Procedural Cities
 | Speculated Content Content presented on this page originates from datamined game files, authenticated leaks from official sources, or past developer statements. It has not been officially confirmed to be in development, and may not be implemented. |
Procedural Cities refers to a speculated potential feature for Elite Dangerous in which full-scale cities may be created within the game using procedural generation. Procedural cities have not yet been confirmed to be in active development or announced for an upcoming update or expansion.
On 1 March 2016, David Braben said, "There are very big challenges once you start talking about planets with populations that are measured in billions. You would expect cities and things like that. But I think futuristic cities is just thinking about their life cycle. They're likely to be protected by domes anyway. Just because if you think of the cycle of settling a planet. Chances are either life would be very threatening to you or there would be poisonous things in the atmosphere. So we might want to start off living in a dome and people might feel safer that way. There's lots of ways we can look at it, but the scale of things is always a challenge."[1]
Some important points:[2]
- Sheer scale, big challenges with planets with populations measured in billions. City cycle suggests they'll be domed, to deal with initial threats.
- Juxtaposition of scales, large ships, to smaller, to people. Challenges to balance gameplay. Can't just have someone nuking the site from orbit etc, so need mechanics that prevent that. Domes or shields could deal with that.
- Question of whether future societies would 'despoil' planets, or would they make hotels be just tiny huts, or hidden and unobtrusive. Tourism planets in particular may be like that.
- Frontier has a rough idea of the resources on planets driving different economies, e.g. what materials are being extracted. Braben said agriculture economies may be hunting small cute animals on the surface etc.
The Guardians lived in domed cities as well: "The war raged for many years and eventually destroyed the Guardians’ habitats, forcing them to retreat into ‘sacred’ domes protected by powerful shields. Eventually even the domes were destroyed, or their shields failed, and ultimately the population died out."[3]
The Alliance, Empire, Federation, and independent systems will each have distinct city and infrastructure develoment patterns on hospitable worlds that can be viewed from space.
A megalopolis is defined as a chain of roughly adjacent metropolitan areas. Some examples on Earth: the Taiheiyō Belt in Japan has 81 million people in 2016. The Northeast megalopolis in the USA has 52 million people.[4]
Development
On 14 December 2012, David Braben said, "What I want to see down on the planet is interesting things, cityscapes, even animals, live trees, being a big game hunter. All of the things that we’ve been very, very excited about for a long time, we want to be able to realize. The amount of work required to create those things is so huge we want to do it properly."[5]
Gallery
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A city in the Empire -
A city in the Federation -
A city in the Alliance -
Concept art of faction-specific city layout patterns -
Concept art of a Planetary Port on a non-atmospheric world
