[Replies to this should go to Bill Morrison (look at the From and
Reply-To lines), who will coordinate the discussion and prepare digests.
Be careful not to reply to JAMESP or TRAVELLER-REQUEST, or there will be
a delay as I will have to manually redistribute the mail to him.
Similarly, mailing to TRAVELLER isn't necessary, since he will digest
the traffic for the rest of us. Questions/concerns? Let me know --
James]
With all of the recent interest in the star system generation
programs, I would like to get the star system discussion group
going again. I remember (way back when :-) that James Perkins
and Fred Schiff were discussing the developement of their
program to generate sectors and subsectors with PostScript
output on hex paper.
Our main topics of discussion would be:
- What referees and players would like to see in a (generic)
sector/subsector/planet generation program,
- The design of these programs, and whether they should be one
program or several programs in one system,
- The necessary data needed to keep consistency between
each generation system,
- Expansion of any system generation program in scope/scale
(eg. to include planetary maps of generated worlds, maybe
down to the 'city' level).
- Modification of James' (with his permission) and the existing
'real' system generation programs to incorporate new functions,
capabilities, and data items.
We will add other topics as soon as they are mentioned. Please note
that the 'expansion' item above is *very* ambitious with the amount
of time available (I assume that most readers have jobs and/or
school?) to use?
We are looking for programmers, physics/astrophysics/astronomy
experts, biologist, SoRag agents, and anyone else who is
interested and has ideas about system generation (alright, even
if you don't have ideas on system generation we could use you).
This will be a sub-discussion group with myself as moderator, and
I'll post digests (just like the Trade & Commerce group) of the
discussion to the rest of the traveller mailing list. So if you're
interested, send me email and I'll add you to my personal alias
list (yes, that means that I'll have to forward all messages
back to the subgroup by hand).
I look forward to hearing from you.
- --Bill Morrison
[email removed]
Star System Discussion Group coordinator