The thing that is really freaking me out right now is that we are at this stage of the game without a usable game map of the universe. Yet one more thing our illustrious founders could not be bothered to do when they started this game. Michael seems to have the whole stellar mapping thing under control, that is great, now we just have to deal with ~1000 solar systems (# of stars within 50ly of Earth, the traditional area of the 2300AD universe), ~25 Satellites per solar system, ~100 hexes per Satellite … and each hex has >5 elements of information. Does anyone have some man-lifetimes to dedicate to the cause of generating, checking for reasonability, and updating this? Even if +99% of it is never colonized it still needs to be generated ahead of time. So I am throwing this desperate plea open to everyone:
Does anyone have any kind of procedural generation system which can generate the type and amount of usable game information we need? I would prefer some system Traveller related, but I am desperate enough to consider any alternative.
The system has to be
-Functional: No ‘Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if …’
-It has be accessible by everyone. A game map is no good unless each player can use it. Proprietary software, unintelligible output, etc, is useless.
-It has to be not labour intensive to use. Count the number of clicks/keystrokes it takes to do something, do you love this game enough to do it 10s of thousands if not millions of times?
-It has to generate results which look somewhat like our current rules. I do not expect any premade system to perfectly generate everything exactly how our current rules say they should be; so I cannot emphasis enough that
which ever system is the easiest to use the rules will have to be changed to match whatever is the output from said system.
The best that I have found so far is
http://www.downport.com/wbd/HEAVEN_&_EARTH.htm
It is ancient free ware …oh god I have no idea if it will work on a non-Windows box… I have worked out a procedure which would amount to ~9 clicks/keystrokes per Satellite --> Sounds pretty good right? --> but over the course of 25000 Satellites, at 1 click/keystroke per second works about to be ~62 man-hours of work, just to generate and enter! Also, for starters, I can think of this would mean rules changes to:
-Asteroid Mining is going to have to be altered to be something about mining the specific Asteroid belts and rings generated by the system and not mining the Orbit hex of any Satellite. <meh, ok>
-rewiting everything to do with Atmo, G, AU, Breathability, Hospitable/Inhospitable/Intolerable to instead be about World Size, Atmosphere code, Orbit#. <grumble, fine>
-hex size generated is *variable with World Size* which means to keep things consistent across worlds everything range or area related would have to have some kind of World Size term added. <boo!!!>
-I am sure there will be many other rules changes which will be necessitated that I cannot think of right now. <shudder>