Oolite Bulletins

Did anyone think about a "real" Galaxy, like in Frontier or First Encounters?

Would be nice to fly a through a Galaxy ... maybe with different realms...

I believe Pleb is slowly working on making something like that possible in OXPs.

Zireael wrote:

I believe Pleb is slowly working on making something like that possible in OXPs.

I wouldn't quite go that far! I have admittedly figured out how to have custom galaxies, so you can specify the size and number of systems from the planetinfo.plist file. But there are many issues that arise from this, mainly that it is more of the same. So I also incorporated new features such as uninhabited galaxies that all have names like "P-682034". The rest is all theoretical and hypothetical at present, and again another problem with larger galaxies is the big hit on loading times you take when jumping into a new galaxy/system... Still all messy ideas that would need a LOT of fleshing out if they were to be taken seriously I'm afraid...

But on the positive side it has been quite fun playing around with the code for me!

Pleb wrote:

So I also incorporated new features such as uninhabited galaxies that all have names like "P-682034".

It might be worth including in your conversion a few words why such regions are uninhabited or worse...how they got that way. That's the kind of story that almost writes itself once you start thinking about it.

While I can only currently use hacked savegames to simulate new Galaxy Chart regions, once there I can get around better than most due to using misjumping to cross small voids. We can hypothesize that Thargoids have little difficulty reaching almost anywhere, seeing as how ubiquitous they seem. Maybe even drawn to hyperspace traffic?

not that I should be encouraging this but ...

each chart doesn't have to be limited to 256 stars. The random number generator
http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Random ... _generator

keeps on going and after 32,768 you would be back, e.g.Tibedied in Chart1. So the seeds for Chart 1 could create a 'ring' for a galaxy with Chart 1 occupying segment 1 of this ring. The ring extends in the z-coordinate out of the plane of the plots we usually view and loops back underneath. In Oolite and Classic Elite the seeds get rolled to generate the other 7 Charts, so that gives 8 rings in total for the original seeds, 74 90 , 72 2 , 83 183.

How these rings are arranged geometrically (in a plane or as meridians) I dont know, but GalCop would occupy segment 1 of each ring. You would have to explain why there is no hyperspace travel cost/distance in the ring direction to explain whey the projections down to Chart 1 etc work.