Re: [GZG] Space, Excel, and the reoccuring project

Roger Burton West wrote on 03/21/2011 05:31:29 PM:

> On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 02:16:52PM -0500, Doug Evans wrote:
>
> >What seems appropriate is a) figuring a way to get that info with
each
star
> >without having to manually repeat the process 300 times, b) give each
star
> >a home coordinate pattern and a way to convert any location to the
given
> >star's offsets, and c) come up with some guidance on choosing stars
as
> >empire starters: not too close, too far, roughly equal number of
nearby
> >stars to start empires.
>
> I think you'd do much better to use a programming language than to
mess
> about with Excel. This sort of thing is dead easy in Perl, for
example.

Having 'grown up' on Basic, Fortran, Pascal, and even a bit of Rexx,
Cobol
and VB, for reasons I'm too ashamed to analyze, I find myself unable to
pick up anything easily currently available.

> Coordinate transformations are relatively easy. I'll see what I can
> knock together.

Thanks, as long as you don't add 'easily run on your (MAC, LINUX,
whatever)
box.' I hate M$, but am Winders dependent. ;->=

> What exactly is "that info" for (a)? (b) is pretty easy. (c) is quite
a
> lot harder.

Sorry, "that info" as in creating a list of stars' relative coordinates.
I
suspect my description was so convoluted as to be almost
self-referential.
As for c), didn't mean it should make choices, just give me a way of
looking at the mass of stars that I can make the choices myself. Now,
THAT
was convoluted!

FYI, at one point, I'd a set of lists in the volume of about 10(?) or so
parsecs, and could chose stars that were close to equidistant from the
Earth, and none closer to each other. Seemed fairly good, as each list
gave
a small group of closest stars.

Samuel Penn wrote on 03/21/2011 06:30:10 PM:

> Use a database. MySQL for example is free. As Roger said, doing
> this sort of thing in a programming language is easy (though
> you need to know a programming language).
>
> Does it have to be real star lists? If you have four players,
> divide the 'universe' into 9 cubes, and randomly generate 'N'
> stars in each cube. That gives you 9 volumes each with an
> equal number of stars. Place each player on a random star
> in one of the edge cubes (so there's 5 initially unpopulated
> cubes). This should be random but reasonably fair. You could
> bias starting location to the centre of each cube if you want.

Doesn't HAVE to be, but the thought of actual stars leaves one with the
enjoyment of allowing someone to discover the Earth.

> e.g.:
>
>   -+-
>   +-+
>   -+-
>
> Each + is a starting cube, each - an unpopulated cube. Add
> further cubes for extra players or extra obfuscation as to
> a player's place in the universe (3x3x3 cubes gives 8 corners
> or 6 faces).

Understood, but don't want it too regular; an apparent random fill isn't
something beyond my conception, just beyond my hurdle of learning a
current
language.

For a DB, I've Access 2007, can play relatively painlessly though not
VB/Macro facile. I miss Paradox. As to the thought of trying to write
SQL... *shudder*

Sorry for being the blind to be led, but you knew the job was
dangerous...

Doug

_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-l