Thoughts on (big) galaxy map design...

mrxak

After I finish my current Nova TC project I will do a new TC with a universe that is in a straight line, each system with only two connections (except the ends). There will be at least 400 systems, and missions will frequently require over 100 jumps :p.

Firebird

Quote

Originally posted by mrxak:
**After I finish my current Nova TC project I will do a new TC with a universe that is in a straight line, each system with only two connections (except the ends). There will be at least 400 systems, and missions will frequently require over 100 jumps:p.

**

I was thinking this kind of system would work with a ST: Voyager plug-in, but I never felt like doing it myself (you can call me lazy, I guess).

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Mike Lee (Firebird)
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HeWhoMustNotBeNamed

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Originally posted by Vaumnou:
**Just a note: if you actually do that, please remember that Jupiter is a gas giant. Asteroids wouldn't make much sense, 'cause most of the planet is gaseous. It would be better to alter the background color of the systems around where Jupiter was, making them brighter. What would be WAY cool, is if you had crons set up so the effect propagates outwards slowly.

-Vaumnou

**

Keep in mind that the shockwave from the explosion would knock many of the asteroids out of orbit.

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"Damn, everybody wants something up their ass today! Yeah, I'm cool like that." - forge

Gluegun

...God, what is WITH you people? No one NEEDS that many systems... it is detrimental to the gameplay experience... I think keeping it (relatively) small, like EV:N would be fine... it hurts gameplay to have THOUSANDS of systems with little to nothing in them...

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Eep!

mrxak

Yeah, but if somebody does pull it off with 2000 or so systems, all with worthwhile content (something like 10-15 major governments, each with a nice long branching storylines and unique qualities), it would probably be a really great plug-in. The player could just stay in one region of space for a long time, never going very far, then after completing a storyline go off to another region of space and take up another storyline (as long as they aren't mutually exclusive). Then another, than another. It might be hard to keep it from being too repetetive sure, but if it's done right, it could be very popular.

Development time would be long and painful though, but with a large enough team, it could work.

(This message has been edited by mrxak (edited 05-13-2003).)

TheRedeemer

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Originally posted by Gluegun:
**...God, what is WITH you people? No one NEEDS that many systems... it is detrimental to the gameplay experience... I think keeping it (relatively) small, like EV:N would be fine... it hurts gameplay to have THOUSANDS of systems with little to nothing in them...

**

I don't mind having to travel through loads of systems with nothing in, as long as there is something interesting to find at the end, like a planet with cool outfits, an abondoned alien wreck, or a space station that was the last frontier into uncharted space. Because if theres something cool to see at the end, it makes it worthwhile.

TheRedemeer

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Replicant

I wish you luck with your 1000-strong universe, but I think you're going to need a lot of it in order to succeed. Large projects like that usually fail because of lack of motivation, not lack of ability. This is getting into YMMV territory, but I think that development goes better by stages. I saw a striking difference between mods for different games. A number of mods for Deus Ex were announced. All of them were wildly ambitious. One of them even planned on turning DX's first-person shooter action into a massively multiplayer online RPG. All failed. On the other hand, Diablo 2 has a number of successful mods, and notably, the successful ones almost all started with a single idea. This one would replace uniques, little more than a day's work of word processing; this one would raise difficulty, which was simply a matter of going through the text files and multiplying monster stats by an arbitrary number. It always turned into a cycle; they started with something simple, and then would add another simple improvement on top of it. That would in turn be followed by another fairly easy improvement, and another, until one day almost every aspect of the game had been changed.

Some people can pull off the giant leap forward. I suspect, however, that the majority of plug-in designers would be better off aiming low, then raising their sights. The number of ambitious projects that are now just half-finished data moldering on someone's hard drive tends to confirm my suspicions.

Just had to say that... it's depressing to see how few big projects are finished works compared to the number that have long-dead threads on the board. You might be one of those lucky few sods who can keep it up; you'll know for sure a few weeks from now, when you're done creating those systems and have to start populating them, and you check to see whether you're still feeling the urge for afterburner.

