its points.
So starting at the 'center of the universe' you draw a space filling curve that intersects all super massive black holes (ie galaxies) and other errant objects. all objects orbiting these masses (ie that will complete a full revolution based on their current trajectory) will be excluded from the 'center of the universe' list. each object in the list (ie super massive black holes and such) will define a space filling curve that most accurately represents their revolving objects (which excludes smaller objects that are rotating around other objects)
Basically you sort objects based on what they are orbiting and let the parent object define the best algorithm to represent where their children are.
In order to respect cultures and sentient civilizations you allow for exceptions to naming based on whatever sentient species can file a complaint with the Intergalactic Galactic Cartographers Society. This way you can easily search for sentient planets by also searching for exceptions to the naming convention.
The locals will probably name their planets differently though
Numbers for planets and lower case for moons sounds like Wayne Barlowe's Expedition.
In that Darwin was the name of the system, Darwin A and Darwin B were the binary stars, and Darwin IV was the planet (out of 6) that supported life. The discovery of alien life is what led to the system being named after Charles Darwin
I'd rather use angular coordinates than a grid, seen as galaxies are round, but it's a good idea. I like that, since stars that are close together share some of their first consonants, you can say stuff like "the DaMoCa Sector" and intutitively convey exactly which region of space you're referring to.
I can't imagine all the ways how hilarious the system based on the English pronunciation can be.
- Honey, are you sure we are going to the right coordinates? We're drifting through this gas cloud for 2 weeks already
- Yeah, ain't we going to Gownkavikpelt to visit your cousin?
- Darling, it's Gowncaviqpelt.
*Obsidian jr devs taking notes for Outer Worlds 2*
I did something similar once - but I made several overlapping systems that had different "sounds" so that different cultures had their own names for star systems, and which was used depended on the political control (which didn't change). I also explored the way that nearby stars had similar names due to sharing common coordinates, and made that explicit by making names like "oofarnu in the blarfh sector".
You can have a planet that orbits two stars. Its called a restricted three body system.
Basically 3 bodies of equal mass can't realistically orbit eachother for very long, however with some circumstances meet you can have two bodies orbit eachother and then generally a 3rd body that is small and far away can orbit both of them and be stable. You see this in starwars and it's totally physically possible for that to be true. Also makes sense why the place is just a desert, hard for things to grow with no water.
Sensible system but i would go with polar coordinates instead of Cartesian. So divide the galaxy by radius is to 20 cylinders, name them form b in core to z in periphery, then divide each cylinder in to 20 angular slices named form b to z. Repeat to process on each slice to get subdivisions. To improve stability of names as starts orbit the galaxy each main cylinder can be given velocity equal to average axial velocity of stars within the cylinder.
Advantage of polar coordinates is that more densely populated part of the galaxy (core) would have smaller sectors, and more sparse ports of the galaxy in the rim would have bigger sectors, overall reducing the number of desolate or overcrowded sectors.
Hi Tim! I remembered that you talking about some UI/UX changes you wanted to change in Fallout/Fallout2 if you had the opportunity. I recently ran across a channel that made videos of UI/UX redesigns, so I asked if they would have a go at modernizing the UI/UX of Fallout/Fallout 2. And they just released a video on it!
The video is titled *"I modernized the Fallout 2 UI"* and the channel is _Loreworx_ . I'll post the link in another comment just in case TH-cam removes it with their auto-moderation.
I've added that video to my watch later list. Thanks!
This is really good... as an exercise in creating something unique. But for functionality, it comes up with too weird stuff. For human use (and I mean in-game-universe humans) the coordinates (in whatever system the game uses to place them) + something that a planet name generator spit out are better.
If I was implementing this, I would do a frequency analysis of English or other words to create a probability map of what vowels and consonants go together, and use that to auto insert vowels. If the designers want names that sound more Latin or a combination of languages then just sub in or add those dictionaries to the frequency analysis program
This is nice but I see two caveats:
- You might end up creating offensive words, so you would need a dictionary of "bad" words and possibly rearrange the vowels so they don't create offensive words.
