Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » The Bar » The Milky Way. (Game idea)
| The Milky Way. (Game idea) |
Sun, 15 February 2009 02:15  |
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 magic9mushroom |
 | Commander |
Messages: 1361
Registered: May 2008 | |
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Here's the idea.
Get a map of the RL Milky Way, as accurate as possible, and remap a really big (like 5k ly, 2k planets or sth) Stars! starmap to fit it reasonably, with scaled star densities etc.
Remap planet habs to fit expected conditions in different parts of the galaxy, ie more radiation near the core, higher gravity in denser regions because bigger planets can form there, etc.
Remap mineral concentrations accordingly as well.
Place "Precursor artifacts" at certain locations across the galaxy, e.g. fleets of (mostly unarmed) ships with some high technology on them, or MT toys, in accordance with theories that there was a civilisation covering most of the galaxy 65 million years ago. Set things up so that if a player finds them, the ships fall under their control.
Place the players in the galaxy according to where their HW would fit naturally (ie high rad types would start in the core, low rad types in the arms, etc)
Allow players to detect radio transmissions (ie they are told the locations of other HWs at a time, determined by the scaling, at which light/radio would reach them from there).
Have no race wizard penalties, but depending on PRT you might start later. After all, isolated races won't all reach sentience in sync.
Leave random events on, after all, weird stuff does happen.
In other words, have a "realistic" game of Stars! set in our galaxy.
A non-playing host would be required. I'd be ok with doing it, but I have no idea how to remap.
Who's interested?
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| Re: The Milky Way. (Game idea) |
Sun, 15 February 2009 07:14  |
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| PaulCr |
 | Chief Warrant Officer 3
Stars! V.I.P
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Messages: 187
Registered: February 2007
Location: An Island that kinda look... | |
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| magic9mushroom wrote on Sun, 15 February 2009 07:15 |
Here's the idea.
Get a map of the RL Milky Way, as accurate as possible, and remap a really big (like 5k ly, 2k planets or sth) Stars! starmap to fit it reasonably, with scaled star densities etc.
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The absolute maximum number of planets in stars is 1000, the xy file only dedicates 12 bits to the y coordinate which is specified in full so the maximum possible height is 4096 assuming stars doesn't have a limit in the code, the X coords are included as offsets from the previous planets X value up to 1023 so it is theoretically possible to have a universe width of 1023*planets but I doubt stars would be able to use it.
| magic9mushroom wrote on Sun, 15 February 2009 07:15 |
Remap planet habs to fit expected conditions in different parts of the galaxy, ie more radiation near the core, higher gravity in denser regions because bigger planets can form there, etc.
Remap mineral concentrations accordingly as well.
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Whilst this is possible, something similar was done in Home High Ground it would probably take an lot of time to do and test it, it would probably require somebody to write a program to work out the values to use, I certainly wouldn't want to do it manually, not sure if gible did his manually or not, the Host editor I've written can do the changes but you'd have to work out the settings for each planet yourself.
Actually that might be a nice idea for a program that you could tell it certain values for certain planets and have it map the unspecified planets to graduate the values between them, another option that might be used more often could be for an app that takes a CSV file containing planet X,Y,hab settings,Mineral concentrations, surface minerals and another file detailing player race files and starting locations and generate a .hst and .xy file from those which would give full control of the universe setup.
| magic9mushroom wrote on Sun, 15 February 2009 07:15 |
Place "Precursor artifacts" at certain locations across the galaxy, e.g. fleets of (mostly unarmed) ships with some high technology on them, or MT toys, in accordance with theories that there was a civilisation covering most of the galaxy 65 million years ago. Set things up so that if a player finds them, the ships fall under their control.
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You would need an observer player owning the artefacts and manually transfer them to the player that reaches them first but that shouldn't be a problem and it's easy to give the observer player all the MT items and maximum tech to build them.
| magic9mushroom wrote on Sun, 15 February 2009 07:15 |
Place the players in the galaxy according to where their HW would fit naturally (ie high rad types would start in the core, low rad types in the arms, etc)
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Placing HWs isn't that difficult, the host editor can also do that.
| magic9mushroom wrote on Sun, 15 February 2009 07:15 |
Allow players to detect radio transmissions (ie they are told the locations of other HWs at a time, determined by the scaling, at which light/radio would reach them from there).