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Replicant

mrxak

True, motivation kills a lot of big projects.

Just in case anyone cared about my own TC in the works (for which I have no lack of motivation), it's only about 300 or so systems right now, and I don't think I'll be increasing it except for universe changes, which are really only minor alterations. Lately I've been working more on developing outlines for the many storylines it will include, and I have about twenty different charts mapping out how they interact and branch so far. I've already been writing bits and pieces when I get inspiration. I predict most of the time will be on graphics. I'm hoping to do all the landing picts myself (several are already complete), but I've already got a couple of people working on spöb picts. Weapon sounds are being produced by several others, but I'm going to hold off on intro music for now. Many spöbs are already placed, and governments are set up for the most part. Description texts are also being written, and I have a number of them complete for planets and bars. Nova ships are being used as placeholders until I'm farther along. Weapons/outfits are nonexistent, but I have most of them mapped out on paper. So yeah, I'm not worried about it becoming vaporware. I just get a little bit done each day, and eventually it will be done.

UncleTwitchy

Quote

Originally posted by mrxak:
So yeah, I'm not worried about it becoming vaporware. I just get a little bit done each day, and eventually it will be done.

Same here -- whenever I suffer from burnout, I walk away from it and work on other projects (or nothing at all) and then come back to it when I want to. So far, slow and steady is winning the race.

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Commander Arashi

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Originally posted by Russell Quintero:
**Keep in mind that the shockwave from the explosion would knock many of the asteroids out of orbit.

**

Um...all of this is technically true. If you could somehow summon up the power to turn Jupiter from a gravitationally bound collection of gas and rock to a cloud expanding outwards, you would get mostly gases, but about an earth's worth of solids. Plus add in the small collection of Jovian moons. You would likely perturb an asteroid or two, particulary from the Trojan groups (which gather around Jupiter's Lagrange points 4 and 5).

The expanding front of gas and rock would, among other things, fall into the upper layers of Earth's atmosphere, be added to our sun's mass and influence it's behavior, and head outwards to nearby star systems.

But let's talk about scale. First off, a more mathematically-inclined gentleman has calculated that to turn the Earth into rubble (this is based solely on the gravitational bonds, not on any material strengths) would take the entire output of our sun over a twenty-minute period. Considering that Jupiter is 318 times more massy...

Did I mention the sun puts out 3.9 EE 33 erg/sec, and converts 6 EE 11 kilograms of hydrogen to do so? Assume we make one honking weapon ship and assign it to blow up Jupiter. Said ship has, in the tanks of "fuel" (let's just assume Lhyd and a solar fusion cycle), are 2.3 EE 20 grams of fuseable hydrogen. 2,300,000,000,000 capital ships are left waiting in at the pump while this ship tops off. This isn't even up the level of back-of-the-envelope accuracy, so no utilty in mentioning said fuel tank is within a couple orders of magnitude of the size of Earth's Moon. Death Star indeed.

Oh, and let's dispose of the asteroid issue. To paraphrase one astronomer, were you standing on an asteroid you would spend a long time searching in vain to see another. The belt just isn't that dense. Nor is it that close. And what is hitting it is not a "shock wave" (in what? The ether?) but actual material projected from the explosion. (The so-called supernovae shock wave, a compressing of the trace gases of the interstellar medium, is so many magnitudes below any of the factors we are discussing it isn't of import here.)

Which brings us to inverse square. Imagine the material of Jupiter is spread out over an expanding sphere. When that sphere intersects Earth's orbit it has a surface area of 4.4 EE 19 km2, Earth's cross-section is 1.3 EE 8 km2...well well well; a good 5 EE 14 kilos falls on Earth. Very roughly speaking, if it were a single mass it'd be a kilometer on the side. Again, very roughly speaking, the total of all kinetic energy delivered would be about one 20-megaton hydrogen bomb. Which, as bad as it might be for those at ground zero, is a matter of small importance to the Earth as a whole. And, since much of this stuff is coming in waves of fairly dilute hydrogen, the more probable effect is spectacular Northern Lights.

