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News: Celebrating 30 years of Star Control 2 - The Ur-Quan Masters

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Death 999
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Re: star control 1
« Reply #15 on: December 22, 2004, 02:33:52 am »

The SC 3d map was horrible. Just like nearly every other aspect of the game.

Things I would have added:
- The ability to fix 1 or 2 or 3 stars in place so that the rotation will not move them (if you fix 3, the starfield can't rotate...). This would help greatly with staying oriented.

- having the stars occur in constellations and clusters would help A LOT in keeping stuff straight, and it would also incidentally make physical sense (not as if that mattered much). In any case, it would be consistent with SC2. So not only did the map have problems, the starfield itself had problems.

- ability to consider only stars within a certain radius
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meep-eep
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Re: star control 1
« Reply #16 on: December 22, 2004, 06:15:58 am »

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- having the stars occur in constellations and clusters would help A LOT in keeping stuff straight, and it would also incidentally make physical sense (not as if that mattered much).

Clusters, yes. Constellations, no. They're just in a close angle as seen from Earth, but they can be very far apart in distance.
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Re: star control 1
« Reply #17 on: January 08, 2005, 08:37:03 am »

Quote

Clusters, yes. Constellations, no. They're just in a close angle as seen from Earth, but they can be very far apart in distance.


You're confusing TrueSpace astronomy with HyperSpace astronomy. The term for a close grouping of relatively few stars (say, anywhere from two to ten) in HyperSpace *is* a "constellation" -- repeated many times in SC2 dialogues and the manual. Of course these groupings are, likely as not, artificial distinctions made for the purposes of star travelers -- like states or counties in Earth geography -- but they certainly do represent real distances and real proximity.

They almost certainly do *not* represent the TrueSpace definition of a constellation -- a grouping of stars defined against Earth's night sky -- since the starmap they're defined on is an absolute grid rather than Earth's sky, and since they don't match up at all to the TrueSpace constellations they're named after. Like the names for the constellations themselves ("Centauri", "Aquilae", "Sextantis") the term "constellation" is just a convenient borrowing from TrueSpace astronomy to represent a sort-of-similar but different concept.

In astronomical terms, the whole of the starmap in Star Control 2 probably represents one "cluster", if that term is applicable in Hyperspace. Clusters contain hundreds of stars and the distances separating them are very wide.
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meep-eep
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Re: star control 1
« Reply #18 on: January 08, 2005, 11:26:58 am »

I don't actually remember the SC3 starmap very much, but considering that Death_999 was talking about things making physical sense, I don't think he's talking about HyperSpace (which appears to be 2D in nature anyhow).

As for the rest (naming of constellations in HS in SC2, etc), that's not under dispute.

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Re: star control 1
« Reply #19 on: January 12, 2005, 01:29:49 am »

My 'physical sense' idea was simply that the map was way too evenly distributed to be random. Also this differed strongly from the distribution of stars within hyperspace in SC2. Why would the Kessari quadrant have evenly spaced stars in total contrast to our quadrant?

Obviously, distance comparisons to TrueSpace are, well, thoroughly vapid, due to the immense distortion of Hyperspace.
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