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100% GMing
Treasure Tables is dedicated to game masters, offering GMing advice and ideas and a community of GMs helping each other run great games since 2005. I'm Martin Ralya, and I've been GMing since 1989 and writing for the RPG industry since 2004.
AstroSynthesis for 3D Space Maps
Sun. November 26, 2006
AstroSynthesis 2.0 is a program that lets you create 3D star system maps.
Maps can include randomly-generated features alongside the ones you place, and they can get quite complex. AstroSynthesis drills down to the level of plotting routes between planets (and calculating the distances for you) and allowing you to animate planetary orbits.
I’m not sure I would ever need this much detail to run a space-based campaign, but it would be fun to play with — and nice to know that if I did need to go deeper, I could. There’s also a free trial, and at the moment this puppy has four 5/5 reviews on RPGNow.
Has anyone tried AstroSynthesis?
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Comments
7 Responses to “AstroSynthesis for 3D Space Maps”
I’ve tried to use AstroSynthesis 1.0, and it’s nigh-unusable, with horrendous bugs, particularly in camera movement. My brief time spent with the demo of 2.0 did not do much to improve my opinion.
Yes, space is big, mindbogglingly big. But it would be nice if it could look like the distance down the road to your chemist, when you’re trying to look at the various stars. It’s nearly impossible to get a good view of more than half-a-dozen stars at a time. Compare this to things like the really clever starmap in DragonStar, which managed to handle 3-d space on a 2-d page, and I really don’t see the point in paying money for AstroSynthesis.
I actually put NBOS’s Fractal Mapper, Screen Monkey, and AstroSynthesis on my shared X-Mas list for this year because I wanted to try running an online sci-fi campaign in 2007 using them (I’ll be recruiting players sometime in January/February if anyone is interested).
I’ve used the trial versions of all of these proucts, and so far I am happy with the results.
PS And I’ll also start experimenting with Fantasy Grounds after the holidays as well if there are any players who prefer that software for online gaming.
Two very different opinions.
Any other takers?
How variable is it? Can I make crystal spheres for my Spelljammer campaign with it, complete with cubic planets made of fire circling worlds held on the backs of elephants? Or is it strictly Sci-fi?
I actually own the software (picked up the bundle including Fractal Mapper at Gencon Indy).
It is kind of strange - I have yet to actually use it for my campaign except to organize my personal notes and I love it.
Then again, I’m running a not-so-SciFi campaign, so the players have yet to leave the campaign world’s surface.
Rick: My guess from the product is no on the Spelljammer worlds.
aetherspoon: What kind of notes are you using this to organize?
I bought Astrosynthesis 2.0 to use for my GURPS Space/Traveller(ish) game and played around with it quite a bit. I found it to be a really good visualization tool, and I planned to use it to create sectors and dump them to a MySQL database, except for a couple of things:
1. I didn’t like the random star placement — you either end up with a big undifferentiated glob in the middle of your sector, or a “snowdrift” formation that occupies one side and corner of a cubic sector. I wanted clumpiness and couldn’t get it through the basic program, and, in response to a post on the mailing list, it didn’t seem like the author understood his random-placement algorithm well enough to be able to modify it. (I wanted large Jump-1 clusters connected by discrete Jump-2 routes.) I downloaded a plugin that promised to implement a perlin noise algorithm, which would give me controllable clumpiness, but it didn’t seem to work right — a great deal of research later, I realized that there were problems in the math. However, rather than correcting the plugin, I realized that it was easier for me to just write a PHP script that used the perlin noise algorithm to create the sector in MySQL directly. (And then I use yEd to create a 2D node map of the 3D sector, which makes sense since I’m using Traveller-style jump routes).
2. It doesn’t use GURPS Space parameters (except for the obvious physical ones like diameter, orbital radius, etc.), and teaching myself enough VBScript to make it do so was too much trouble. There is a plugin that says it creates that data, but getting it to actually display without a lot of hand work isn’t there yet.
3. There are no parameters to tweak habitability values or sector types. For instance, you can’t create a space opera setting with lots of Earthlike worlds, or a “stellar nursery” with lots of young blue stars. You’re stuck with the basic average stellar and planetary distribution. Also, the program’s definition of “habitable” and “hospitable” are quite liberal — it considers Mars to be “habitable” and the top of Mt. Everest to be “hospitable” (says so in the docs). I’d prefer something with a numerical rating like GURPS Space. Oh, and it creates far too many double-planet clusters (like Earth/Moon, but closer in mass) for my taste in verisimilitude, and again you can’t tweak that or turn it off.
So, while I think it’s a neat program, I’ll be using it for visualization purposes only. I’ll be creating my random sectors in PHP and MySQL (I’m working on a PHP GURPS Space system generator right now), exporting them to yEd for 2D visualization, and eventually back to Astroscript for 3D visualization.
It would be more useful to a gamer who either wants a realistic near-Sol environment (the datafiles for stars within 50ly, 100ly and 1000ly are downloadable), is using rules that allow more free-form movement, and/or doesn’t need game-specific system data.
Oh, yes: a particularly neat feature is the animated system display showing positions of planets, moons, etc., and the transit time calculator that goes along with it.
Hope this helps!