2006-04-12

I'm back, and a few suggestions

While I was away, Roger Carden sent in a couple of suggestions that I thought I'd share, just so everyone can see what I think.

1) Set it up so that you can select a time period, so you can see what known space looked like in the Interstellar Wars era (GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars), the "Milieu 0" era (Traveller 4th Ed), 1100 era (Classic Traveller), Session Era (Mega Traveller) or the new era (The New Era).
I'd love to do this. Right now, though, finding enough data for a single era is tricky! However, some day this may be possible with judicious use of collapsing/advancing algorithms. I'd also need to finish the "produce decent borders" work.


2) How about an additional feature when you double click on a system, to create a pop up with the full planetary profile from Book 6 Scouts?
In my "started but not finished" pile is a feature that would show you the credits for a sector/subsector/world when you hovered over it or zoomed in. This could easily be extended to show the UWP. If you zoom in far enough I'd love to show the whole system.

One of my favorite sites is Extrasolar Visions, and these pages are inspirational:

http://www.extrasolar.net/distancecompare.asp
http://www.extrasolar.net/mostinteresting.asp

The former shows comparisons of known stellar systems. When I was first playing Traveller in the early 1980s I read books full of this sort of diagram. (See Worlds of the Federation for an example.) This was pure science fiction. It's astoundingly cool that this is now solid science. Ω