I would like to rate 5 stars. However, I'd like to see some star system expansion. There appears to be a LOT of unused map.

Regarding the COV-19 virus and its effects:Things are frustrating, and confusing, and scary. People dream up conspiracy theories to help make sense of things. They're not helpful, though, and only serve to make the world more confusing and scarier.We're not going to have that here. If there's new information to be shared, share it, but cite your information to a reputablesource.

And we swear to God, if anyone comes in here and starts spouting off QAnon bullshit about COVID-19 or literally anything else, you are going to get permabanned so thoroughly that your grandchildren won't be allowed to post here. Greetings All:Does anyone out there use Celestia for their science fiction role playing games? Celestia is an open-source planetarium+ program.Years ago, I wrote a program for generating the data for a star chart (stars and planets). If you know about the Drake Equation, stellar evolution, exoplanets, green belts, and stuff like that, you know what I'm talking about. I've been working on removing our known universe and porting my fictional universe into Celestia.

(I have no relationship to Celestia.) I'd be curious to have a thread exchange with anyone who has used it.Thanks,Mark. Rob:I started by creating the data to build a starchart map - to get the distances between inhabited routes to establish trade routes and to find out what interesting finds that randomness would create.I don't know how well Celestia will work as an RPG tool. Very well for GM planning, I suspect, but of limited use on game day. I was hoping to find gamers on this forum that used it so that I could get their input before I got too far into it, but no avail.I'll drop a line on this forum again when I have something people can try.Mark. I have never heard of celestia.

Why would I use it? What does it do?It looks like a full screen immersive program, which seems like it would be of limited use to planning and plotting.A smaller program like the inner sphere map for mechwarrior seems like it'd work better (easier to import star maps too).Or a special made similar program.It would not surprise me if mechwarrior had other more useful starmaps than just the ones I know of as well.Just not sure how a planetarium program would be very useful in the cases you describe. How we map space currently is to think of the galaxy in 2D, break up the galaxy into arms, split an arm into sectors and then each sector has a map which has a crazy-paving design of clusters. A cluster is a naturally formed group of stars (another big simplification) and the cluster maps are what the players normally deal with.I used to have a huge directed graph that charted 'best fit' trade routes between systems (the nodes in the graph). They could stray off these routes but 'there be dragons' there. It was OK but we found that it wasn't fun for our gaming group. As the charts got bigger, they weren't useful.

The other thing we found was that a small change in the pseudo-physics of space travel made an enormous difference in how the map was formed. If I introduced a new form of drive, then the existing maps would need to change entirely.Just some feedback from what I found! DarkLightHitomi:Celestia is principally a planetarium program. The difference between it and a standard planetarium program is that Celestia plots stars in a 3-dimensional space rather than projecting them against a sperical shell. Thus, you can see the planets move across the backdrop of the stars from Mercury, for example, instead of earth.

Or, you can see how the night sky appear from a planet orbiting Rigel Centarus.How useful is this program to gaming? Well, that depends entriely on your style of play. If you're science fiction, it can be immensely useful. If you're future fantasy it is a waste of time. Something like the Mechwarrior Inner Sphere Map is ideal for future fantasy and doesn't require anywhere near the time that something like Celestia would require to learn.I should also state that I'm using it for game and campaign development, not necessarily for game play. I see something like Celestia as an invaluable tool for game design, adventure development, and such.

I don't disagree with you. Your skepticism in using Celestia for game play is well founded. I don't know if it would be useful for game play.I hope this answers your questions.Mark. Rob:When we dug into astronomy during our game development, it really made out heads spin.

The Milky Way galaxy (our home galaxy) is on the order of 150,000 lightyears in diameter and 2,000 lightyears thick within something on the order of 300,000,000,000 (300 billion) stars. (Recall that Star Wars' Galactic Republic had 'thousands' of systems in it.) Of course we don't know what percentage of stars have inhabitable worlds on them, and we won't know until the Drake Equation is solved, but I feel confident that a government representing 1,000s of worlds would be a very small piece of our galaxy. The Star Wars galaxy must be MUCH smaller than the Milky Way. But I digress.Back in the early 1990s, I took an astrophysics course in college while developing a science fiction game. Rather than design a star chart for my game, I developed a game for my star chart. Taking what we knew at that time I wrote a program to randomly generate solar systems in a portion of a galaxy. The only exoplanets (or extra-solar planets, or whatever else you want to call them) known back then orbited a pulsar - the variability of the pulsar's frequency gave away the presence of planets orbiting it and was responsible, in part, for starting the exoplanet search.