- All planets always have at least 9 letters (probably even 12), which is not ideal. You can't have a planet named "Heragon KV" for instance.
This is an interesting problem though, I might take the time to find a solution that adresses those issues
I thought this problem might interest my viewers, who are 30% more clever and better-looking than the average viewer.
i honestly think this would work better as a sorta letter-based zip code. planets, galaxies and star systems could have "human pronounceable" common or official names with these things attatched
Well, I would choose dwarf galaxies with a handful of stars because I couldn't fill a world with 100 billion stars with content. The latter never works. You can see it in Elite Dangerous. Even for Star Citizen, which is only supposed to have a small number of systems, it takes forever to develop.
Traveler has a pretty elabrate coordinate and classification system too
I always thought we should give quadrants something like IPv6 addresses. IPv4 was only 2^32, but IPv6 is 2^128 or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. And with the format of them (e.g. 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334) there's a built in hierarchy structured around the eight groups of four hexadecimal digits.
Reminds me of Canadian post codes
Hey Tim given your proposed naming scheme, what would be the galactic coordinates of the real-world solar system containing Earth in your system? I figured that would be a fun one to show off to people since it's where we all live!
Binary moons as a concept is so cool to me. and if they could be habitable 10x so. Apparently stable binary moons may be possible with a planet like Neptune.
This is neat. I wonder if this is something similar to how Elite Dangerous does its 1:1 procgen model of the Milky Way
But then the galaxy changes over time.. but then time is relative.. argh! I suppose there could be a 'canonical instant' chosen for the coordinate system, and in the future, navigation systems would have to run orbital simulations in reverse to figure out the original quadrant of a particular body. Potential for a story featuring Y2K-like bug in the ship computer messing up the navigation royally.
This approach is, however, is about an 'absolute' coordinate system. I wonder if there could be relative coordinate systems. For example where each body self-assigns itself a random number in some range, and those numbers are distributed to near-by bodies to eventually form routing tables. To disambiguate number overlaps, one could say n1 near n2 and n3, instead of just n1. Those random names could be encoded in the same way you are proposing, giving them colorful names.
Thank you for the food for thought, though. Now I am thinking about applying the relative addressing principle as a potential Internet Protocol alternative...
Ive just started being the GM in a space setting. It started as a playtest, so I'm still worldbuilding and I'm kinda stuck on if I need a star map.
Im a professional Surveyor, so not having a map kinda goes against everything I stand for, but on the other hand, Im a bit paralyzed by the thought of having to map out the whole thing. Also to decide if I should go for known or made up galaxy, and if I should stick with one sector.
For now I'm just moving the ball forward one meter at the time, making notes as I make up new stuff, so it can stay coherent, but if I want an armed conflict going on between factions in my world, I kinda need to figure out of we are dealing with megacorps in a small sector on a handful of planets or empires spanning multiple sectors.
Dunno if I'm just rambling, but I would love your two cents on it.
Question: how would this system accommodate stellar orbits? Does the grid rotate based on set stars? Or do the coordinates change over time?
I didn't account for stellar orbits.
My guess is this would only be useful for naming stars on discovery - stars would leave their cubes at different rates depending on location, and it's not that useful to have a stellar naming system where star names change over time. Perhaps in 10,000 years gowncaviqpelt would become gowncaviqpelve but it stays gowncaviqpelt because it's in 10^25 different databases by that point and changing the name would suck.
Also naming stars based on orbital parameters doesn't help as those change too
Sometimes reality saddens me.
@CainOnGames but reality is great! It's where all my friends and family are 😀
You mentioned extending the consonant chain to get more galaxies included at the end; I could see adding Greek letters beforehand to differentiate different galaxy clusters.
Which sure only has 24 vs English's 26, but has a cool factor. this also made me think of Stargate, and how in that universe there's a little under 2 billion coordinates just for the Milkyway.
I have a book about how we divided up the states that use the cadastral system. The book is 8x11 and is 2 inches tall.
It is a clever system. If it was similar to real life I'd just have it so the co-ordinates are only really used for further reaching stars beyond the explored space in that game.
