Hello,
I am very curious. I would like to know if unreal engine is capable of generating a galaxy with millions of stars like the custom engine of elite dangerous.
I mean without modifying it, and considering i want to use the built in shaders.
What do you think?
i not try EVE, but its a space game and they are doing it with UE4
Could probably do it with the World Compositor - make each map a system and set them up empty, then spawn in planets and suns based on a random seed (deterministic). Warp would do an animation and take you to the next system map.
+1
Btw, i would start with hundreds of stars and see how that goes first. 
Second that - heck, even just dozens of stars (AFAIK Elite only has a couple of dozen right now?).
As an aside - the World Compositor is 90% of what makes things like this possible (in particular, streaming and origin rebasing) so UE4 is a very good fit for that sort of thing right now.
For the sake of performance, I would handle it the way they did it in Jump to light speed. One seamless universe would be amazing and you could do it using streaming levels or world composer, but I would just fake it using level switching. You could have multiple levels created each with their own space box, atmospheres or even transition to planets.
What we did for our game was created multiple map layouts and then called the those maps in an array and it would randomly choose which layout to load into. This is a little harder with streaming because you have to make sure that the levels meet up properly at entry points.
Anyway for each of those levels you could have a string or name variable set that represents a coordinate system, but in reality it just masks the levels name. So when you call a map switch it would look like its calling that map from a set of coordinates which would then fire off a canned loading screen that would look like hyperspace or something.
Multiplayer on the other hand would have to be handled a little differently. But going this route would allow you to have servers running multiple maps at a time (taking into mind resource requirements per) that instead of just a map switch it actually connects you to a different server/map.
Eve uses CCP’s proprietary Trinity engine, and has done so since 2003.
Thank you a lot for the answers!
Will be very useful for my tests 