Mass Star Rolls

[OneMadOgre]

So, I've been following your development for a bit and it dovetails nicely into a project I've played with off and on for 15-20 years. So I took your system generation rules, or at least what I perceive to be the system generation rules from VBAM2E-sysgen-20120513.pdf and built a program to run out a galaxy generation. While mostly for me, if the table below the map is of interest for seeing how the system generation rules roll out, please let me know and I can whip up a page to allow you to create additional galaxies if you'd like to see more data.

http://sg.onemadogre.com/sg-galaxy.asp for the galaxy map with the table beneath it. I don't promise a good browser experience, I've only played with it in chrome so far and my hair is pointy from managing software engineers as opposed to doing the actual work anymore.

[LiolLangston]

Certainly seems to show that high Raw rolls are much more likely than high bio rolls. I'm seeing almost 50% of the systems you have here seem to have RAW 4 or more, while for Bio only about 10% are 4 or above.

There is a slightly newer set of VBAM 2e rules but i don't think they have changed much in regards to system generation. VBAM-CG-2E-20120531.

*edit* in fact the download link for it is in the VBAM 2e playtest files thread, as the last post.

*edit* the trends for your system generation seem to fit the ones I've rolled up for myself as well.

[Charles Lewis]

Now that right there is every kind of awesome.

[wminsing]

Fantastic. Any relation between system stats and the planets depicted orbiting it?

-Will

[OneMadOgre]

aha. I see you clicked in. That wasn't actually there when I originally posted the link.

The planet ratio and constitution is based on star system parameters right now, yes. But it's primitive. It just divides Raw and Bio by 3 and plots out planets for them. I need to randomize the planet images, find black hole images, find color shifted and a better star images. I also need to figure out how I represent binary star systems for creating a secondary star, I think I'd like to see that. The system zoom is an unapologetic rip off of this piece of art. http://www.koenhendrix.com/samples/solar/

I've connected starships to it, but I've been using my own homebrew star ship construction. I haven't decided if I'm going to try to work in the colony information for 2E next, or get my starship construction, orders piece working.

[virtutis.umbra]

OneMadOgre,

This looks AWESOME. Would you be willing to share out the source for this, either on the Yahoo group or, better yet, on a web repository like e.g. GitHub or someplace where other players could fork from it?

[OneMadOgre]

Absolutely.

However, remember I'm a pointy hair boss. The last time I was coding professionally was before dot net was around. So this is all legacy ASP (basically VB Script) against a MS-SQL backend.

If it's useful to people, I can also just make it available on my server as well. Spawning out galaxies isn't a huge deal. Part of why I posted it was to see if I had anything people might like. It's kind of locked in to a coordinate map, as I can't figure out how to handle hex maps with decision making on when I should cull a jump lane because the math doesn't work. I have to say, I kind of like how the black holes act as huge distance jumps in the math I have which just keeps matching jump lanes until there aren't anymore than can be matched.

[countercheck]

That is AMAZINGLY cool!

[virtutis.umbra]

However, remember I'm a pointy hair boss. The last time I was coding professionally was before dot net was around. So this is all legacy ASP (basically VB Script) against a MS-SQL backend.

Don't sell yourself short - a glance at the "View Source" of your planet detail screen showed me a distinctly simple, data-first HTML model with a good use of CSS and JS. Platform is certainly important in web programming, but in the end it's all about the HTML you're generating in my opinion. That's why I, for one, loathe ASP.NET WebForms - it generates the most godawful unreadable unparseable HTML/CSS/JS ever.

I've been itching to tinker with ASP.NET MVC, though, so if you share this out I might have to see about forward-porting the application logic to that.

Any system you can point me to that shows something in the "Ships" field, just for my own interest?

[OneMadOgre]

Ha! trust me, you'll hate the source code.

I've done some additional thinking along those lines, and let me draw back a bit. While I'm a new discoverer of VBAM, it is my understanding that at some point I will have an opportunity to buy the source books I'm currently previewing. That being the case, it probably isn't fair to make me the sole decision maker on if I release the source or not. I'm happy to release the source around the homebrew stuff, but I think I might clear up if I should release the source to implement the ideas that aren't solely my own.

Ships in Algorab: http://sg.onemadogre.com/sg-systemzoom.asp?starid=92 At some point, might be kind of fun to show them in system graphically too.

[virtutis.umbra]

it probably isn't fair to make me the sole decision maker on if I release the source or not. I'm happy to release the source around the homebrew stuff, but I think I might clear up if I should release the source to implement the ideas that aren't solely my own.

Ohhh hey good point. It might be unkind to our kind benefactors to release something that allows people to run too many of the game's mechanics without buying the rulebooks.

[OneMadOgre]

So while I appreciate the attaboys, my initial intent was to just show how multiple systems rolled out. I have every intention of flushing my database and reconstructing a new random galaxy of 200 star systems between this evening and Sunday evening. If the table is interesting, I'll leave it accessible, but I'm getting closer to adding in player views on the galaxy, which means all of the charts and zoom screens will change so that I can run a proper double blind game. At which point, I don't promise there will still be ships on the starid 92.

[virtutis.umbra]

That's cool, I get that it's a live/mutable resource. Carry on!

[OneMadOgre]

Good. 200 new stars, jumplanes and planets are now placed. I did put system id 92 back under player 1 control so that the star system will have a purple underneath it. Then gave player 1 some adjacent systems so that the purple is more obvious.

The table now reflects an new 200 random systems generated.

[OneMadOgre]

I had to rerun the recreate galaxy code a couple of times to get the system terrain and system specials activated. Discovering one of the problems with my random generation of star locations and then placing jump lanes between stars by distance and availability makes some interesting terrain in that it can create these long jumps between systems with 5+ jump lanes, but in the case of this last time, it gives the map a little bit of an ugly look. Especially since I seemed to roll an above average amount of black holes this time.