I just created a map of an entire TradeWars universe. It's a force-directed graph, meaning that the sectors repel each other and the warps act like springs pulling them back together. (Or the other way around... I forget.) As you can see, some interesting bubbles and dead ends have migrated to the perimeter. But I don't know if they're actually anything special that wouldn't show up in SWATH's bubble finder.

The bad news is that GraphStream gets very slow when working with a graph this size, and this is only a 1K universe. I was planning to include this kind of mapping in Weapon M, but now I don't know. It may prove to be a pretty but ultimately useless gimmick.

Oh my God.

That is extremely interesting for many reasons. I can't get the jpeg attachment, can just see the image you posted, would you mind emailing me the jpeg, to the addr from which I sent you the old helper screen caps? Will PM it to you if you no longer have it.

There's no jpg, it's a png. Just right-click and save and you'll have what I have.

That is way cool beans!

I wonder if you can group the nebulas and systems together? So the courses within the systems are shorter, and longer courses (even though it's stll only one hop), between the systems.

Unfortunately, the closer I look at GraphStream, the more I realize it's pretty wonky. It was written by some mathematics professors dabbling in Java programming, not the other way around, and it shows in both its confusing API and its poor performance. It seems better suited to rendering non-realtime visualizations of scientific simulations and recording them as screenshots or movies. Too bad, because it can be really pretty.

But I found another really sweet graphing library that has even more capabilities. It seems to have a larger and more active user base than GraphStream. It's called Prefuse. There's a pretty cool demo video on the site, but it's not embedded, just a wmv you can download.

Check this out. It's the latest "realspace" Bigbang prototype I've been working on. The white dots are sectors, lines are links (no one-ways are represented yet), yellow dots are sectors with Jumps (non-adjacent warps), green dots are MSLs, red dots are FedSpace, SD and Class 0 ports, and the blue dot is Terra. This is a 30K bang.

Despite the ridiculous size of this map, the max course length is 45, and you can get from most sectors to any other sector within 10-15 hops, because of the placement of jumps. So it's designed to give you the "close" feel of a typical TW game map, where every sector can be reached within a reasonable number of hops, but provide a physical layout that can be mapped visually.

This is part of the work that's been keeping me busy lately. Working on a proposal for a graphical TW remake.

The image is over 4000x4000 pixels, so it's been shrunk to fit the browser window. To see the full image and look around the map, you'll need to download it.

That's very cool JP. Wish someone could come out with something like that in a helper or standalone program. I like the SWATH visual map, but it's kind of confusing sometimes with all the crisscrossing lines. Of course the map would be even bigger with sector numbers in there, but would still be cool. I like the layout of it.

Since I'm prototyping it in v3, I might end up releasing it either as a Bigbang option for v3, or even as the standard Bigbang method for v4. It would be a shame to just waste the code ;) If I did release a version with this kind of map structure, helper authors could then add a feature that supports a visual map.

It's structured like a spiral galaxy. Terra is approximately where it would be in our galaxy, at 6 o'clock on this map. Then Stardock is on the other side of the galaxy, at 12 o'clock, with Rylos and Alpha Centauri on the two sides at approximately 3 and 9 o'clock.

I'm going to put a game with this kind of map up onto the EIS beta site before long and try to get some feedback on how it plays.

Interesting map JP. The small 2-3 sector free-standing links are neat. Thinking about how it would be to move 3 or 4 sectors, only to find yourself back where you started is such a strange idea. Or that there really is direction, rather than just a seemingly arbitrary relation between sectors as it is now. I can't imagine how it might play, but it will be interesting to find out. I suspect that it will be one of those transitions where once we've wrapped your head around it, we'll realize that the way we've been playing all these years was crazy.

The way it was originally done was definitely for a reason, and it provides very good properties for this game. The struggle is trying to strike a balance where it can be visualized in a 2D map without throwing out all of the good properties of the current system. Because there's no question that a new game is going to have to support a visual map. The fully random map of TW 2002 has always been one of the things holding it back from making a jump to a graphical game.

Interestingly, the original versions of TW had maps more like the ones I'm building now. The earliest TW versions by Sherrick were actually hand-built, and once you knew the game map, it was the same from game to game. Here's a link to one of those maps:

http://wiki.classictw.com/index.php?tit ... ector_Maps

You can see a 200 and 500 sector map at that link.

Something I think will be interesting is the fact that, in any flat bubble, there will be "dead areas" where the course plotting algorithm will tend to pass by. The course plotter will always hit the same sectors when plotting from point A to point B, and within a cluster of flat sectors, no matter how big, there will be a limited number of points, the jump points (yellow dots on the map), that will be the starting and ending points of a course plot that does not originate from within the cluster. So anyone plotting a course through a cluster of sectors will tend to hit certain sectors and miss others.

In some ways, it's not so different from the current approach. In the current game, if a sector has 6 warps, there are 6 ways into the sector. But it might take you a course of up to, say, 20 sectors to find your way into the sector by one of its other warps. With this new approach, you'll be able to enter by another warp generally by moving to an adjacent sector (with the exception of jump gates). So it'll be easier with less of a turn-cost to enter a sector by another warp, but you could always do that.

There are a lot of little differences, but it's going to be fun exploring it.

Sorry for derailing your topic, Mongoose! I just wanted to throw it out there the direction I'm wanting to take the game in terms of map structure. The work you're doing for your helper will always be relevant for TWv3, no matter what I do. But hopefully we can break down this visualization barrier at some point as we move forward.

Very interesting. Are the "jumps" always between nearby regions, or do they sometimes take you halfway across the galaxy?

The jumps are like typical TW warps. They can go anywhere in the map. That's why this is a hybrid approach. A true flat map would commonly have course plots of hundreds of warps and wouldn't work well with traditional TW gameplay. So I generate sections of "flat space", then do a pass where I add jumps in order to guarantee that all sectors can be reached from all other sectors in less than the max course length as specified in Bigbang.