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Web-based Automatic Sector Data / Map pdf Generator

Originally posted by mickazoid:
And a special bonus: here's a URL to a pdf that I generated from the existing Spinward Marches datafile, on my own web site: http://micki001.cnc.net/trav/SpinwardMarchespre.pdf
Click to expand...
This is a remarkable thing you've done.

I downloaded the Spinward Marches PDF above (since I one day intend to run a game there) and it is great. But I wonder if I could ask a favor. You mention in another post that with the world descriptions the spinwad marches is 216 pages long - would you mind linking to such a thing? I find the text description of worlds very enlightening (since UPPs are not second nature to me).

In any case I wanted to compliment you on your work, thank you for what you've already done,and ask you to share a bit more. All of which prompted be to post for the first time.

I look forward to the day that your work is all hosted somewhere to generate systems for us luddites.

Thanks,
John
 
JJH - thank you so much! I'm looking forward to hosting it myself as well.

I'll generate an updated Spinward Marches pdf with world descriptions, and (server space permitting) I'll pass along the URL.

Do you have any trade route data you'd like to see reflected in the pdf?

And most of all, thank you for posting and giving your support - it's really lovely to receive such kind praise.
 
Mickazoid,
Thanks. UPPs are not second nature to me yet, like they seem to be for most of the participants here. I am not looking for any particular trade route info, but thanks for asking.

If you do get your generater hosted, I believe you will make a ot of gamers very happy.
 
JJH - I'm the same way. I still need little references to make my games smooth, so doing a version with UPP explanations per-world (using the program 'full-upp') seemed like a good idea.

You may want to download and install it on your machine - you can use it to pass a UPP and get an instant description:

Using the tools independently, or 'per-world', can be a great reference for a referee.

</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">3222

Name: Alahs
Affiliation: GrIn Manifest ( Ji )

UPP: A877267-A

Planetary details:
Starport class A, Excellent quality installation.
Refined fuel available. Annual maintenance overhaul available. Shipyard
capable of constructing starships and non-starships present.
Medium sized world. Surface gravity 1 G.
World diameter is 8000 miles (12800 km).
Standard, tainted atmosphere. Filter mask needed.
70 percent water. Cloud cover is 50 percent.
Hundreds of inhabitants.
Captive Government. Government by a leadership answerable to an outside
group; a colony or conqured area.
Law Level 7: Shotguns are prohibited.
Tech Level A: Interstellar community.
Trade Classifications: Non-Industrial.

Generic Cargo:
A-A Lo Ni Cr6000

Animal Encounters:

TERRAIN: Chasm A877267-A
Die Animal Weight Hits Armor Wounds & Weapons Action
2 3 Intimidator 12kg 7/8 none claws, teeth A4F5S1
3 1 Gatherer 50kg 16/4 none thrasher A4F5S2
4 1 Hijacker 1kg 6/5 none -2 thrasher A6F7S1
5 1 Hunter 3kg 1/2 none -2 teeth A5F5S2
6 1 Grazer 6kg 4/6 none -1 teeth A5F2S3
7 1 Intermittent 25kg 17/7 none hooves A5F4S1
8 1 Intermittent 3kg 1/1 none -2 hooves, horns A7F5S1
9 1 Chaser 6kg 2/9 none -1 teeth +1 A0F9S2
10 Special event to be administered by the referee.
11 1 Trapper 6kg 2/3 none -1 stinger A0F8S0
12 1 Pouncer 100kg 14/3 jack teeth +1 A0F0S1 </pre>[/QUOTE]
 
On another topic...

I spent the day playing with J Greely's allygen.pl and adding some border-rendering capability to my site. No, it's not live yet, and I mostly did it as part of a Secret Project.

Border rendering works great within a sector but there's no stitching of adjacent borders. Also, allygen appears to not deal so well with irregular shaped polities - it creates disparate blobs rather than tendrils.

Has anybody played with tweaking the algorithms yet?
 
Secret Project? Joshua, you can't just hint and then leave us hanging. What's going on? What can you share about this? Personal or professional?

Inquiring Sophonts Want To Know,
Flynn
 
Originally posted by Joshua Bell:
On another topic...

I spent the day playing with J Greely's allygen.pl and adding some border-rendering capability to my site. No, it's not live yet, and I mostly did it as part of a Secret Project.

Border rendering works great within a sector but there's no stitching of adjacent borders. Also, allygen appears to not deal so well with irregular shaped polities - it creates disparate blobs rather than tendrils.

Has anybody played with tweaking the algorithms yet?
Click to expand...
Offhand, the least intrusive fix might be to load up multiple sectors, modifying the algorithm to use ring/ray instead of hex, thus ignoring sector boundaries.
 
I would love to see a tweaked version of allygen, that addresses 'multi-sector' borders.

And feel free to use my tweaked code, which includes your route gen snippet (or better yet, write a better tweak yourself!)