Then have the co-ordinates still used for charting but have a second system that uses a 'seed' to gather human words/names from a dictionary (Could even be words used within the lore of the game). To generate a random name for the planet instead. That way it would give more realism to 'people' naming planets without the scientific stuff behind it. Then when you run out stuff for the dictionary it would just apply the co-ordinate system designated name instead.
Im aware of the concept of voxels, i really enjoyed the implementation in the EverQuest Next/Landmark engine, am i wrong that this "fractal" approach to position mapping represents a "voxel engine"?
This is brilliant, but what about using a syllabary such as japanese instead of english, this would mean each syllable would have 40 combinations instead of 20, reducing potential necessary syllables,
40^8 gives 6.5 trillion cubes, or 40^7 is 163 billion cubes
It also already would be pronounceable since a syllabary is meant to work well in nearly any combination.
The downside would be planets or stars would need a separate name or identifiers since you couldn't just add vowels, unless you reserved a few parts of the syllabary to handle the edge cases (i believe I left 8 over)
I'm sure other solutions using the writing systems of other languages are also possible, ie korean.
This idea, whilst good, would have problems with clusters. e.g. especially where you have 100s of stars in only a few cubes. What you need is something like a hash functions avalanche effect, where nearby things are lexigraphically far away.
One thing you could do is feed those coordinates into some kind of what-three-words algorithm so all of your planets are named stupid things like fish-eye-potatoes or whatever.
What I think is a problem with this system is that even if your "grids" are rotating around the galaxy's centre of gravity, it doesn't account for the stars drifting over time. This co-ordinate system would also need a time reference. Granted, in the average human lifetime an object is unlikely to complete its transition from one co-ordinate cube to another, and if in your game you can cross the galaxy in negligible time, then your co-ordinate system will be fine for (say) the first great Era of human galactic conquest…
Joining up the co-ordinate letters with vowels to make pronounceable words is an interesting idea! But again I see a problem. All the stars close to any point in the galaxy are going to have extremely similar names, differing by maybe only a letter here or there, and I think that lends itself to confusion and error.
A three-dimensional system like the "What 3 Words" 2D co-ordinate system (maps out all the land on Earth in 3mx3m squares, assigning each a random combination of 3 words) plus a time (e.g. since Big Bang or any other arbitrary point) would work, but naming your stars and other objects would be like some foreign lord arriving at your medieval court and having their full list of names, ancestry, heraldry and titles read out for half an hour! 😊
*First* book, 15 years ago? Did I miss something, have you published something other than your unpublished memoirs? :)
I think he meant his idea books =)
Reminds me of some sort of spatial hashing trick a bit like this to store positions as strings in a sql database for easy searching.
As described, all stars nearby would start with very similar prefixes. Is that what you want? Maybe you could have shorthand names for nearby stars by omitting the similar prefix.
but what about binary star system with planets that switch between them
and what about nebula objects that span regions greater than one cell
and what about objects that move out of the cells?
and then i feel like generally having objects that are close together having different names is easier if you live there - its only useful if you don't live there
instead of being a grid it should be based on clusters with arbitrarily chosen constants
so like a galaxy has a constants or two
and then the arm the the galaxy has one or two
and then different regions in the arm have a couple constants (like how dense the planets are together)
and then things near certain land marks (like nebula or black holes or idk) have different constants
and then solar system clusters have different constants
and then the solar systems have different constants
and then the bodies have different constants
and then moons have different constants
etc
and then the constants are put in reverse order - so most specific to least
that way if you are only staying in a single solar system then you can address all the objects by a nickname which is just the first part of their full name
so if someone is traveling from a moon jopalkiseekafikeojadobais on one planet to a moon mawilkiseekafikeojadobais on a different planet in the same solar system they can just say "I am going from jopal to mawil"
overall the system is simpler reduces most of the issues i described - except to know the name of something you need to have an up-to-date map instead of just the coordinates
but irl you need a map not just coordinate to know somethings name so id say thats ok - this is still a programmatic method of assigning names
Sounds a bit like an octree!
perhaps in the far future, someone will rediscover this video and name a random star GAWNICVIQPLUTY
Plot twist: I’m an alien from the planet GAWNICVIQPLUTY4
You decided to not use Y in the consonant set, should H stay in our not? Also, I feel like a galaxy would lend itself better to a polar coordinate system, but I've only been thinking about this for about 5 minutes.
