| Animated territory map |
Sat, 13 December 2003 15:38  |
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Following on from a discussion in rgcs I am building a utility that creates an animated territory map from a set of planet reports.
While it works OK for me, it is not particularly robust, so I'd like to get a bit of test data to give it a work-out.
If anyone would like to supply me with a set of report files, I will see if I can send them back an animated GIF showing how the territory changed over time (like Xtreme Borders, but moving).
I would need the .map file and a set of planet reports, renamed according to the year. For example, mygame.map along with 2401.p1, 2401.p2, 2402.p1, 2402.p2, etc. Putting it all into a ZIP file would make sense.
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| Re: Animated territory map |
Mon, 15 December 2003 01:23  |
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I'd like to see that also in fleet files.. Watch the war as the fleets move about all over (possibly with like a 1 year thing so you can see how fast they are moving around).. That would also be interesting..
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| Re: Animated territory map |
Mon, 15 December 2003 01:59 |
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Yes... Make an influence map using ship value instead of population/economy... Could be very cool. I want it! somebody better make it fast or I'll sulk ;
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| Re: Animated territory map |
Mon, 15 December 2003 05:01 |
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Any suggestions on how to effectively plot fleets, given the limited information available in fleet reports, would be welcome.
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| Re: Animated territory map |
Mon, 15 December 2003 17:18 |
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It's not that hard.. Here's an example:
Fleet Name-----------------------X------Y-------Planet--------Head ing
Gate Keeper Galleon #3--1820----1855---Dark Planet------48.176
#Ships (Cargo I,B,G Here)(colonists)(Gas) (owner) (ETA) (Warp)
-----5-------------0-0-0-----------0------------0-------1--- ------0------10
(Mass) (Cloak) (Scan) (Pen) (task)(Mining) (Sweep)(Lay)(Terra)
1225-----0--------0----------0-----------------0---------0-- -------0-------0
(unarm) (Scout) (Warship) (Utility) (Bomber)
0-------------0--------------0------------5-----------0
From this you can get some gernal details about the whole fleet. It's size, if it's yours you'll get it's cargo count. It's fuel quanitity, it's ETA, and you'll always get it's speed and heading (heading is in degrees) and mass, you'll get lots of other bits about it.. But Basically all your really missing is if there's a combind fleet you'll only be able to know for sure what the most common ship is because it doesn't keep the spesific ship ID's in there so the rest get burried.. Plus X left over mass which shows up as warship, utility or whatever. You can insert ship types manually. But that's how to read or use the information. In essesence.
[Updated on: Mon, 15 December 2003 17:39]
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| Re: Animated territory map |
Mon, 15 December 2003 19:38 |
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Sorry, I didn't phrase the question very well.
What I am struggling with is getting meaningful information from the numbers; for example, a friage horde has warships=0, according to the fleet report.
I want to be able to assess the threat that a fleet represents, so that I can draw attention to it on the map display - a dot to represent a single scout, and a big array to represent a fleet of Nubians/B52s.
So, I probably need to look at total fleet mass, then factor in number of warships and bombers, and maybe also look at minesweeping capacity. Quite how I do this is the question I am asking.
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| Re: Animated territory map |
Mon, 15 December 2003 20:25 |
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That's true, Frigates count as scouts.. Their original name afterall was "Super Scout".. Best thing I can think of is, to input some values on a per ship type basis. Such as.. Using Mass, and name to ID a particular kind of ship. It's not fool proof but it's workable.
Also in terms of fleet mergers if a fleet is seen merging (as in, you have a turn where the ships are seporate and you can track them through time as they merge) you should be able to know what they are. If you saw it, Else you could spesifiy and let it track from there. But yeah, Manual ship design inserts are probably the only way to go as far as that.
Also if you have say a fleet of freighters, plus some warships, if you can isolate the mass of the freighters from the war ships you get the mass of the cargo as a remainder. Course you'd have to have at least seen both the freighters and the war ships. (Basically I think that the only way to really be able to deal with merged fleets is to track their components over time. Which could be perfect for this project. Esspecially if it can rewind and fast forward over game progress.)
Any of that worth using? Or helpful?
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| Re: Animated territory map |
Tue, 16 December 2003 14:47 |
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I think the main concern is with other player's fleets, so we don't even know what designs are in it. We then have to figure out what kinds of fleet constitute a threat.
Take a large late game battle fleet approaching one of your starbases. Can it kill the starbase, along with the defending fleet ? If it can, I need to draw attention to it.
First thing is, it is likely to have huge numbers of chaff; I can count "scouts" easily enough, so we get an idea of that. Have a guess at the mass of the chaff design, and that gives you the total mass of the chaff.
Next we take the number of bombers, have a guess at the mass of each, and multiply the two to give the total mass of bombers.
We then take the total fleet mass, subtract the mass of the chaff and the bombers, divide by the number of warships and this gives the average mass of each warship. This should give an idea of the ratio of beamers to missile ships.
If there are heavy freighters in there, then things get a lot more complex.
The main problem is, I've never played a game through to this stage before so I don't have any test data to play with.
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| Re: Animated territory map |
Wed, 17 December 2003 06:07 |
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I've got some data... Plus if you've ever fought the ships before you can imput their designs in to help with mass/class predictions to figure what's the fleet made of.. If there's some confusion say, 2 hulls of the same mass. Both could be displayed and perhaps the player could look at check one.. I dunno. But it's a thought.
You could always use Battle Sim to get the data you need.
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| Re: Animated territory map |
Sun, 04 June 2006 23:13 |
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Hey Staz, did you get this tool robust enough to share? (The animated territory one, I'm not too worried about mapping fleets, although that would be cool.)
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| Re: Animated territory map |
Mon, 05 June 2006 03:07 |
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Thing is, I could never get the animated maps working in xborders (in fact, in the 1.7.1 version the option appears to have disappeared.) I can manully generate bmp files one at a time though, but am hoping for something faster.
Last time I did this I eneded up generating one bmp for every 5 years, then morphing them to make a short movie. I'd really like to do better next time though, which means generating a bmp for every 1 year :/ Which will be a numbing task.
An alternative tool, or a way of scripting XB would be great, if anything like that exists.
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| Re: Animated territory map |
Mon, 05 June 2006 03:29 |
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Ah! Well in that case seeing fleet movements with colored numbers could be kinda cool too, if overlayed on this. Shame you won't see any packets in any of this data. Fortunately the game warns you if a packet is coming.
I also agree with you, XB's nice but not the best at animated starmaps.
[Updated on: Mon, 05 June 2006 03:30]
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