Oolite Bulletins

The map is wonderful, can't wait for more!!!

Seems Oolite 2 will be a really good game.

Looks cool, but my gut feeling tells me that if you want to go 3D, then it would be nice to make it less flat and thicker even if some of the distances get distorted a bit, as long as the <7ly condition (graph topology) is kept and the relative distance ordering from each star to its neighbours is maintained.

One idea how to spread-out them in Z direction would be to squeeze the whole map in XY direction by a certain percentage (say 20-30%) then let them move out in Z direction to try to grow towards the original distances in 3D -- but allowing some tolerance of error as long as the topology is maintained.

It’s not clear that we do want to go 3D; the primary objective here is to redefine the map in Euclidian space so we can use sensible maths. A top-down map has clear usability advantages.

zsozso wrote:

Looks cool, but my gut feeling tells me that if you want to go 3D, then it would be nice to make it less flat and thicker even if some of the distances get distorted a bit, as long as the <7ly condition (graph topology) is kept and the relative distance ordering from each star to its neighbours is maintained.

Such flat galaxies also exist in the real world. Look at Ngc5866.

Eric Walch wrote:

Such flat galaxies also exist in the real world. Look at Ngc5866.

Spinny things tend to do that. Now find us a rectangular accretion disc. :-)

any chance of upgrading the planet descriptions so they are more all in one like the maps?
I can redesign them so their a little more, you know, spacey.

Ahruman wrote:

Spinny things tend to do that. Now find us a rectangular accretion disc.

Or a galaxy that's only about 140 light-years across ...

I think it's reasonable to assume that Oolite's eight "galaxies" are just individual little slices of a very small fraction of our own galaxy. And I'd support your comment about the usability values of a top-down map. Am I remembering wrong, or did Frontier have a 3D map? And if so, was it not a bit of a PITA? I certainly remember getting cheesed off with the shortcomings of 3D maps playing Homeworld ... maybe we should keep the fully immersive VR options to one side for Oolite 3.0.

Disembodied wrote:

Ahruman wrote:

Spinny things tend to do that. Now find us a rectangular accretion disc.

Or a galaxy that's only about 140 light-years across ...

I think it's reasonable to assume that Oolite's eight "galaxies" are just individual little slices of a very small fraction of our own galaxy. And I'd support your comment about the usability values of a top-down map. Am I remembering wrong, or did Frontier have a 3D map? And if so, was it not a bit of a PITA? I certainly remember getting cheesed off with the shortcomings of 3D maps playing Homeworld ... maybe we should keep the fully immersive VR options to one side for Oolite 3.0.

FFE... did have something of a 3D map. Not that it made a huge difference, I rarely had to rotate it in any direction to find what I needed, so it was mostly like it was flat still.

Disembodied wrote:

Or a galaxy that's only about 140 light-years across ... :)

102 × 51. Nice round numbers. :-)

Eric Walch wrote:

zsozso wrote:

Looks cool, but my gut feeling tells me that if you want to go 3D, then it would be nice to make it less flat and thicker even if some of the distances get distorted a bit, as long as the <7ly condition (graph topology) is kept and the relative distance ordering from each star to its neighbours is maintained.

Such flat galaxies also exist in the real world. Look at Ngc5866.

That rather depends on your definition of 'flat' I feel.

NGC5866 is still hundreds of lightyears 'thick'.

Cheers,

Drew.

Eric Walch wrote:

zsozso wrote:

Looks cool, but my gut feeling tells me that if you want to go 3D, then it would be nice to make it less flat and thicker even if some of the distances get distorted a bit, as long as the <7ly condition (graph topology) is kept and the relative distance ordering from each star to its neighbours is maintained.

Such flat galaxies also exist in the real world. Look at Ngc5866.

"Flat" is a relative term - NGC 5866 is estimated to be about 69,000 LY in diameter, so even at its thinnest point will be about 100 LY thick; by comparison the Milky Way is about 3000 LY thick where we are in it. If you wanted to create a star map that was realistic in terms of relative topography in three dimensions then it would end up looking nothing like what we know G1 to G8 are in Elite and Oolite as they stand currently.

Ahruman wrote:

Eric Walch wrote:

Such flat galaxies also exist in the real world. Look at Ngc5866.

Spinny things tend to do that. Now find us a rectangular accretion disc.

Now THAT would really confuse astronomers!

I've always imagined G1-G8 to be adjacent slices of a section of a galaxy - ie sort of stacked on top of one another - hence the hyper drive takes you in an up/down direction rather than the normal sideways movement through witch-space...?

Frontier/FFE kinda made a mess of things, they even added some of the core Elite systems (Lave/Zaonce/Etc) to our universe even though the original Elite universe was a randomly generated fictional universe.

I always imagined the 8 galactic sectors were kind of like 'spokes' of a single galaxy, like this:



Where the inner systems are non-traversable due to being too dense, and the outer systems too empty to provide a lock-on. Using Galactic Hyperdrive simply shifts the user 45 degrees from galactic centre.

Each Oolite galaxy map is 102 light years wide by 51 tall. On the layout above that would give a circumference of around 1,000 light years. The circumference of our actual galaxy is estimated to be somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 light years. Of course, Oolite has always had issues with scale!