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It's likely a player would already know the HWs of anybody near him before that would occur and he'd certainly know it before he had any intention of taking it. You probably have to set it up so that you were told your nearest neighbour's HW in about 5 years for it to have any effect at all.
| magic9mushroom wrote on Sun, 15 February 2009 07:15 |
Have no race wizard penalties, but depending on PRT you might start later. After all, isolated races won't all reach sentience in sync.
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That actually sounds like an interesting idea for balancing PRTs rather than the current point penalties, may be somebody could try it in a future game, 10 years is probably the maximum time you could start even the best race behind the worst and still have it competitive, and that assumes the HW is growing pop but not doing any production except alchemy. You'd also have to limit the difference between neighbours to about 5 years max otherwise the neighbour could take to much of the later starters territory.
...
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| Re: The Milky Way. (Game idea) |
Sun, 15 February 2009 07:34 |
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| PaulCr |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3
Stars! V.I.P
|
Messages: 187
Registered: February 2007
Location: An Island that kinda look... | |
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| magic9mushroom wrote on Sun, 15 February 2009 07:15 |
Who's interested?
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At the moment I'd actually like a fairly small game, about 5-8 players, medium universe with absolutely no contact between players and completely anonymous, ie player names of P1, P2, P3 etc or themed names given by the host so that it is impossible to know who any player is, ie if I was to see a race named the Xeelee I'd have a pretty good idea of who was playing it and would treat it differently than if it had been called P1, diplomacy seems to take quite a bit longer than the actual turns and tends to turn the game into who is the best diplomat and I don't think I've actually played in a games without diplomacy, certainly not in the last 2 years since I came back to stars.
Given the amount of knowledge I have about the stars file formats I'm not in a position to host a game that I want to play in. The host has access to all the game files and whilst I wouldn't actually use them I wouldn't want to put myself in the position were somebody could accuse me of doing so. I'd therefore need someone else hosting any game I'm actively taking part in although I could play an impartial observer/facilitor type race in one along the lines of the artefact giver in your game idea.
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| Re: The Milky Way. (Game idea) |
Sun, 15 February 2009 19:26 |
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| PaulCr wrote on Mon, 16 February 2009 01:14 |
| magic9mushroom wrote on Sun, 15 February 2009 07:15 |
Remap planet habs to fit expected conditions in different parts of the galaxy, ie more radiation near the core, higher gravity in denser regions because bigger planets can form there, etc.
Remap mineral concentrations accordingly as well.
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Whilst this is possible, something similar was done in Home High Ground it would probably take an lot of time to do and test it, it would probably require somebody to write a program to work out the values to use, I certainly wouldn't want to do it manually, not sure if gible did his manually or not, the Host editor I've written can do the changes but you'd have to work out the settings for each planet yourself.
Actually that might be a nice idea for a program that you could tell it certain values for certain planets and have it map the unspecified planets to graduate the values between them, another option that might be used more often could be for an app that takes a CSV file containing planet X,Y,hab settings,Mineral concentrations, surface minerals and another file detailing player race files and starting locations and generate a .hst and .xy file from those which would give full control of the universe setup.
<snip>
Graduating worlds could be useful in a games, Home High Ground that started up recently actually did something similar along with specifically setting peoples HWs. Don't really think the idea is much different to that though other than looking like the milky way.
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Like hell I was going to calculate them manually. I used a spreadsheet with a mass of columns. Prolly shoulda just used java. Making a spiral terrain wouldn't be that much harder really...make a star shaped thingy terrain and then just rotate the positions. I thought about a specified points and graduated areas, but couldn't get the math to work easily(without looking it up).
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| Re: The Milky Way. (Game idea) |
Sun, 15 February 2009 19:58 |
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| PaulCr |
| Chief Warrant Officer 3
Stars! V.I.P
|
Messages: 187
Registered: February 2007
Location: An Island that kinda look... | |
|
I had the idea of using a gradient fill in a graphics program to perform the fill with RGB being Temp, Rad & Grav respectively and then looking up the color at the position that corresponds to the planet you want to set.
The gradient fills I have seen have been pretty much 1 or 2 points so I've just had a look on google and corel draw 9 has a mesh gradient fill feature that looks like it could probably do the job although I don't have corel draw so I can't try it out.
