Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore…



Lave. Diso. Leesti. Zaonce. The classic systems in the original Elite game evoke fond memories. Elite was the original 'open-world' experience, and one of the very first 3D games. It famously used every byte in the legendary the legendary BBC Micro computer to create 8 'galaxies' using just 22k of program and data memory. Yes, 22 kilobytes – that’s probably smaller than just about any email you’ll get today.

Crucially, though, it used amazing techniques that allowed a generation of gamers to experience something unique as they carved their own path through a dog-eat-dog, go anywhere, do anything galaxy and worked their way to the most iconic rank in gaming history – Elite. Those techniques were further expanded in Frontier a decade later, fitting an even bigger, richer world into 512k.

And of course, as everyone reading this newsletter knows, with Elite: Dangerous we are taking another huge step for today's hardware. Detail and accuracy has taken another great leap, but, we have a confession to make: Alpha builds 1, 2 and 3 have all used a 'skydome' – a static, painted backdrop around a 64 bit play space roughly 1 light year across. Within that all the planets and stars are still modelled, but the galaxy beyond was not. Until now.

Alpha 4 genuinely contains over 400 billion star systems. And they are all moving correctly; spinning, orbiting each other in an incredible astronomical ballet. We are also modelling interstellar molecular clouds, and though some of the detail in these (particularly for nebulae) will come after Alpha 4, wherever you are, the 'night sky' is accurate. Beyond our galaxy, perhaps surprisingly we do still have a 'skydome' - but it is now a staggering 100,000 light years away, containing all the other galaxies, including the Magellanic Clouds. That's one heck of a draw distance…

If you go to Earth (not available to travel to in Alpha 4 – but you can see Sol in the galactic map), you'll see our familiar constellations. In fact over 130,000 objects in the night sky – including all stars visible to the naked eye – are modelled. We can even show those joined-up Solar-centric constellations when viewed from elsewhere – which become stretched and distorted due to parallax. Want to travel to Orion's belt and see what good old Sol looks like from there? Do it. Or just sit and marvel at the local sunrise (yes all the planets are moving too) over the rings and moons of a gas giant you've just found.



To achieve this, we start out with the precise locations all the known stars, exo-planets, celestial bodies and phenomena. Beyond that, procedural techniques are used in conjunction with real, 'hard' physics to model the other hundreds of billions of star systems – the star’s location, type, temperature, chemical compositions, what planetary systems there are, etc.