AstroSynthesis Who is playing with it.
- Thread starter infojunky
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Why would the players notice?
"You're on Planet X. Planets A and B are J1 away. C is J2 away, and planet Q, E, D, are all J3 away".
A jump is a jump. 3D adds color, but that's about it.
That would be different for a TCS interstellar war campaign, requiring more fleets and what not, the frontier being more a piece of a bubble than a line,
If you are not travelling much the players would not notice or care much. If you want to give them a map of a subsector and let them plan a route to a system four jumps away it gets complicated.
Complicated isn't bad, necessarily. Really depends on the type of campaign and the type of player. It can be a plus if they are into that sort of thing.
If I had a group that wanted a 3d system and were willing to spend extra time by looking at the browser and figure out the best route in a 3d universe then I would have fun with that.
If they are not looking for that then keeping things 2d means they can plot routes with minimal work.
Complicated isn't bad, necessarily. Really depends on the type of campaign and the type of player. It can be a plus if they are into that sort of thing.
If I had a group that wanted a 3d system and were willing to spend extra time by looking at the browser and figure out the best route in a 3d universe then I would have fun with that.
If they are not looking for that then keeping things 2d means they can plot routes with minimal work.
pretty much that - my players do not want to deal with that level of crunch. I could spend hours playng with that, but they just want to get from point a to point b. last game I just had NPCs deal with all that as they just did not want to deal with that level of detail. Which to me, though, is a good bit of what makes Traveller fun: all those details are important. They had sponsors so they did not worry about fuel and all the details.
I give a list of xyz coordinates, one can plot routes by that too using only a calculator. Only done it a couple of times, otherwise we play off the 30+ star maps I have made.
But that's my point, that map is, essentially, a 2D map. (Actually, it IS a 2D map.)
For all effective purposes, this is how the denizens interact with the universe. All they really care about is travel time. The orientation of the vector unimportant.
kilemall
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For it to matter, the entire plane of the planetary orbits would need to be known, and the system’s speed and course.
I think it would need to be a holographic projection to be true 3D. A hex map is easier, though trying to do it, I found at about 10 parsecs out, it became too crowded at the edges, and some stars, such as Tau Ceti, are almost directly below Sol. Overall, I find the 3D to be more fun, more directions to move, with hidden little paths, such as having a certain "terrain" quality that the hex maps lack. Stars often come in clusters, little spheres inside big ones. I loved making those maps.
Another influence is http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/ these are often called lollipop maps, and while nice looking, are more difficult to use than what I eventually settled upon.
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Did you do it manually? Or is there a way to import that sort of data?
I am in the find out what it can do point.
I did it manually, I started with only trying for 500 of the closest systems, though I ran over to 550. One list was published in Cepheus Journal, and it is in the both Solis People of the Sun books, both the alpha and final. I do have a few hundred more that I have not published, the data file sits at 151gb, a lot of that are maps, AS files.
I should probably mention that I set up the galaxy like NASA, center to the right. There is a lot of disagreement between people and places on how it is done, such as right hand rotation, which makes some of the older maps upside down. The "map" we have is only coordinates, I use 0, 0, 0 for Sol, some don't; all the maps people see of the universe are artists impressions of the datasets.
You asked how or why players notice. They would notice because there would be more routes, and some J2 routes "look" longer than some J3 routes.
It would be pretty obvious to a Traveller player it is not a "normal" subsector. That is how they would notice.
I recalled when I tried this years ago, I was not sure if the players would embrace the idea of a 3D universe so I made 2D subsector map for them.
When you place a 3D subsector onto a 2D map you can no longer trust the hexes to show you distance. So you have to draw lines between all the systems with the jump number. You can color code them or just write the number down beside the line. I recall only doing Jump 3 and lower because if I included every line up to jump 6 the map was unreadable.
I realized the map I had was not intuitive to navigate. I would either need to (a) restrict the number of systems in the subsector or (b) handle the entire thing on my players behalf.
That campaign ended before it started. This time around I considered going back, but when I thought about my players I realized it was not the right group for that type of experiment. They are happy with their 2-D map and counting hexes to know how far away something is. And it saved me a bunch of work.
But if I had some diehards who were attracted to 3-d jump routes and even wanted to look at the systems through a 3d browser (which I think nbos has these days) I would totally do it.
When you place a 3D subsector onto a 2D map you can no longer trust the hexes to show you distance. So you have to draw lines between all the systems with the jump number. You can color code them or just write the number down beside the line. I recall only doing Jump 3 and lower because if I included every line up to jump 6 the map was unreadable.
I realized the map I had was not intuitive to navigate. I would either need to (a) restrict the number of systems in the subsector or (b) handle the entire thing on my players behalf.
That campaign ended before it started. This time around I considered going back, but when I thought about my players I realized it was not the right group for that type of experiment. They are happy with their 2-D map and counting hexes to know how far away something is. And it saved me a bunch of work.
But if I had some diehards who were attracted to 3-d jump routes and even wanted to look at the systems through a 3d browser (which I think nbos has these days) I would totally do it.
With 3D browsers, or computer maps that one can rotate, the issue becomes one of orientation. Such as for the 3D map I posted, most mappers look at it and see it is a xyz with z suppressed, or sort of looking at in plan view like a normal map. It is a traditional way of doing star maps. Though AstroSynthesis often shows maps as face on, which is the normal way one sees stars in the night sky. Plus for the AS view, it can be sort of clunky to rotate the map by the controls, and difficult to get back to the original view. Using AstroSynthesis, it is important to save actual database files, numbering them, in case something happens.
Being more of a space fan than gamer (like why I was invited to spacey space vs the normal rpg instance) I do tend to prefer the 3D over 2D hex maps, it is not important though, I just like the way it feels. Counting hexes is easier, than a map where you can't actually measure it without using coordinate calculations, and why I added the jump lines. In Traveller, esp at high jump, 5 or 6, it is easy to go really far, and not need them, at that point maybe an overlay of a transparent circle, or just have a database that has all the stars in it, and one can type in what are the nearest stars within x distance, similar to the ISDB http://www.stellar-database.com/
Spinward Flow
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