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Topic: Announcing a New Map Poster... (Read 4856 times)
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jschmerge
Zebranky food
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Posts: 7
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Hey guys, I've been a fan of SC2 since I was a kid... I recently downloaded UQM and (finally) beat the game after close to 15 years!
Let me say thanks to all of the people that have made UQM a success! It was a lot of fun going back and replaying this game, and the remixes of the music are top-notch (I especially like the HyperSpace remix).
When I played this game as a kid, there was a poster-sized map that came with the game that showed the HyperSpace coordinates of the various stars in the galaxy, and it was pretty useful as a starting point for figuring out where to go in the game. I recently found a scan of this poster online, and thought in might be cool to post a copy of the map with the locations of various things (QuasiSpace exits, Rainbow Worlds, etc.) superimposed upon the old map... Kind of a graphical cheat-sheet.
When I started to work on it, it quickly became clear to me that the scan didn't have the resolution needed to add the stuff that I wanted to add, so I made my own reproduction of the old poster... I started with about 50 screen scrapes of the in-game hyperspace map, and added the stuff from the old SC2 poster. There's more I want to add (Greek letters designating every star in each system for a start), but at this point, I have a high-res image (3200x3500) with all of the information that was available on the old poster.
You can find a preview of it here: http://www.speakeasy.org/~schmerge/files/UrquanMap.png.
Please feel free to let me know what you think 
I do have one question for the UQM developers... I want to eventually release this image under a creative-commons style license... Do you guys see any issues with doing something like that?
Thanks,
John
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Cedric6014
Enlightened
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Posts: 701
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Hey John, that's great work.
I've been waiting for a decent reproduction of the old map. I certainly prefer it to one with all the spoilers.
Its my hope that a real decent one can be added to the UQM release as a downloadable image file, preferably as faithful to the original as possible.
Did notice a typo though: you have gigclas instead of giclas
As far as suggestions: anything to make it as close to the original gets a thumbs up from me, like perhaps refining the constellation lines, and NOT having the alpha beta etc.
Great job though
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spinsane
Zebranky food
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Posts: 42
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It does look nice!- I was wondering, does anybody have the special edition white starmap? It's about twice the size of the original black one and is a little prettier.
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jschmerge
Zebranky food
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Posts: 7
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Hey, thanks for the feedback... Thanks for catching the typo
As far as fixing the constellation lines, I might be able to do something to make them look a bit more like the original, but I haven't yet played with different ways of rendering those lines.
My goal in creating this map was to duplicate all of the info on the original map, not to create an exact copy... As far as I know, all of the info from the original is in this map. Overall, I had 2 guiding principals when creating this: 1) Make it readable. 2) Get through the repetitive stuff as quickly as possible.
Now that I've got most of the hard parts taken care of, I can go back and work on tweaking it a bit.
Thanks again for the possitive comments.
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Novus
Enlightened
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Posts: 1938
Fot or not?
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I do have one question for the UQM developers... I want to eventually release this image under a creative-commons style license... Do you guys see any issues with doing something like that?
That shouldn't be a problem. From the UQM licence:
The content -- voiceovers, dialogue, graphics, sounds, and music -- are copyright (C) 1992, 1993, 2002 Toys for Bob, Inc. or their respective creators. The content may be used freely under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license (included below, and also available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/).
However, if you want to be pedantic, the contents of the starmap are defined in the code (src/sc2code/plandata.c), which is GPL. I have no idea whether the starmap data is intended to be GPL, and I can't say I have any idea how the GPL is supposed to work if you take a bunch of definitions out of the code and make a map of them. 
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jschmerge
Zebranky food
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Posts: 7
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Hey guys, a couple of things:
First, I have a *completely* labeled map now (greek letter designations for every star in a constellation). You can find it here: http://www.speakeasy.org/~schmerge/files/UQMGreek.png. This took quite a bit of expresso to make my way through, so if any of you have the time to double-check the star designations, I would *really* appreciate it.
Secondly, I *think* I've got a pretty good idea of how to reproduce the look of the original SC2 map... It took a bit of playing around to figure out how to do it, but I think I have it... Check out this preview: http://www.speakeasy.org/~schmerge/files/new.png. It's not perfect *at all*, butt I think it looks a lot more like the original map than anything else i've posted. I'm only posting the thumbnail now because I'm realizing that I need to totally scratch the base layer of the map and rework it from scratch.
Lastly, I'm issuing a call for help... I need help filling the bottom of the map with something that looks good. Any suggestions or art are welcome
*Sigh* I started on doing this as both a thank you to the developers who made UQM possible and as a way of learning how to use Gimp... It's turning into more of a project than that.
-J
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CelticMinstrel
Enlightened
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Posts: 522
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For the bottom, here's the text from the original:
This map details the spatial relationship between the stars in our known
region of the galaxy, as well as the spheres of influence for each alien
race as of AD 2133. The positions are based on HyperSpace coordi-
nates, which may be unsettling to some students of TrueSpace
astronomy. Defined long ago by Chenjesu stargazers, the constella-
tions are now accepted by all Alliance races as the standard. Due to
the great difficulty in pronouncing the Chenjesu language, each
race has translated the names into their own tongue. When it came
time for Earth to adopt this system, the United Nations decided to use
traditional astrological designations, assigned at random. This has
cause some confusion, but it is considered preferable to the sug-
gested alternative: using names of past politicians.
There's also a star key, arranged thus:
Red Orange Yellow Green Blue White
Dwarf
Giant
Supergiant
I think you should include the star key, at least; as for the text, I see you've already got an abbreviated version of it. I personally would like to see the whole text on the map (except without the line breaks in the middle of words).
The only other thing the original has the yours doesn't is the title "Hyperspace Star Map" below "Star Control II" (you coul place it below "Ur-Quan Masters" in your version).
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Dragon
Frungy champion
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Posts: 86
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Love it, particularly the alpha, beta, gamma etc... Actually I was thinking of printing it out (A2) but, and here's the rub, the background is too dark. Would it be possible to use a lighter/more colourful background instead?
Just as a test I tried slapping a rainbow/nebula/whatsit behind everything and it, um, certainly makes it more colourful. I also gave the words and symbols a one or two pixel black border so they were still visible. I think the full version looks quite nice although one can''t really see what's going on in this little version
That's my two cents.
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CelticMinstrel
Enlightened
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Posts: 522
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I think I prefer the black version...
If you're worried about printing, is there any problem with simply inverting it?
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SuddenDeath
Frungy champion
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Gender:
Posts: 96
from Sunstrike's image pack
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Another small error spotted: it's not Achemar, but Achernar
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