From: finn@convex.com (Tom Finn)
Newsgroups: rec.games.pbm
Subject: Re: galaxy
Keywords: galaxy, graphic map, tools
Date: 6 Apr 92 22:34:11 GMT
Organization: CONVEX Computer Corporation, Richardson, Tx., USA
X-Disclaimer: This message was written by a user at CONVEX Computer
              Corp. The opinions expressed are those of the user and
              not necessarily those of CONVEX.

markhof@ls12r.informatik.uni-dortmund.de (Ingolf Markhof) writes:


>I've just started toplay galaxy. It's a nice game, but most of the
>results are given as text in tables. You get an ascii printed map, too.
>You can see ships an planets on it, but there are no identifiers. If
>you want to send ships to a planet you see on the map, you have to
>find out its name, first. But for this, you have to know its coordinates.
>This means you have to look up the large tables. This is very time
>consuming.

Russell Wallace (the author) has a couple of utilities available; one takes
a listing of planets straight out of the turn report and will plot planets
with names.  The other will take two stars as input and give you the
distance between them.

I wrote a utility that creates a grid of stars and the distances between
them.  It handles up to 17 stars on a 132 column display, 10 on an 80 column
display.  It has a recently-discovered bug in it that I'll get around to
fixing sometime soon.

I also recently wrote a routine that will allow using either the name (which
can be changed at the owner's whim) or the originally assigned number for a
planet any time you reference it.  Another person is looking at a way to
incorporate this into already running games, as it requires a different
structure definition for planets.  Russell has said he'll probably use it in
any new games.

I have also recently (an hour ago) acquired a program that will print
postscript maps from appropriate input.  It comes with a program to create
this input from the turn report, but the converter is written in VAX/VMS
BASIC and will need to be ported to C.  I may do it but if anyone with
working knowledge of both languages were to volunteer....

>So, I've started to create some tools to make playing easier: One will
>print distances between planets and the time your ships need to get
>from one to another. More important is the tool which creates graphical
>maps for your textual results. Several information is attached to each
>planet (its name, size, ressources, population, ships, ownership).

The second one sounds quite useful, given a big enough display.  The first
one sounds like mostly a duplication of effort; the travel time feature
would be nice.

>The tools are still not finished. And they are not in a state to give
>them to other people. But perhaps there are already such tools written
>by someone else? Anyone who's currently developing such tools or who how
>already has them, is invited to contact me.

I'd be interested in any and all tools for Galaxy.  I'd like to make a
package of the best of them.  C source would be the best, as I don't know a
thing about BASIC and don't have time (or inclination) to learn it.  If you
have something you'd like to share, drop me a line...

tom

finn@eugene.convex.com
"Peace is the name of the ideal we have deduced from the fact that there have
been pauses between wars."	Jerry Pournelle in "The Mercenary"