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Author Topic: UQM Hyperspace Map/Planetary Database Project  (Read 23232 times)
Sage
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UQM Hyperspace Map/Planetary Database Project
« on: September 17, 2003, 11:11:45 pm »

That's right, an image map. For what purpose? Maybe to link up to the existing star info database? Maybe to create a database of my own? I'm not sure yet. I'll know when I get there.

The image in question is made of 16 4x zooms pasted together. I would have created this at 2x (which I actually have an image of still), but many stars were obscured or not visible at all. Even at 4x I can't make out Vela, but that can be worked around. I've also input the data for the first column of stars. Hovering over a star will display its name, and link you to whatever it is I intend to do later.

20 tiles down, 380 to go.

Random Ideas for what could potentially be included:
- Overlays for spheres of influence, quasispace portals, rainbow worlds, collectible items, homeworlds, etc.
- Planetary database?
- Old spheres of influence from the paper hyperspace map?
- Constellation images?
- Anything else?

Errors? Questions? Comments? Ideas? Have I lost my mind? Post away!
« Last Edit: November 01, 2003, 02:29:14 pm by sageallen » Logged
Spurk
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Re: Insane Undertaking: Hyperspace Image Map
« Reply #1 on: September 17, 2003, 11:24:10 pm »

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- Old spheres of influence from color hyperspace map?

Ah, that's why you didn't just use the old one, right? I was trying to figure out why you did all those screen shots when there's already one up at PNF.

Anyway, neat idea. The HTML nerd in me would want to make the whole thing Javascript so when you moved your mouse over various planets or whatever it would pop up the information in a window or something. But it's probably better not to do that.
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Culture20
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Re: Insane Undertaking: Hyperspace Image Map
« Reply #2 on: September 18, 2003, 01:20:26 am »

Doesn't seem to work in Mozilla 1.4;  IE might be fixing a syntactical error in your code when you test it (it's been known to do that)...
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Spurk
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Re: Insane Undertaking: Hyperspace Image Map
« Reply #3 on: September 18, 2003, 02:06:07 am »

^ yeah, for Mozilla support, you need to put title="Vega" (or whatever) as well as alt="Vega"
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Sage
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Re: Insane Undertaking: Hyperspace Image Map
« Reply #4 on: September 18, 2003, 07:40:41 am »

I've already converted the offline version to titles instead of alts, as per an Opera user's request. As a benefit to this method I also discovered how to do line breaks within the titles, so now I can probably put in star coordinates and other data in those tooltips.
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Culture20
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Re: Insane Undertaking: Hyperspace Image Map
« Reply #5 on: September 20, 2003, 04:52:04 am »

Wow, this looks really great Sage;  I bet Starcontrol RPG will want to take a look at this image map for their games (with a little css magic, you'd have dynamic circles of influence and everything)...
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umgahbob
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Re: Insane Undertaking: Hyperspace Image Map
« Reply #6 on: September 20, 2003, 04:01:28 pm »

That's a good start sage. One of your ideas, the planetary database, would this include minerals, and biologicals? That'd be one hell of an undertaking if so. I like the idea of the constellation overlay, that'd probably stop people from asking about the whereabouts of the Vux beast.
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Sage
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Re: Insane Undertaking: Hyperspace Image Map
« Reply #7 on: September 20, 2003, 08:31:37 pm »

200 tiles down, 200 to go.

umgahbob: My whole idea with the constellations was to solve just that problem. Though I've always thought that the constellation looked more like a hat. Ah well.

As for a planetary database, yeah it might be done. On that note...

Culture20: Do you perchance have any of this CSS on hand that I might be able to make use of?

Also:

I searched the forums and discovered that you were looking for/into the planet generation code, and considering the possibility of building a database on this. Did you ever get anywhere with this? And if you did, think we could share some data or collaborate on this?
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PsychicKiller
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Re: Insane Undertaking: Hyperspace Image Map
« Reply #8 on: September 20, 2003, 09:08:41 pm »

200 tiles to go? Great going man! You probably know everything alot better than I do about planets, but I can give you some quick info about planets... when I get my icq working again. :-/
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umgahbob
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Re: Insane Undertaking: Hyperspace Image Map
« Reply #9 on: September 21, 2003, 07:56:14 am »

Quote
umgahbob: My whole idea with the constellations was to solve just that problem. Though I've always thought that the constellation looked more like a hat. Ah well.



I never thought it looked much like a snake either. It kinda does look like a hat though.
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Krulle
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Re: Insane Undertaking: Hyperspace Image Map
« Reply #10 on: September 22, 2003, 04:48:46 pm »

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I never thought it looked much like a snake either. It kinda does look like a hat though.

A snake has swallowed an mamooth:


      MM
____MM______/
/


Well, yes, that does resemble a hat....

It never had to be specific for me. To be honest, the first 4 or 5 times i played tha game, i never found the beast, therefor i never did the sidequest of reviving the Shofixti and the Yehatrebellion and the rejoining with the Pkunk.
Until now, i never had a Pkunk to fight the Sa-Matra (and i do not have time to try it the next few months).
« Last Edit: September 22, 2003, 04:49:18 pm by Krulle » Logged
Death 999
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Re: Insane Undertaking: Hyperspace Image Map
« Reply #11 on: September 22, 2003, 07:46:44 pm »

Clearly the VUX got this tip from the Little Prince.
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Culture20
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Re: Insane Undertaking: Hyperspace Image Map
« Reply #12 on: September 23, 2003, 12:53:25 am »

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Culture20: Do you perchance have any of this CSS on hand that I might be able to make use of?

Cascading  Style Sheets are what you want to look for.  You can assign layers to objects (including pngs of circles with transparent backgrounds).  I don't know if you can get the images to be transparent to the mouse cursor though (so that the mouse could click through a circle-image onto your starmap background)... It's been years since I've written a decent webpage.
Quote
I searched the forums and discovered that you were looking for/into the planet generation code, and considering the possibility of building a database on this. Did you ever get anywhere with this? And if you did, think we could share some data or collaborate on this?

I started looking through the code and decided that my idea wasn't worth the hassle of tracing where things where stored.  I figured I'd wait until there was better documentation.

Edit: by "things" I meant which variables store what information.  Each solar system is created on the fly based on their coordinates; change a star's coordinates slightly, and the whole solar system changes.
« Last Edit: September 23, 2003, 02:12:58 am by Culture20 » Logged
Sage
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Re: Insane Undertaking: Hyperspace Image Map
« Reply #13 on: September 23, 2003, 01:41:13 am »

About the CSS: Simple solution for that...since the stars on the map appear above the circles anyhow, I can simply put the spheres of influence beneath the star layer but above the grid layer. Though obviously there are no such layers yet, that can change in time.

About generation code: Sensible, but troublesome. I also went looking in PNF's news archive for the planetary database I read about when I first got linked to this community via Penny Arcade. Sadly this database seems to no longer exist, and there appears to be a robots.txt preventing the Web Archive from indexing copies of it. Very annoying. So it looks like I'll have to archive the data myself, with PsychicKiller's help (and pretty much anyone else that's willing) if he'll do it.
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Re: Insane Undertaking: Hyperspace Image Map
« Reply #14 on: September 23, 2003, 02:58:40 am »

Another good reason to use CSS:
You could use a black background with or without the grid, then use little star images for each star, but they could be placed exactly where you want them to go (maybe use some JavaScript to zoom in-out (space the stars/grid by a factor)).  This would make the page load faster (not downloading a gigantic gif file).  The circles of influence would still be big (at least for the two Ur-quan species), but the biggest file would be broken down into a few tiny files.
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