Last - the allygen software seems to only randomize the polity names partially (A + n, then B + n, etc.), so I added a second random character string so that the polity names are more random (N + n).

Looking forward to seeing your updated site! Let me know if I can be of any assistance.
 
OK, I can do that. In the ally generator, there are references to hex locations. My thought would be to add a subroutine that accepted a sector name and hex number, and returned a (ring,ray) pair. Every place which uses the hex row and column would use the values returned from this subroutine instead.

The subroutine would use a hashmap which maps sector names to their ring/ray offsets.

Here's pseudocode.

Yes, I'd rather rewrite the whole thing, because it sounds fun to play with.

</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">sub ringray
{
my $sector = shift;
my $hex = shift;

my ($c,$r) = (match out the row & col from $hex)

my ($oring, $oray) = $sec2rrMap{ $sector }; # get offset

return ($r + $oring, $c + $oray); # is that right?
}</pre>[/QUOTE]
 
Originally posted by Flynn:
Secret Project? Joshua, you can't just hint and then leave us hanging. What's going on? What can you share about this? Personal or professional?
Click to expand...
I don't think I mentioned my recent professional Secret Project to this group, since it's not Traveller related. After 9 years I've bailed from Microsoft to go work on a MMOVR-thingy called "Second Life" in San Francisco.

And unfortunately that move has all my stuff in storage for a few weeks, which has put the Traveller-related personal Secret Project on hold. I'll share details when it emerges from the vaporware stage.
 
Joshua - congrats on joining Second Life!

I hope you're getting 100% of your salary in real dollars!


Looking forward to your next fun-a-thon. Congrats again!
 
Originally posted by robject:
Yes, I'd rather rewrite the whole thing, because it sounds fun to play with.
Click to expand...
See, that's why I post here. Why do it myself when I can pose it as a challenge and sucker some other gullible perl hacker to do it for me? Er, I mean, reap the benefits of a strong community. That's it.

Seriously though...

The ultimate goal would be to point it at a whole directory of sectors and get back the borders for the whole Imperium in one fell swoop. Sort of.

You see, I (will) render borders at two scales: macro-scale which are decimated down to just a few hundred points total around the edge of the path, and micro-scale which are at sector scale a-la sec2pdf. For polities that don't span sectors this is easy. When they span sectors the macro-scale borders are easy - given Robert's proposed tweaks to allygen - I let the perl script crunch overnight on the sectors and then decimate the path down to something reasonable.

The micro-scale borders are the tricky ones, since I need to scope them down to just a sector or so. What I'm thinking (off the top of my head) is to run allygen++ across a sector and its 8 neighbors to determine allegiances, then truncate the results down to just a parsec beyond the sector proper and generate the borders, and tweak the rendering to traverse but not draw any borders on hexes outside the sector. I'm not sure if that will leave anything dangling... I suppose I'll just have to try it.
 
Originally posted by mickazoid:
JJH - you can download an updated 'Spinward Marches' LBB (including descriptions, but no animal encounters or cargo) here:

http://micki001.cnc.net/trav/SpinwardMarches.pdf

Enjoy!
Click to expand...
Thanks Mickaoid,
It is very cool. Between Joshua's Map (which I screen printed one screenshot at a time, and taped together into a poster sized map of the spinward maeches) and your cool new book giving me a one page sector map, detailed subsector maps with UPPs, and world details, I have all the location info I could want.

Some day, if my 1980's style CT game set in the Spinward Marches gets off the ground, my plyers will thak you too.

JJH
 
After 20 years of bumming around the borders, I don't think I'll be playing in the Spinward Marches again.

That said, your PDF is a nostalgic treasure trove for me. I must be getting sentimental in my dotage. Thanks for the memories, Mickazoid! :rolleyes:
 
Hehe - great to hear, thanks folks! I have some great memories of campaigns set in the Marches. And after many Darrian and Sword Worlds adventures, we moved on to the nice, shiny teal 'Solomani Rim' supplement...


Note: There's a recurring bug I've once again squashed - two-or-more-word worldnames were disappearing from the subsector map and data list.

Please grab the pdfs again from the following URL:
http://eaglestone.pocketempires.com/survey/mickazoid/

Some screenshots:
SpinwardSubsector.gif

SpinwardSecMap.gif

The full pdf (with all of the above plus Book 7 cargo and Book 3 Animal Encounters tables for each planet and terrain) is 1218 pages, weighs 3mb and is a little too big for me to host in my personal web space.

Next li'l feature - subsector names in headers, on data/world description pages and on each subsector map's borders.
 
Is there a way to have the actual subsector names instead of, e.g., 'Subsector Two'? Apologies if this has already been answered I seem to have missed all the middle pages of this thread ... :confused:
 
Robject - thanks! I'll email it to ya.

Brom - it's gonna be in the very next update (read the post right above your question)


And you can click on 'printer-friendly' to read the whole thread in one sweet, sweet li'l package.
 
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