With my Honours project done, I am happy to finally get back to this.  Working on some procedural galaxy generation.

(Art belongs to UberEnt & Planetary Annihilation)

This should allow for some more interesting layouts, as before I was just hard-coding the systems and the routes between them.

 

The generation works by;

• Randomly positioning a number of systems within a bounding box, while collision testing to ensure there is no overlay between themselves

• Connecting all systems within a short range of each other

• Grouping together all the systems which are linked

• Finding the shortest paths to link these isolated groups of systems together

 

It seems to work well enough for my purposes at the moment, but I could make it more interesting by adding some more random paths later on.

The systems also have a procedural name which just combines two strings from arrays of names and suffixes.