Let's move outwards. Jupiter's escape velocity is 61 km/sec (this is the number we have to surpass to take the planet apart. Again, seeing as the shuttle carries maybe 80 tons of payload up to a LEO of under 11 km/sec, and Jupiter masses 1.9 times 10 to the 24 tons, the equivalent energy cost to "destroy" Jupiter would be expressed by 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 space shuttles taking off.) Anyhow, let's let this debris fly at a healthy 4x escape or 244 km/sec -- it still takes 5 days for the debris to impact Earth -- it is travelling EE -9 C and will take 95 years to reach Alpha Centauri.

We don't even have to calculate the mass or energy involved. Inverse square, remember? Astronomical distances are huge. Now, if there were some way of making Jupiter into a self-sustaining solar fusion reaction, it could keep burbling along, doubling the effective luminosity of our solar system, for thousands of years. The mass and energy densities needed for supernovae explosions are, alas, far too great; there is not the mass in the entire solar system to make a decent type II supernovae. Which is really what you would need to make an impact on the civilizations of stellar systems a few parsecs away.

Now, I'm not trying to put a damper on creativity, or show off (there are people on this board who are parsecs ahead of me in this stuff, plus were smart enough to bring their scientific calcular home with them!) Just pointing out that a little logic and a little looking up makes the idea of an exploding Jupiter filling nearby systems with asteroids look pretty durn ridiculous.

The argument is always made that one should turn off one's critical facilities and "Just enjoy the game, dude"/"It's only a movie!" The simple counter-argument is that the real world is so much more wonderful and wacky then most of what Hollywood imagines. Screenwriters did not invent black holes. A well-imagined flight of fantasy -- say, Pernese dragons -- is perfectly enjoyable. But if you are going to play at the actual world, or actual science, you should play seriously. We don't like movies to be set in San Franciso but obviously filmed in flat-as-hell LA, we don't like Julius Ceaser whipping out a pocket watch unless the object is parody or spoof, and it is even more abhorant to distort and misquote real physics and engineering and astronomy (to the detriment of young people attempting to learn something of the real world and how it works).

(Takes deep breath). But, over and above all the rest, I for one find hard SF "fun." It is an intellectual game, and like chess no fun if one or more players just cheat. We readers will accept rubber science and improbabilities -- even outright fictions -- for the sake of a good tale, but the best-loved tales are those that take what we know and project it and explore it and show just how wacky and wonderful it can be.

Take one improbable idea and work logically after that. For instance, let's discover that metallic hydrogen is actually stable at normal pressures. So we rip Jupiter apart and create a sort of mini Dyson sphere of roughly the orbit of Callisto. The trauma to poor Jupiter will accelerate all sorts of natural processes of radioative and gravitational heating and give us a nice little central hearth for our new home. Or...follow the previous idea and ignite Jupiter a la Clarke and others. Voila, a second solar system, the Gallileans terraformed into new living planets, and Earth gets a slightly brighter Moon. If we get bored with this set-up, we apply a little of our new power generation to breaking solar orbit and slowly coast out into the void as an independent stellar system (Jupiter and the now-warm Jovians).

Or if we can't resist tampering with the destinies of other suns, let a rogue of some sort (white dwarf, dark matter, black hole, whatever) plunge into our sun and trigger a Type I supernovae. We don't get all the nice heavy elements but we do get a pulse of hard radiation and energetic particles. If our aim was good, it will be a hot time on old Alpha Centauri in about 50 years.

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Butterfly
My husband gave his promise
He would return in the joyous season,
When robin red-breasts rebuild their nests.

Replicant

... which is why 'devastated' might be a better word for what happens to spobs than 'destroyed.' Space stations, sure, you can blow up those, but for planets, 'destroyed' probably means that you can't land because you screwed up the high-tech portions of the surface too much. Then the survivors contract out to some Rebel vacuum soldiers to come clean up the mess, and once they've rebuilt the spaceport, are back in business.

