I was thinking of a new utility to take sector data files (ideally in various formats) and from them generate a homeworld for a character (and in MT terms, also determine appropriate homeworld skills).
I've run across stupidities in the MT homeworld generation rules (vacuum wet worlds... etc) and often you generate a random homeworld and then have a hard time finding a match anywhere nearby. It might be far more useful to have a program that took a sector (or if you want to restrict it, a subsector) worth of data and generated a random homeworld from that sector and told you the name and UPP.
An option for the program could be how to bias the generation (instead of 1/N odds per planet where N = number of planest), options could include a population based bias (ie a Pop 9 world gets 9 pips, a Pop 2 world 2, so your odds of coming from planet of pop P in sector of total pop PT = P/PT), a bias by TL (a range to limit it to), or limits by other factors.
Is this of interest to anyone else? Would this be useful to anyone other than me? Where in the heck could one find documentation on the various sector file data formats?
(I wish we had some parser modules that were publicly available for these, that were separate and hence easily integrable into any software project...).
I've run across stupidities in the MT homeworld generation rules (vacuum wet worlds... etc) and often you generate a random homeworld and then have a hard time finding a match anywhere nearby. It might be far more useful to have a program that took a sector (or if you want to restrict it, a subsector) worth of data and generated a random homeworld from that sector and told you the name and UPP.
An option for the program could be how to bias the generation (instead of 1/N odds per planet where N = number of planest), options could include a population based bias (ie a Pop 9 world gets 9 pips, a Pop 2 world 2, so your odds of coming from planet of pop P in sector of total pop PT = P/PT), a bias by TL (a range to limit it to), or limits by other factors.
Is this of interest to anyone else? Would this be useful to anyone other than me? Where in the heck could one find documentation on the various sector file data formats?
