Re: [FT] Campaign Map

Roger Burton West wrote:
> On Sat, May 15, 2004 at 07:41:13AM -0400, Nyrath the nearly wise
wrote:
> 
>>Now, the FTL drive in full thrust is NOT a "jump link"
>>style of drive.
> 
> Heh. Funnily enough I've just been updating Thomas Anderson's old page
> (now removed) on using Delaunay triangulation to generate a jump-link
> starmap. http://firedrake.org/roger/rpg/voronoi/ has what I've done so
> far.
> Thanks for your node map - I may well use it...

	You are working at a higher mathematical level
	than I was, I salute you.  I will peruse your
	page with interest.

	I had made a half-hearted effort to do something
	using Extended Kohonen Maps but I never quite
	got it to work.
	http://odur.let.rug.nl/~kleiweg/kohonen/kohonen.html

	I already had the data for the Full Thrust map
	in tabular format, for the star mapping program
	I wrote to make the xyz map.  The yEd program
	can import a *.gml format file, which is
	vaguely like xml.  In any event, it is relatively
	easy to write a program that will output *.gml.

	So I wrote a program that would output all the
	stars as nodes, and would generate a link between
	each star and its two closest neighbors.

	I then imported this into yEd, and used
	that program's automatic graph formatting
	to untangle the mess into a nice looking
	map.  I then hand tweeked it when I could
	spot a way to simplify it that the program
	couldn't see.

	yEd then exported the map as a bmp file,	
	which I imported into Adobe Photoshop to
	add the labels and the little flags.
	The result was exported as a *.gif file
	(as that seemed to yield the smallest
	size) and posted to my web site.

	An even better trick would be to slice
	the map into 8.5" x 10" segments for
	printing, but I'm unsure how to do that.