Geography Tools

MajorTom: It's unlikely that I'll have anything working by then. I think the editor should be useful for what you have in mind, but I'm trying to work out the best way of dealing with the size and scale of the maps. I've had a look at the screenshots of Tech2kjason's work at www.geocities.com/tech2kjason/ and it isn't obvious how he intended to deal with this.

Mdvalley: Thanks, that helps.

Hooray! According to the counter, I'm the second person ever to look at that web page. But I still can't understand how it is that I've never seen it before. How did you find it Unheard Of?

Maybe just the page is new, but the site isn't. Because the program looks familiar. I think I had it downloaded somewhere to try out.

What do you mean by "the size and scale of the maps"? What about this do you consider an issue? Technically, the map size is limited only by floating-point value acuracy. The smaller the better though, obviously. Theoretically, the map size is infinite. I don't believe anyone has ever reached the edge of one. And indeed, there may be no edge. It might just go on until the numbers wrap back around, positioning you at the opposite side of the map. But floating-point positional data will get less accurate the farther you go from the center.

Thanks for posting that link again mdvalley, I forgot to download the first time around.

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The map file uses double-precision floating point numbers for positioning, so I assume that’s what flux uses too. The highest a double-precision floating point number can go is 1.7 x 10^308 with 15 digits of precision. The farthest I’ve ever been from a map center in EOC was around 10^12 meters. The size of the solar system with millimeter precision... kinda impressive if you think about it. I’d imagine, if you were to actually go to “the edge�, you’d either wrap around to the other side... or crash your system. Mod your LDS to something insane (single-precision will go to 3.4 x 10^38) and try it.

For the scale, I think what Unheard Of means is that if you were to put Earth’s orbit on the screen, then draw the moon’s orbit around the Earth, it would be so tiny your monitor wouldn’t be able to show it. Space is really big like that. You would need a tremendous amount of zoom in/out to make placing bodies and stations practical.

Looking through the POG SDK’s header files, I didn’t find a single function that took or returned a double float. But at 10^12 meters, single-precision is only accurate to about a hundred kilometers, and my ship flew just fine out that far.

Originally posted by Second Chance

How did you find it Unheard Of?

Extensive bashing of google and one lucky guess. Has anyone heard of this "Corland" fellow that the site refers to?

What do you mean by "the size and scale of the maps"? What about this do you consider an issue?

I'm thinking about displaying and navigating the map in the editor. The ingame Nav map is fairly easy to use, but doesn't show elevation. Full 3d is possible but potentially clunky to navigate and java 3d presents certain irritating problems when used with swing (integration of heavy and lightweight components - it's doable, but annoying)

Do you think the likelihood of someone adding a planet with an orbit out-of-plane with the other orbits is high enough to warrant all that work to display elevation in 3D? If so; cool! I'm all for additional features. But it sounds like a lot work to me.

For the scaling of orbits in the in-game map; my map of our solar system has all the planets out to pluto at their correct orbital distances from the sun. With the earth's moon at it's correct distance. And it displays fine. As I understand it, the starmap uses some kind of sliding scale to display orbits based on their distance from the center object. So it wouldn't matter what the proportion of one orbit to another is. At the solar level, sub-orbiting bodies close to larger bodies aren't displayed. You have to select the large body (such as the Earth), and it would zoom in the right amount to show you the Moon's orbit. If the planet had multiple moons whose orbits exceed the predefined limit for display, they simply don't get shown until they're cycled to. I don't know if that's the issue here or not.

*edit*
Oh wait, now I get it. mdvalley, you meant his program wouldn't be able to show it, right? Sorry about that, I'm a little tired. But, Unheard Of, you might want to emulate the above approach in your editor. But that sounds like a lot of work too.

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The Ultimate Guide To Modding: I-War 2 - Edge Of Chaos (on hold during SW MP mod)
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Originally posted by Second Chance

Do you think the likelihood of someone adding a planet with an orbit out-of-plane with the other orbits is high enough to warrant all that work to display elevation in 3D? If so; cool! I'm all for additional features. But it sounds like a lot work to me.

We'll see - I'll include the option of changning the elevation, but displaying it isn't a priority.

you might want to emulate the above approach in your editor. But that sounds like a lot of work too.

It's going to be a lot of work either way