In a new dev blog post on MMORPG.com, producer David Stahl talks about the Star Trek Online Genesis system and how it's used to create places for you to go and explore without requiring hours of art and development time for each location.

This sounds like a great concept and in theory could make the Star Trek Online universe boundless.  David explains in more detail....

As a producer, it begs the question, “How?”  How can you explore someplace new in an MMO where there are zones and maps and contacts and missions that everyone seems to have access to over the course of their character’s career? Most game content is hand created by a staff of designers and artists who spend time placing things where they should be, making sure that there is a natural progression to what you do. It is a lot of work just to make a single planetary system.

In order to make a game universe where players can go somewhere no one else has gone before, we’d have to make more maps than we physically have time for and we would have to keep making them until the end of time. So how can we deliver on this concept?

To answer this question we turned to the Star Trek movies for inspiration and found the Genesis Program.

In the movie cannon the Genesis program used technology to convert nothing into something. “Life from Lifelessness.” This was the Creation device that Khan threatened to destroy the Enterprise with and what eventually spawned the Genesis planet.

Star Trek Online has embraced the concept of Genesis as a method to generate planets and systems that no one has seen before. But as with any technology it requires a lot of brainstorming, engineering, and testing to make it work right.

The core concept of Genesis in Star Trek Online is to create places for you to go without requiring hours of art and development time for each location. In a lot of ways, when we think of Genesis we think of the Holodeck computer. (source MMORPG.com)

Read the full article here.

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