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| Re: The Milky Way. (Game idea) |
Mon, 16 February 2009 00:47 |
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| PaulCr wrote on Sun, 15 February 2009 07:14 |
| magic9mushroom wrote on Sun, 15 February 2009 07:15 |
Have no race wizard penalties, but depending on PRT you might start later. After all, isolated races won't all reach sentience in sync.
|
That actually sounds like an interesting idea for balancing PRTs rather than the current point penalties, may be somebody could try it in a future game, 10 years is probably the maximum time you could start even the best race behind the worst and still have it competitive, and that assumes the HW is growing pop but not doing any production except alchemy. You'd also have to limit the difference between neighbours to about 5 years max otherwise the neighbour could take to much of the later starters territory.
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You could achieve a very similar outcome by reducing starting pop instead of starting later. IMO it would be better to make it a weak presence rather than none at all in the early years.
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| Re: The Milky Way. (Game idea) |
Mon, 16 February 2009 00:56 |
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| PaulCr wrote on Sun, 15 February 2009 07:34 |
At the moment I'd actually like a fairly small game, about 5-8 players, medium universe with absolutely no contact between players and completely anonymous, ie player names of P1, P2, P3 etc or themed names given by the host so that it is impossible to know who any player is, ie if I was to see a race named the Xeelee I'd have a pretty good idea of who was playing it and would treat it differently than if it had been called P1, diplomacy seems to take quite a bit longer than the actual turns and tends to turn the game into who is the best diplomat and I don't think I've actually played in a games without diplomacy, certainly not in the last 2 years since I came back to stars.
Given the amount of knowledge I have about the stars file formats I'm not in a position to host a game that I want to play in. The host has access to all the game files and whilst I wouldn't actually use them I wouldn't want to put myself in the position were somebody could accuse me of doing so. I'd therefore need someone else hosting any game I'm actively taking part in although I could play an impartial observer/facilitor type race in one along the lines of the artefact giver in your game idea.
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Sounds like Sixpack 1 & 2 - I played in one & hosted the other. Wizard originally posted them but, if he doesn't have the time I could post & host Sixpack 3. I can't fit another game in as a player though.
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| Re: The Milky Way. (Game idea) |
Mon, 16 February 2009 23:20 |
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| magic9mushroom |
| Commander |
Messages: 1361
Registered: May 2008 | |
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| PaulCr wrote on Sun, 15 February 2009 23:14 |
The absolute maximum number of planets in stars is 1000, the xy file only dedicates 12 bits to the y coordinate which is specified in full so the maximum possible height is 4096 assuming stars doesn't have a limit in the code, the X coords are included as offsets from the previous planets X value up to 1023 so it is theoretically possible to have a universe width of 1023*planets but I doubt stars would be able to use it.
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Gee, that's a bummer. Looks like 1k planets, 2k ly might work out the best then.
| Quote: |
Whilst this is possible, something similar was done in Home High Ground it would probably take an lot of time to do and test it, it would probably require somebody to write a program to work out the values to use, I certainly wouldn't want to do it manually, not sure if gible did his manually or not, the Host editor I've written can do the changes but you'd have to work out the settings for each planet yourself.
Actually that might be a nice idea for a program that you could tell it certain values for certain planets and have it map the unspecified planets to graduate the values between them, another option that might be used more often could be for an app that takes a CSV file containing planet X,Y,hab settings,Mineral concentrations, surface minerals and another file detailing player race files and starting locations and generate a .hst and .xy file from those which would give full control of the universe setup.
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Because the MW's density isn't a uniform gradient it'd have to be manual.
| Quote: |
It's likely a player would already know the HWs of anybody near him before that would occur and he'd certainly know it before he had any intention of taking it. You probably have to set it up so that you were told your nearest neighbour's HW in about 5 years for it to have any effect at all.
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The information would travel at Warp 10, so it would be faster.
| Quote: |
That actually sounds like an interesting idea for balancing PRTs rather than the current point penalties, may be somebody could try it in a future game, 10 years is probably the maximum time you could start even the best race behind the worst and still have it competitive, and that assumes the HW is growing pop but not doing any production except alchemy. You'd also have to limit the difference between neighbours to about 5 years max otherwise the neighbour could take to much of the later starters territory.
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Hmm.
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Random events do seem to be left on anyway in most games since people seem to like the MT.
Graduating worlds could be useful in a games, Home High Ground that started up recently actually did something similar along with specifically setting peoples HWs. Don't really think the idea is much different to that though other than looking like the milky way.
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If there was a way to turn off the MT while leaving other Random Events intact, then I'd want it. Because comets, planetary changes etc are all within the spirit of a realistic game, but the MT really isn't. There's the secret artifact sites for that.
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