Of course, you can also assume some fictitious weapon was used. Nova already assumes that there is artificial gravity; supposing you could invert gravity in an area, you could make a planet explode as all of its internally-directed pressure turns into externally-directed expansion. Such a weapon would be quite effective against planets but merely an annoyance against other ships, thereby providing a plausible explanation for why it fits in 20 tons of space on your ship but doesn't come as standard on every warship in the galaxy in spite of its planet-smiting capacity.

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Replicant

Firebird

Quote

Originally posted by UncleTwitchy:
**Same here -- whenever I suffer from burnout, I walk away from it and work on other projects (or nothing at all) and then come back to it when I want to. So far, slow and steady is winning the race.

**

My problem is that I have too many projects, and I might be spreading myself too thin. I'm supposedly helping out on a new version of EVGE and on NR, but neither plug-in looks like it'll be out for another year, give or take five years.

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Mike Lee (Firebird)
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HeWhoMustNotBeNamed

Quote

Originally posted by Commander Arashi:
** <giant snip>**

I do believe that he was discussing a solar system based TC, in which case it is plausible that the destruction of Jupiter would wreak havoc on the asteroids. While there would be no shockwave of compressed air, there would be a high velocity wave of gases and debris, and that would perturb their orbits.

As for the mechanism of destruction...it's the future. Who knows what nifty weapons they will have devised. The idea of actually obliterating a planet does seem a bit absurd, especially one so large, but that only means that we cannot accomplish it now.

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"Damn, everybody wants something up their ass today! Yeah, I'm cool like that." - forge

Meaker VI

Quote

Originally posted by Replicant:
**... which is why 'devastated' might be a better word for what happens to spobs than 'destroyed.' Space stations, sure, you can blow up those, but for planets, 'destroyed' probably means that you can't land because you screwed up the high-tech portions of the surface too much...
Of course, you can also assume some fictitious weapon was used. Nova already assumes that there is artificial gravity; supposing you could invert gravity in an area, you could make a planet explode as all of its internally-directed pressure turns into externally-directed expansion. Such a weapon would be quite effective against planets but merely an annoyance against other ships, thereby providing a plausible explanation for why it fits in 20 tons of space on your ship but doesn't come as standard on every warship in the galaxy in spite of its planet-smiting capacity.

**

With the planets, I was thinking the same thing. You destroy stations, only devistate planets. Unless I make missions to destroy them too...

Accually, I was planning on making a mission that you got the ONLY weapon that destroyed Jupiter, (some mission ship) and use it to blow up Jupiter whilst fleeing. Then, the devistation would probably spread to most of the system.

Quote

Originally posted by Russell Quintero:
**I do believe that he was discussing a solar system based TC, in which case it is plausible that the destruction of Jupiter would wreak havoc on the asteroids. While there would be no shockwave of compressed air, there would be a high velocity wave of gases and debris, and that would perturb their orbits.

As for the mechanism of destruction...it's the future. Who knows what nifty weapons they will have devised. The idea of actually obliterating a planet does seem a bit absurd, especially one so large, but that only means that we cannot accomplish it now.

**

Exactly. Who knows what weird antimatter/fusion hydroxide weapon will be available in the future timescape I set up? Flight wasn't thought possible till a hundred years ago, the world was flat 500 years ago, so who says these things won't be possible in the future?

Anyway, I wouldn't make blowing up Jupiter a normal option. Not just some 300 cr weapon bought on some backwater world. This would be some government funded missoin to destroy a major object. The enemy who dwells in Jupiter's orbit.

(edit: blast my poor spelling. "Normall," bah!)

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I am ME hear me roar!
Meeoowwwww

(This message has been edited by Meaker VI (edited 05-14-2003).)

Commander Arashi

(/b)(/QUOTE)
Exactly. Who knows what weird antimatter/fusion hydroxide weapon will be available in the future timescape I set up? Flight wasn't thought possible till a hundred years ago, the world was flat 500 years ago, so who says these things won't be possible in the future?

