Re: 3D traveller

A thread of 2 messages, 21 October 1993 to 22 October 1993, in the order they were sent.

#6210 Re: 3D traveller

George W Herbert · 21 October 1993

Doing Traveller in 3D sounds attractive until you have to work
out some mechanics for it... then your brain starts to hurt.

You _can_ do it; I'm doing it right now for an alternate
setting I'm toying with, though I may give up in the end
and abstract things quite a bit.  One problem is that to
map out a subsector-sized chunk, you need to use the
sector-sized map squares, which hurts after a little while.
They're hard to read and work with, and harder to draw in
the useful info (base, starport, GG presence, etc).
It also is hard to fit a whole "subsector" (being defined
as roughly the boundaries of one jump radius) on one
piece of paper in any case.  This really hurts more than
the small squares do; you lose the forest for the trees
in your flurry of pages of map.

This is one of the places where realism may not be a good
idea... it usually slows down managing the game without
introducing that much more advantage in the gaming situation.
I usually avoid such complications barring really good reason
to keep it that way.

- -george william herbert

#6217 Re: 3D traveller

John C. Orthoefer · 22 October 1993 · reply to #6210

Mapping traveller maps into 3-d isn't that bad.  I did it back in HS
(circa 1983).  But what you have to do is drop the damn hex grid.  You
map all the stars into spherical coordinates.

[Note: Spherical Coordinates are an ordered triple of (theta1, theta2,
r) where theta1 is the angle from the X-axis in the X-Y Plain; theta2
is the angle from the X-axis in the Y-Z plain; and r is the distance
from the origin.]

There are mapping functions between this and Cartesian Coordinates.
And yes you need a computer to do all this, I've had a good
programmable calculator since HS.  So it was no problem.  You also
need a computer/good calculator to do the jump calculations.

I wrote a program either in Basic or Turbo pascal, I don't remember if
it was on an apple or an IBM-PC, to convert subsectors for me.  And a
second which took the output and printed an Epson map of the sector.
The map was flat X-Y plain with elevations on it so we could figure
out where we where headed and the coordinates of the world.

Today with the new HP-48xx which has 3-d display primitives built in
you could put the whole sector into it and display it in 3-d (much the
same way your characters are, yes they have cool holo-systems but...)

Finaly don't ask me for the code.  It wasn't that hard to write (I did
it from a good geometry book.)  And you try and find some code you
wrote in HS!

If I had a current Traveller campain I would rewrite the software.

johno