OBT Forum

And that doesn't count the 110,000 uninhabited planets, nor any units or icons you place

ugh don't remind me. I'll just assume a blank hex has an uninhabited system and use my random number generator to tell me how many turns I have to stay til my drives are charged.

You do realize, that the map, even with 10 LY .5" hexes, is over 4 FEET across right?  If you cut that in half, and just use hexes to track location, you are still talking about a really large map that will be very cumbersome to use.  I have tried to make a game using counters on a hex map, and though it can be done, it puts every other counter based game every done to shame in the amount of counters and significant hexes.  A computer IMO, is the only real way to do this

Yup, which is why I only plan to have regional maps and then mosaic them as needed. Besides, most of the time it'll be border clashes (like Risk) so I won't need an entire map, which is a waste of trees, space and time. At the same time I would be able to generate a full IS map (using the exact same source) and showing JUST relative faction influence without worrying about individual systems. I'd be able to print hex overlays representing whole regions based on a triangle/hex outline.

This is more possible, and a regional map of a few hundred light years much more viable.  Again tho, soon as you want to put them together, it becomes the counter game that requires 38 trees to produce and in a game where I constantly got into fight because nobody in the universe seemed to want any detail, an excessive amount of detail.

Yeah, let them think that until they encounter a massive hole their tiny imaginations can't plug up. I for one believe you can never go wrong with enough information, even conflicting ones. Multiple Choice is so much better than Fill-in-the-Blanks, as my old friend used to say back in the day (he was referring to getting a prom date, but I think it works well here too)

I had support for any size of hex, and even rendered some as low as 5 before the time it took was too excessive to use.  The hexes started at the far left side IIRC which is why Terra wouldn't have been in the middle.  I must not have put out my latest greatest version.  I still have the source, but I think if I start working on it again I'll start from scratch, redesigning it to support multiple cores, faster rendering, caching, and a few other features.

I suppose you could make an automatic offset on the starting point of the hexes based on the value of Terra. ex if the horizontal distance between the starting hex and terra is say 1,927.227LY (distance between Brundams and Terra) and a hex is 10LY, then the number of hexes between Brundams and Terra is 154.17816 [1927.227 / 12.5LY (one and a quarter hexes)], then you can offset the initial X draw by [=1927.227-roundup(1927.227/12.5,0)*12.5] = -10.27LY so that you have 154 hexes between them AND Terra would be at the center of the 155th Hex. Or something like that. You just have to get the distance in hexes from the system that is left-most (and I'm assuming top-most from Terra. I used 1.25 hexes because a horizontal hex grid has a period of 1.5 hexes, and you'd want Terra to be in the middle of the half-hex. (assuming you draw a hex from the pointy end and not the center. If from center, you use 7.5 instead of 12.5. Who says Geometry has no use in everyday life.

I'll put this on my plate at a medium-high priority, right after a robotech rule set I'm writing (which could be done this weekend).  However, I just found out I'll be taking on the dog of a homeless vet while he saves up for his deposit on a new place, so that could throw a wrench into things.  To just get the map done I can knock out in <1 day, some of the other features a few more days.  I'll letcha know when I have something more useful.

Any output that works on my crumby laptop will be highly appreciated 

Well I'm simpler.

Planet Coordinates:  Coordinates, (PlanetX-HexWidth/2)*Zoom, (PlanetY-HexHeight/2)*Zoom

HOWEVER, this will result in more hexes with 2+ systems.  The reason Terra isn't in the middle of 0,0, is so there is the smallest number of hexes possible with 2+ systems.  Moving it to the center may increase it from 20 to 50 systems or something crazy.

The dog thing kept me off my computer all weekend, sorry.

I did think about the next version of this.  The next version I may draw the full map with/without borders/names/lines, then cut it into pieces and save those in memory.  The memory usage will go up, but rendering at anything but full map zoom should be pretty quick as there is only 1 action when a system is being rendered, instead of 3 or 4.  Plus, since the chunks will be 36 parsecs (I am a firm believer that the 30 LY jump, is really 9pc with crappy rounding) or so, there will only be maybe 1500 render operations instead of 20,000, which should speed up panning.  I'll have to test this, as it may work better in my head

Hey Volt, you and Bad_Syntax did some very impressive work!

I'm looking for the stellar coordinates as listed in the backs of the old Housebooks. Is that what systems.txt is, or did you guys go with coordinates extracted from the map graphics? And, is there any way to tell which book a given entry came from?

Well lookie what I found!

Also a touched up one, not sure what the diff was.

Also the ISCS data was taken from the old house books. That data is available on their old website and sarna iirc.

Inner sphere cartogharphy society (ISCS)


Personally I'd go with volt and bad_syntax and Blacknova's most recent data as a lot of work has gone into fixing the inconsistencies and errors that were in the house book data. Also the new data more closely corresponds to current canon positions as determined by oystein

That was where I started Volt.

I took all those house coordinates, entered them in by hand (ugh!).  Including all dupes between different maps.

I then went through every single map in every single book and updated the coordinates.  For systems that were new, I just made a placeholder.

Eventually I started going through all the maps Oystein was making, and updated those coordinates as I could.

So eventually I had over 30,000 lines in excel.

About that time you stepped in Volt, and helped me parse the maps, fix typos, remove duplicates, etc, etc.

Eventually I was kinda done, and then I think you jumped back in and updated all those coordinates based on some more recent map or something, but I had already written 80% of Cartographer and got banned, and stopped work on it.

Whenever HBHK comes out I hope to redo cartographer with some new methods to make it faster, but wanted the complete set of coordinates and right now Kurita space is missing some chunks in some time periods.

So yeah, a few systems here and there were off, but once we went through Oystein's maps and updated all those coordinates (now accurate to a 3rd decimal place) it fixed them all and made them consistent.

i made a minor error with the New Delphi Compact Coordinates. The Y-axes were mirrored with reference to the region's X-axis. The corrected coordinates are now reflected in the mediafire account.