Quick Map: Starfield

[dorpond]

Well, I figured since Maptool isn't prejudice, I thought a Stafield map would be a good quick map for those Sci-Fi gamers

Let me know what you think. Believe it or not, it took longer than the water map -- I had difficulties making it look different than just a bunch of dots

As before, load this map as unbound and the universe will be seamless!

Final thought: Now with some cool nebula and planet stamps, we will make this universe come to life!

"May the Stamp be with you, always..."

[heruca]

Great job! Starfields are a lot harder to make than they look.

[Steel Rat]

Yeah, this one is pretty cool.

[trevor]

Endless universe. Neat !

That would be a pretty cool exploration game. Pick a direction and "Go that way", while the GM continuously adds new content in their path.

[RPTroll]

That's the plan (sort of). Basically you pop this puppy up and populate your star sector (did a mention I've coded the hero games sector generator in php?) then let the guys go from star to star exploring. This is one of those times where altitude is important if you use 3-d coordinates.

Each solar system of note would be a different zone as would be any planet or moon the players would land on.

I always planned to recode the sector generator in java but never got around to it.

[Steel Rat]

Have you seen AstroSynthesis at nbos.com?

[heruca]

There's a Photoshop plug-in for generating planets, moons, and other celestial bodies. It's called LunarCell, by Flaming Pear.

Here's some sample output, on Dorpond's starfield.

[Emryys]

Drooll....

Very Nice! Both of them....

[dorpond]

That planet plug-in is really cool! Can you change the light or not have light at all? I will have to look at the plug-in later today.

Does it say any Eula or copyright stuff saying what we can or can't use the output for?

That would be a great stamp maker!

[RPTroll]

Have you seen AstroSynthesis at nbos.com?

That's pretty cool stuff.

[trevor]

That planet plug-in is really cool! Can you change the light or not have light at all? I will have to look at the plug-in later today.

Does it say any Eula or copyright stuff saying what we can or can't use the output for?

That would be a great stamp maker!

To be honest, I've only ever heard of one (only one) program that puts crazy stipulations on the output of it's program.

[Steel Rat]

I have GOT to get those three space plugins!!!

[trevor]

Dorpond, could you see if you could make a similar starfield that looks good repeated, but is less than 100k ? This one is 333k, which is a bit big in relation to the other quickmaps.

[heruca]

That planet plug-in is really cool! Can you change the light or not have light at all? I will have to look at the plug-in later today.

Does it say any Eula or copyright stuff saying what we can or can't use the output for?

That would be a great stamp maker!

You can set the light, axial tilt, cloud cover, storms, the color and thickness of the atmosphere, and a good number of other settings. You could also make a planet big enough to cover half of your map, I imagine. The only thing I don't think it lets you do that would be nifty is let you import a defined set of continents to define the land masses. I think it only generates random terrain.

I'm not sure about the EULA, but I'm almost certain you can use the content any way you want to, like anything else you make with Photoshop.

[heruca]

Here's some info about LunarCell. I guess I was wrong, and you can define your own land masses.

http://photoshop.digitalmedianet.com/ar ... p?id=38516

http://www.flamingpear.com/lunarcell.html

Glitterato is another of their plug-ins, for generating starfields.

http://www.flamingpear.com/glitterato.html

The other one worth checking out is called Tesselation. It makes seamless tiled textures.

http://www.flamingpear.com/tesselation.html