2gunkid Posted September 23, 2003 Report Share Posted September 23, 2003 Howdy folks. I'm tenetively going to be starting a Star Hero campaign in the near future, and I was wondering if anyone could recomend a program to use to keep track of star locations. I'd love something that lets me define x,y,z coordinates for stars and log star names and boarders of stellar nations and what-not. Any ideas? Thanks, James. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Polaris Posted September 23, 2003 Report Share Posted September 23, 2003 I think I remember someone mentioning that ProFantasy was coming out with a program that would do just what you are looking for. It was a Campaign Cartographer for space. Does anyone know if this program came out? If so, if anyone has it, how easy/hard is it to use? Polaris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
comfortmd Posted October 17, 2003 Report Share Posted October 17, 2003 i have seen references to that on their website, so i must assume it will be out soon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tempuswolf Posted October 17, 2003 Report Share Posted October 17, 2003 There's the Sector Generator in the Free Stuff-Other Software right here at Hero Web Site. I don't think it does all that you requested in your post but it is a start. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Long Posted October 17, 2003 Report Share Posted October 17, 2003 I don't think ProFantasy has come out with their space supplement for Campaign Cartographer yet, but I believe it's due out "soon." Other than (hopefully) that program, I don't know of any other resource that makes it easy to create a three-dimensional galaxy. And believe me, I've looked around. The closest thing I've found is a paper publication, The Astrogator's Handbook, which maps out on paper all the stars within 150 LY of Earth. There are a bunch of websites that list the galactic coordinates of stars, but a lot of them require you to have an astronomy grad student's knowledge to fully and properly understand them, and none of 'em that I found have a "mapping" feature for creating your own. Astronomers, for some reason, only seem interested in existing stars. They have no idea how much fun it is to just create your own. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Polaris Posted October 17, 2003 Report Share Posted October 17, 2003 I wrote to the folks at Pro Fantasy and was told that the space map program is going to be coming out, but is not yet. They said they added me to their list to send information to as it becomes available... as I get information, I will post it to the boards. Polaris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jhamin Posted October 17, 2003 Report Share Posted October 17, 2003 According to the info they released on their Email Discussion List, Stellar Cartographer is being worked on but still has some polishing to do before it is ready for prime time. It sounds like the time until the release date can be measured in months, not weeks, but also not in years. Profantasy is pretty good about actually releasing their products somewhat on time, and their customer service is among the best I have ever encountered. (When I was having an odd problem they actually tracked down the programmer to answer a question). Short answer, if you need a program in the next month or so Steller Cartographer won't be there for you. If you need it a year from now it may well be ready. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest C_Zeree Posted October 17, 2003 Report Share Posted October 17, 2003 A program that I've toyed with a couple times is "It's Full of Stars" by Claus Børnich. It asks you how big you want your "sector" (in LY), how dense you want it packed, and then starts randomly placing randomly generated systems. Its full 3-D, and you can just start creating your own system instead of having them generated. There is a limit on Sector SIze through. So no 100,000 LY galaxies. Love to own the computer that could generate that and hold such a creation though. Play around, its free! It's Full of Stars Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadowcat1313 Posted November 2, 2003 Report Share Posted November 2, 2003 I would recommend Heaven and Earth... which allows you to select how much data you want on an area, it was designed for Traveller and GURPS Space, but I dont see why you couldnt adapt it to Star Hero it can be found here http://www.downport.com/wbd/HEAVEN_&_EARTH.htm Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JohnTaber Posted November 3, 2003 Report Share Posted November 3, 2003 I plan to use It's Full Of Stars. I've played around and it looks kinda neat. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
