RE: The Digital Battlefield

This sort of thing has been done for some of the PBEM games, see 

http://scivax.stsci.edu/~kochte/ftgame.html

o Turn 10 Color Map

For a good example of this. The programs used to create these maps were 
different but the best (because its free) is the one written by Alun
Thomas 
which is freeware if you have a C compiler. It only runs on unix systems
but 
hasn't been ported to Win95 or NT or Mac yet, I intend to do so (intel)
when I 
get my C compiler.

The color images were Mike Wikans and I edited then in Paint Shop Pro
which is a 
very common shareware program. The space images can be got from the
Hubble Space 
telescope public access images (Thanks Mark K.)

This makes setting up space games very easy as all you need is an ASCII
data 
file in the right format and map generation is automatic. Zooming can be

achieved by changing the pixels per MU in the ftmap program, you get a
different 
map for each zoom level, you can also use any GIF file for the ship
images, so 
you can use different symbology for zoom levels.

This sort of tool could be slaved to a Web applet to generate maps for
online 
games via CGI or java native calls.

For a raster format I'd choose GIF because its everywhere and there are
very 
good tools for transparency and animation available, although didn't
some fool 
company claim they had the patent for it and we weren't to use it
without paying 
royalties?

For a vector format CGM would be my favourite due to its level of
support across 
platforms.

Tim Jones
timj@uk.gdscorp.com