In terms of it not sounding pretty, "If it looks stupid, but works, it ain't stupid."
Evochron dev has entered chat:
Tim, buddy, friend... stars move. They aren't static. The whole galaxy rotates. Naming stars based on their coordinates relative to each other is non-sensical at best.
That being said, we can name stars based on their size, numbering them from 1 to 100 billion using a rank system, where the biggest star is ranked #1, therefore named 000000000001. Then, we can give them prefixes based on Greek gods relative to the star category ( I'm not going to look up the names right now ).
Basically, we could call the biggest stars Cronus stars or something like that, with the smallest stars being named after one of the lesser gods or whatever.
We would call the biggest star, Cronus 000000000001 or Cronus 1.
Weee, I’m all cubed out
With billions of stars in a galaxy, what is the likelihood of two players ever meeting in a multiplayer exploration game? (This is something I didn't like about Elite Dangerous when it came out in 2014 - flying around without much interaction with other players - just NPCs [or NPShips]). Should players be constrained to a subset of planets to force interactions?
What if your star drifts from one sub-sub-cube into another one?
Now, if we can just figure out a way to get a top down view of our own galaxy.
Elite Dagerous uses this system, pretty much
You pronounce Vs and Ws as if they never left Latin (or have it as an option). Things like making Qs into Ks phonetically and following the with E or I sounds could also be done.
I disagree that the system for naming needs to scale to hundreds of billions. A lot of the stars will likely be unimportant, and can just be referenced by some alphanumeric code. The more important ones will likely be named in one of the hundreds of ways we historically have named things. If you look at how we name cities you have a huge amount of duplicates, Portland being both the biggest cities in Maine and Oregon or Vancouver being just north and south of Washington at the same time, but that's fine we've delt with such things for at least thousands of years and likely will into the future.
As far as systems to assign an alphanumeric code to star systems this one seems workable I just doubt that outside of boreoarctic processes anyone would actually use those names.
This is likely what will happen, we already have placeholder names for unimportant stars and real names for important ones like Betelgeuse.
In this episode, Tim Cain reminds me why he's smarter than me.
So if you have a binary moon, how do you arbitrary and consistently decide which one is 1 or 2. What is the rule so that anyone who stumbles across the system with directions to -2, how would they know which one is -2?
My serious answer is that the moons are numbered based on their distance from their mutual orbital point, which I think works out to be the same as the larger mass moon is 1 and the smaller one is 2. This should work unless the two moons are exactly the same mass, which is statistically unlikely.
My non-serious answer is that Chairface Chippendale will carve a giant 1 and 2 into each moon.
@@CainOnGames Due to the potential difficulty of determining the mass or orbital distance rapidly by beings of various technological levels, I do feel that carving 1 and 2 makes more sense in the big picture. Unfortunately, the question then becomes Roman or Arabic numerals?
The universe is expanding, how do you account for that naming scheme in 200,000 years
With shame.
@@CainOnGames we would have to include the Red Shift and Blue shift into the naming scheme.
Also we would have to discuss the naming of the binary when one of the objects consumes the other. Maybe a -3 at the end of the name.
@@CainOnGamesthe naming scheme would work confined to the time frame of a game, unless we jump into vast years into the future or past.
Yeah, but in this system is Pluto a planet? 😂😂😂
The real question!
#Plutoisaplanet
Not a planet, unless you want ceres and everything large past pluto to also be planets
@@jextra1313 Keep your Nachos, I want my Pizza
Sorry...The system is broken if you use English vowels 😅
Yoink! 😅
Just like no man's sky but not scrambled
Mate, Me and my crew are lost in the delta quadrant. How is this supposed to help?
This is similar to how root and pattern morphology works in languages like Arabic.
Hello there
General Kenobi
Your talent and wisdom are lost on the "Modern Audience"
😬
XYZ yawn. Cartesian poop