assault Posted November 5, 2003 Report Share Posted November 5, 2003 You might try a search on "Chview". This is a Java tool for mapping stars originally designed by fans of CJ Cherryh. It appears to be able to accomodate any set of data. Alan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jkeown Posted November 9, 2003 Report Share Posted November 9, 2003 Celestia Try this one. http://www.shatters.net/celestia It uses distance/declination/right acension from Sol for coordinates, but it works great. I use Fractal Terrains to generate a planet surface, polish it in Paint Shop and use NotePad to write Celestia code to create whole solar systems. You can even run the program's clock forward and backward to find out when your system's planets will eclipse each other and to help you describe the sky to your players. This last bit is accomplished by placing the viewpoint 2 meters from a planet, syncing the orbit and looking around with the mouse. You can really describe some beautiful vistas to your players this way. (especially from Terrestrial planets circling Gas Giants... just lovely!) I've written some TableMaster code to generate whole systems from scratch that I can just plug into Celestia... really boss... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
keithcurtis Posted November 10, 2003 Report Share Posted November 10, 2003 Awesome program Jkeown! I wish I had had this when I ran my Solar Colonies campaign. It was a pre-ftl sci-fi game set throughout the solar system. Sigh... Keith "Ahead of his time" Curtis Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Badger Posted November 12, 2003 Report Share Posted November 12, 2003 I was going to create a thread about this type of thing, thanks for saving me time;) . I have been thinking about starting up a kind of combination of star/super game and I wanted kind of a visual to "estimate" how far they have to travel, etc. I guess theoetically you could "piece" some of the sectors you create together to have a region of a galaxy. And I agree why cant astronomers use their imaginations. They might get a date now and again:cool: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kristopher Posted November 12, 2003 Report Share Posted November 12, 2003 Keep in mind that the Milky Way is an immensely vast place. Over 100,000 light years from one edge to the other. Somewhere around 300 billion* stars. You could use a relatively tiny portion of it and still have 1000s of stars to map, and maybe 10000s of worlds to visit... * US billions, not UK billions... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Badger Posted November 12, 2003 Report Share Posted November 12, 2003 Yeah, I was kinda planning on doing something like that. Yeah I remember in science class the mentioning of the size of the galaxy. Little too big to think about for my puny mind. . Yeah I was thinking of just a region, though you cant necessarily assume that every system has a planet with sentient life. The Sol system is still up for debate on the whole sentient thing:p Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Curufea Posted November 14, 2003 Report Share Posted November 14, 2003 Some of my more vehemently hard-SF players have been mapping our campaign universe. A habit I hope to break them of - as we are doing space opera and have magic - hard-SF is not genre. But they have come up with info that may be useful to other people- http://www.glyphweb.com/esky/default.htm?http://www.glyphweb.com/esky/concepts/spectralclassification.html http://www.anzwers.org/free/universe/hr.html Personally I'm all for drawing a point on a piece of paper after you've been to the star and writing in how long it took to get there - instead of exact lightyear distances and spectral classes... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jkeown Posted November 14, 2003 Report Share Posted November 14, 2003 I forgot... I made up up some interstellar mapping symbols for use with Campaign Cartographer. They're on the CC2 webite... Profantasy.com Or I could mail them to interested parties... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grymlynn Posted November 19, 2003 Report Share Posted November 19, 2003 Hey Guys! Do you think that you could get these links to these great programs put up in the "Free Stuff" section of this site? I would love to try all these things out, but my Star Hero game is some distance away, and I would hate to loose these resources because I didn't have the opportunity to start before this thread went away... I dunno how you would go about that, hopefully Ben will help... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ben Seeman Posted November 19, 2003 Report Share Posted November 19, 2003 This thread will never go away, so don't worry... As far as posting stuff to the Free Stuff section, I'll post it if someone e-mails the stuff to me... but I generally don't like to post other people's stuff without the owner requesting it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Curufea Posted November 20, 2003 Report Share Posted November 20, 2003 More links- World Building http://www.hut.fi/~vesanto/world.build.html Mapping http://www.hut.fi/~vesanto/link.useful/maps/maps.html On Creating an Earth-Like Planet http://www.cix.co.uk/~morven/worldkit/index.html Definative page of 3D starmaps http://www.projectrho.com/starmap.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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