[Space] System Generator

[scc]

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

I wonder if it's possible to get two planets in the liquid water zone?

I think it would require a close binary, and one would be mild and the other one hot/frozen...

Yeah it is, great way to have multiple planets for the setting and avoid FTL

[kreios]

Originally Posted by Alden_Loveshade

I'm bumping a really old thread. I may have missed it in the discussion (I found some dead links), but did this program ever get made and if so where is it?

I don't know whether it's the same implementation as discussed originally in this thread, but the only starsystem generation project I know of can be found here: https://github.com/tschoppi/starsystem-gen

[Jinumon]

I'm actually working on one right now. Currently it just generates all of the stars in the system and their stellar characteristics up through minimum and maximum separation. I'm coding it in Python and it's currently a little over 800 lines long. I haven't worked on it in a while, though. I'm currently working on an article I'm hoping to submit to Pyramid soon.

Jinumon

EDIT:
Here's a sample output of my program so far.
http://imgur.com/q61ri65

[Pragmatic]

I wonder if it's possible to get two planets in the liquid water zone?

I think it would require a close binary, and one would be mild and the other one hot/frozen...

[Diomedes]

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

I wonder if it's possible to get two planets in the liquid water zone?

I think it would require a close binary, and one would be mild and the other one hot/frozen...

I think I've managed three.

[Crakkerjakk]

Agemogos,

I was talking about the entry of the constants you want for the system, as far as using the whole .pdf. Once you hit the randomize button, the hope was to print out the relevant information on the Planetary Record sheet(the second to last page in the .pdf) It's one page, has world/system info, and seems fairly well summarized. Even has a hex map for where certain land features might be, although I think that would be up to the individual GM to fill in.

The only problem with it is if you have multiple colonies within a single system, you would need to make a separate sheet for each colony as regards to it's economic/etc info, as all there is room for right now is colony data on one colony. I don't think it's unreasonable to presume that most systems will have one major economic/political center, and if a system has multiple ones, you can always just copy over the system info to a new sheet, focusing on a different colony per sheet. If you need more data because your players are going to be spending a whole lot of time in one system, well then you probably won't be doing random generation and will probably want more detailed notes for it anyways(I wouldn't try to run a THS campaign off of planetary record sheets, even with one record sheet per planet, for example.)

An index page and batch mode may be beyond the scope of the project, (unless e23 starts paying me, that is, but I'll need to put some serious thought into how much time/effort I can afford to put into this, as I'm heading into my Junior year of mechanical engineering this fall.) But, I'll see how much extra work it would be once I actually get started. No promises.

Thanks for the responses, and I'll try to post regular updates about the status of the project. Or at the very least let you know when it's finished.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

One qualification, though: almost any other file format would be better than PDF.

Out of curiosity, what do you propose then? From what I've seen from GCS, Java doesn't look good for generator-type programs. I also envision the horror of having to compile the generator from a C source. Anything more esoteric than that will probably compromise cross-system portability.

[Crakkerjakk]

And don't forget about 'final frontier' campaigns: scouts and explorers with a spaceship. Being able to present them with system data including bits & bobs like Jupiter, valuable asteroid belts and so forth has its place.

I plan on having the program generate the entire system, including moons of all planets, including gas giant moons and ring systems, as well as asteroid belts. I also intend on giving the user the ability to toggle on/off certain aspects, such as brown dwarf stars and artifacts.

You bring up a good point about PDFs. I'll have to give it some thought, but an easily editable output format would probably be best.

[Shrale]

make sure you look this post over thoroughly

Web-based Automatic Sector Data / Map pdf Generator

while you might not be interested in the Traveller aspects, the author/coder has done an awesome job with the project. I think it's for Mac, but she might have some Windows insights for you.

[congo]

There is a script for astro synthesis 2. It added typical gurps statistics to world description (like TL etc.)