Near Star List/Colonial Atlas online

[nyrath]

Very nice! Elegant, but the various "spheres of influence" are clearly shown.

 

[yatima]

That page looks great, Ted, and an online Flash-based map would be fantastic. There's lots of potential for that approach.

 

[Valarian]

An example flash map can be found here for the Battletech Universe

 

[nyrath]

Originally posted by tlindsey:
Even with this little information, it's challenging since the nature of stellar positions dictates that there will be overlaps and tightly packed clusters that require manual repositioning of labels are such to minimize confusion.

Tell me about it.
I tried once to write a program that would automatically move the labels so they did not overlap each other. It did not work very well.

I did some research and discovered that the Map Labeling Problem is one of the great unsolved programming problems of cartography. The trouble is that whenever you move one label, you have to re-check all the others. Thus the problem grows exponentially with the number of labels.

So I do it manually.

http://i11www.iti.uni-karlsruhe.de/map-labeling/
http://i11www.iti.uni-karlsruhe.de/~awolff/map-labeling/bibliography/sites.html
http://www.ads.tuwien.ac.at/research/labeling/
http://www.szoraster.com/Cartography/PracticalExperience.htm
http://www.szoraster.com/Cartography/ExpertSystems.htm

With most of my maps, I found I had to add "elbows" to some of the links. Otherwise they pass over the top of other stars which confuses the reader as to which two stars the link connects.


And there were a couple of cases where I had to move a star, since two stars at vast distances just happen to share their X and Y coords. Since I labeled the stars with their actual coords, this did not introduce any major inaccuracy.

 

[nyrath]

There is a nice flash based 3D starmap here:
http://www.exosolar.net/

There is a nice rotatable 3D starmap here:
http://well-of-souls.com/outsider/map_terran.html
but it requires Java to be enabled.

 

[tlindsey]

Nyrath: WOW! Those 3d starmaps on exosolar.net as well as the developer's site as amazing. That's almost exactly how I had pictured what an interactive stellar database would look like. I'm pretty rusty at ActionScript, but knowing that something like this is possible helps a lot.

- Ted

 

[nyrath]

Originally posted by tlindsey:
Nyrath: WOW! Those 3d starmaps on exosolar.net as well as the developer's site as amazing.

I know I was picking my jaw up from the floor when I saw it. If you get in touch with Mr. Margaris, tell him Nyrath sent you. He says he is always happy to chat about Flash.

The starmaps on the developer's site are interesting
http://www.margaris.de/?p=38
http://www.margaris.de/?p=39