I have only recently become aware of the Traveller mailing
list but have devoted many hours to creating Traveller software.
So by means of introduction I will list some of the things I have
worked on. Interested parties please e-mail me and if there is
enough general interest I will post it to the list.
Most of the code is fairly portable as it was first
developed under Berkely Unix then ported to a MS-DOS PC.
[email removed]
[email removed]
LANGUAGES. I was always annoyed that the original Traveller
didn't have language generation for English (Villani). So after a
series of programs I now have one that will take a given text,
parse it in repeated passes and try to find the best fitting
syllabic pattern. It then effectively generates a table like the
standard ones. There is another trivial program that actually
generates the words. It worked well on English, brilliantly on
Maori; I am unqualified to judge the results on German and Irish
but it couldn't adequately parse Latin. Its assumptions about
syllables occurring independently within a word just don't work.
YET ANOTHER CHARACTER GENERATOR. I am sure it doesn't have
much over the others but the one nifty feature it does have is
that you can set the interaction level. I.e. you can specify that
the computer is to make the decisions as to what cascade skills
to pick up to even choosing when to muster out, etc.
SCALED HEX MAPPING. The idea is to design a map at several
different scales. You can go up to the largest, mark several
hexes as hills, go down a few levels and add the finer details.
It turned out not to be as useful as I first thought.
YET ANOTHER TRADE PROGRAM. Handles what is available and
keeps a record of where you have been. Not very sophisticated.
YET ANOTHER SYSTEM GENERATOR. Scouts expanded system
generator. Not much more I can say.
ZAP. I started ZAP back in college shortly after Elite came
out. I liked the trading and exploration aspect of Elite and
strove to come up with something similar. It uses the galactic
co-ordinates as a random seed and the system for that area (if
there is one) is generated from that. Add a simple density
function and I have literally an entire galaxy of stars even I
know nothing about.
System generation and ship construction are done although
the latter is not like Traveller. Trading is there but not very
well done. I had a combat section done but it seems to have
disappeared. Due to time pressures its development has been
rather slow over the last two years. I want to be able to
generate maps of planets next but am having difficulty coming up
with a good enough representation (more of that in another
posting).
I would dearly like for someone to volunteer to take over
development of it. Or best a group development of modules for it
al la 'nethack' centrally co-ordinated (Anyone read
'Planiverse'?). Anyone who might be interested in doing odd bits
please e-mail me and perhaps the mailing list might want to adopt
it.
Jo Jaquinta; [email removed].
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