Username Password Topic http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a365/Detjen/k.jpg Just a little taste of the map, its poor quality since it was set up to be really big, but got all scaled down. this was taken off of the old map I really went through some weird trouble of measuring the distance between each dot and all that crap. unfortunately I don't have the data so I would have to start over, but this is just to show you how awesome the program is anyways Thread for Mapping our Outer Rim Index | New Thread | Reply | Close | Stick | Delete  Mapping our Outer Rim FALCON X-0N 4:52pm, December 13, 2009 [Edit] [Delete] It's that time of year again! Mother fuckin'--THROWDOWN! No wait, nevermind. Ahem. So me and Ace were talking the other day about that old political space-map that we did in photoshop a while back. Thinking how things have slightly changed since when we first put it together, I hopped back on and modified things. I also created a 'ginormous' version of it--it was already a huge file, but I felt we should really push the whole of the star systems together so we can show where and what everything really is. So, I made it into a 6400x4800 map! This includes, to my knowledge (which is flawed and limited) every major faction in the chat, including the Hutts, since they're there and they're huge and in canon they own our asses but here we ignore them so there! I also fixed the 'line' on the left side-originally, the page cut off at the Federation and New Republic, looking like somebody took a slide ruler to it. I tried to fix that, make it look more organic without really modifying Det's space. Then I went in and added all of the afteraffects of Thel's rampage across the galaxy...and...then I was going to update the stuff for ace but okay then I got lazy. But more on that later! Anyways, the map itself! I also tested some of the distance--at warp a skillion, I've said that Tatooine is roughly a day away from the Lunix colonies. With the Star Wars atlas that came out the other year, and the wonderful wookiees and wookieepedia, we have this picture: http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/3/37/ArkanisSector.jpg which states that Tatooine and Geonosis are a parsec away. That's 123 light years--not a small amount of space. But on the Star Wars scale, where they really don't do much exploring, just go by settled trade routes in hyperspace (as cru has explained many times before) this makes sense. THis also allows us to, well, claim every other damn star in between the two. Especially considering the most 'settled' factions--Children of the Nile and the Federation--have pretty good teraforming abilities. So with the bigger map, I estimated out around 130 light years, and plopped Geonosis on the map. Finally, we have a solid map! It's just gigantic. No, really, see for yourselves! http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i285/FALCONX0N/giantspacecopy.jpg Now the problem we had before is that gorny made the first map of his space in mspaint, then I took it and ran with it with photoshop. Photoshop can handle giant pictures like this with no problem--mspaint can't. Which means that it'll downconvert the file, and the text that you put down for your systems turns unreadable. This happened to the CoN space (though it's still ledgable...mostly) and it happened to the Outer Rim Republic (to the extent that we just deleted them all and Ace has asked me to fill it in later). So the idea was now to maybe take this giant file and cut it up into grids, small ones, like 100 of them, a 10x10 grid that we could export each grid, then edit it, and replace it. That way we'd have a full and coherent map that everyone could upload and futz with. Sounds complicated? It is, yeah. But hey, we're making a 2D map of 3D space, so we're really going the most bare bones here after all. Then det told me about AstroSynthesis. http://www.nbos.com/products/astro/astro.htm This is a program designed specifically for RPers and it allow you to map solar systems, quadrants, and planets, moons, etc in full three-dimensional view, can extrapolate to create top-down two-D views, can plug in political boundaries, space stations, sphere of influence, color coding, fleet movements down to the ship, star clusters, binary systems, trinary systems, known hyperspace routes and even make you a sandwich. ... THANK YOU INTERNET The only problem is that it's about 35 bucks. Though to be honest, I'd expect it to be a little more expensive than a night out at the '99. I've been playing with the demo trying to get a hang of it, it's a bit of a steep learning curve(and det's farther along than I) but it's just so damned nifty that I can't get my mind off of it; I think we could use it. I mean, you literally can plug in everything, including the orbital plane, distance from the stars, etc. Or it can generate it automatically. There's even a tutorial on how to modify the auto-generator names and files so they can auto-generate names more suited to your faction. It's like this thing was built for us! We wouldn't be able to swap the program but we could swap the files, making a fully interactive map of our little playground that we can easily print up little top-down maps for the wiki. Once we got used to it, it'd be a hell of a lot easier than frakking with a 6400x4800 pixel file that I'm betting for the most of you is still downloading. Now, this is just a thought. Mostly I put this post up so that you guys can take a look at the giant space map I made and go "WTF why does the Hutt space look like a penis" and tell me where we went horribly wrong, and so everyone could have a chance to work on it. But this astrosynth program deserves some thought as well... Edited 4:55pm, December 13, 2009 by FALCON X-0N, author.   AceOOC 6:47pm, December 13, 2009 [Edit] [Delete] DO WANT 3D MAP THINGIE but I would probably just stare at it in confusion if i bought it.... or maybe I'd make a masterpiece... or maybe I'd somehow revive skylink in map form and kill us all... anyways, kudos on the map, Zon.   ScottOOC 8:45pm, December 13, 2009 [Edit] [Delete] uh...A parsec is 3.262 light years.... http://i158.photobucket.com/albums/t95/saintdsh/ArkanisSectorMap.jpg Edited 7:42pm, December 14, 2009 by ScottOOC, author.   FALCON X-0N 10:58pm, December 13, 2009 [Edit] [Delete] There, fixed. See, what would I do without you guys? Any other comments on the map?  maps Lucas Wolenczak 12:01am, December 14, 2009 [Edit] [Delete] Kiri can has 3D map? Please? ...... pretty please?   Uncle DetDe 11:04pm, December 15, 2009 [Edit] [Delete] http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a365/Detjen/k.jpg Just a little taste of the map, its poor quality since it was set up to be really big, but got all scaled down. this was taken off of the old map I really went through some weird trouble of measuring the distance between each dot and all that crap. unfortunately I don't have the data so I would have to start over, but this is just to show you how awesome the program is anyways Index | New Thread | Reply | Close | Stick | Delete