Again I digress.Rather than try to create a fictional galaxy, we decided to select a random small galaxy and create only a small part of it. (We were very generous with the Drake Equation; I think somewhere around 5% of our stars have habitable worlds.) We chose a very dense section of that galaxy, specifically a region 2700 x 2700 x 300 lightyears (or eighty-one 300 x 300 x 300 lightyear sectors). We then populated it with more than 100,000 solar systems. With our backstory in hand, we set out to find our game in the star chart.

I think we found our entire game in 2 of those 81 sectors. (We did cheat, however, and started looking in the center of a galactic band where the density of stars per light year was higher.)This whole database of solar systems that we created is all driven in a Unix server and is all text-based. (The program spits out very boring stuff like orbital elements, luminosities, densities, and such.) I had roughed out a prototype graphical front-end for my star chart, but it was awful. Celestia was much more impressive, so I set out to dump my star chart into it.So, that's the approach I took. It gives us not only the locations of all the stars and a visual of our small part of the galaxy, but also the positions of every planet in every solar system and any moment of time (that's the beauty of a planetarium program). Still, (as my son would say) it is freakin' awesome.Travel times, exploration possibilities, minining opportunities.

Everything you need for a huge campaign all nicely contained in a star chart far bigger (as we found out) than it ever needed to be.Thank you for your input. Not many people have replied on this thread, so I really appreciate it.Mark.

Regarding the COV-19 virus and its effects:Things are frustrating, and confusing, and scary. People dream up conspiracy theories to help make sense of things. They're not helpful, though, and only serve to make the world more confusing and scarier.We're not going to have that here. If there's new information to be shared, share it, but cite your information to a reputablesource. And we swear to God, if anyone comes in here and starts spouting off QAnon bullshit about COVID-19 or literally anything else, you are going to get permabanned so thoroughly that your grandchildren won't be allowed to post here.

I've just been reading about how the creators of 2300 AD used the real stars close to the sun to make their star map. Of course, this was back in 1986 and we have discovered so much more, including actual Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of their stars. I'm thinking of doing a modern version, using up-to-date data on stars, planets, and brown dwarfs. It doesn't have to be specific to any particular game system. Think of it as the interstellar equivalent of a realistic terrain you can use for a fantasy game.I'd decide what kind of star systems are likely to be settled, and find good candidates in real stars. Not just where we've actually discovered a planet, but where it would be plausible to have one and we haven't ruled it out yet. One thing I've realised is you don't need to assume anything about interstellar travel to make the map.

If something's 16 light years away, that could mean anything from centuries of travel to a weekend jaunt, but the map stays the same. With real stars, the thing to choose is the scope - how many unique locations you need.So, any interest in this?

Any suggestions for how to start? I downloaded a file of stars and their coordinates, with over 31000 stars. Computer tycoon roblox image. I then wrote a program to convert these into multi-layered starmaps, at various scales. One scale had a 601 by 601 by 601 grid which I put into HTML format as a single web page, but it ended up as a 234KB file. It is really difficult to portray each cell in an easy way, so I ended up with a 601 by 601 grid of dashes, with hyperlinks for each of the cells containing a star, or stars. Sol is, of course, at 0,0,0, with 300 pages above and 300 pages below, 300 cells to the left, right, up and down. It doesn't look at all sophisticated but is probably usable as a 3-D Starmap, although it takes an age to load.

One thing that is noticable is that there is an awful lot of empty space/voids in a lot of the areas.It doesn't have any information about the stars, as the file I downloaded didn;t contain that information. I've just been reading about how the creators of 2300 AD used the real stars close to the sun to make their star map. Of course, this was back in 1986 and we have discovered so much more, including actual Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of their stars.

I'm thinking of doing a modern version, using up-to-date data on stars, planets, and brown dwarfs. It doesn't have to be specific to any particular game system.

By clicking “I agree” below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. Comfort inn washington dc downtown. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website:We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests.

Think of it as the interstellar equivalent of a realistic terrain you can use for a fantasy game.I'd decide what kind of star systems are likely to be settled, and find good candidates in real stars. Not just where we've actually discovered a planet, but where it would be plausible to have one and we haven't ruled it out yet. One thing I've realised is you don't need to assume anything about interstellar travel to make the map. If something's 16 light years away, that could mean anything from centuries of travel to a weekend jaunt, but the map stays the same. With real stars, the thing to choose is the scope - how many unique locations you need.So, any interest in this?

Any suggestions for how to start? Let's put it this way: there less than 200 countries on earth.Many of those are close enough in the minds of non-natives to be 'basically the same'. I'm going to ballpark it as 50 being kinda the upper limit for inhabited worlds before it's basically just redundancy after redundancy that nobody will be able to remember.Maybe a bit more if you want stellar empires, but I kinda like the idea that for most purposes, a single solar system with several planets would cover you.So the closest 50 good candidates for earth-like worlds and anything else inside that 'bubble'?(I like 50. 50 was the number of Spacer worlds.