Quote:
Originally Posted by thrash
- Provide a gazetteer, listing potentially interesting destinations.
Are there other options (or variations) that I've missed? What works? What doesn't? |
One variation on a gazetteer would be a searchable database with positional data and systematic specification of social, governmental, and economic/technological characteristics. The representation system would need to be designed with intelligent care, but once that were done the content could perhaps be generated procedurally. As you say that's best when the means of interstellar travel doesn't impose a notion of adjacency or make proximity notably important, and it perhaps does well in putting the players into the same information-overloaded shoes as their character.
I am not proficient enough with programming and computer graphics to do this, but it seems within the capabilities of a keen amateur to augment such a database with an anaglyphic or rotatable display in which the user gets to specify on the fly which objects from the database are included and which data about nodes and links are displayed and how they are represented (with size, shape, colour, captions etc.).