(/B)(/QUOTE)

Mechanism, schmechanism. All in good humor, here, but the point is that the gravitational energy doesn't just "go away." Energy is energy (is mass, too), no matter whether it is stored in flywheels, batteries, high-energy photons or the potential of a load of bricks sitting twelve feet off the ground in a sling. If you got the energy to pull Jupiter apart, you got the energy to run a tractor beam that would suck every starbase in Auroran space into a handy star. You can try to get around stuff like this by making the special thing you want to do (make a star go novae, destroy a planet, etc.) a "special case", but you gotta wave your hands really fast to make sure it really is a special case.

Reversal of gravity is a cute idea. But...since it appears to apply to any mass, you could make a hell of a star drive out of it, plus since you are dealing with gravitation (which acts on all particles equally) you can have fighters make turns of millions of gees without even mussing the pilot's hair. Oh, and if I could cause Jupiter to fly apart from gravity reversal, I could also make your average city fly into the air, or your average sun go promptly nova. If I can't use the "Secret Jupiter Destructo-Ray" for these as well you'd better tell me why.

But, you see, this is the fun part. What else can we do with the Gravity Reverser? Well, spacehooks become a thing of the past. In fact, a nice deep planetary gravity well actually gives a ship a hefty boost on the way out. And cushions an incoming ship so it can enter orbit at some fantastic velocity. Oh, and that annoying hyperlimit should go bye-bye; it's a factor of local curvature as well.

Since we can turn gravity around with a simple double-wound coil of copper wire and a molybedenum whisker (or whatever), and since surface gravity is not so much the mass as how close you can get to it, how about a cute little handgun built around a 2 KG lump of neutronium. There's a slight engineering problem involved in getting your bullets back from being a thin smear over the pinhead lump of the neutronium, but once that gravity reverser goes, that bullet leaps away with an acceleration of thousands of gravities. Bullet? I'd say plasma, really. And while I'm playing with hyperdense matter, why not stick a gravity reverser with a short-lived battery in the middle of a lump of metallic hydrogen? Imagine the eagerness of that ultra-compressed material to return to an ordinary gas!

The most dangerous part of playing with the laws of physics is the ugly possibility of perpetual motion. So, here at the Grand Cooly Gravity-Reversing dam, the water flows from the lake through the turbines, flows over a gravity reverser, and runs back up the hill though another bank of just-as-powerful turbines before being returned to the lake. We have all the power we want, and it is free. If water doesn't do it for you, we could do the same trick with blocks of lead -- or simplify the whole mechanism and run heavy iron plungers up and down at 10 m/s2. Energy for nothing (and let me tell you, the universe HATES that).

Oh...and we can create a naked singularity! Imagine, please, the effects of bringing a gravity reverser up to a black hole. Suddenly, the hole is no longer black. We can see what had previously been unseeable; beyond the event horizon, outside the knowable universe. The cat meows back. Hey...maybe this is how the hypergates work!

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Butterfly
My husband gave his promise
He would return in the joyous season,
When robin red-breasts rebuild their nests.

Vast Deathmaster

My first thought was that you make a (url="http://"http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990624.html")Barred Spiral(/url) Galaxy. You would split up the number of star systems you actually had to play with. Then you could have a sequel where you deal with the other side of the bar.

Another thing that comes to mind which would make it easy to have two star systems "near" each other is to not forget that a Galaxy has thickness. Two stars that look near each other, are actually quite far away.

It's too bad the game doesn't allow a 3d map.

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Never meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for you are crunchy and taste good with
ketchup.

Spoony

WARNING: 1,000 systems is A LOT OF SYSTEMS, nobody knows what it's like to build 1,000 systems until they finish ten and look ahead of them... and say ooops, never mind.

If your team is large enough, you can pull it off, but I've never seen a thousand systems before...

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Curufinwe_Fëanor

Is there any way to import like an EPS of a map into some kind of editor?

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