Well... you could grab a pencil, paper, and a very good long lasting eraser, and draw it out and then after you do that, make the map somehow... Notepad or GC2IDE.
i think it'd be possible to use Excel to generate most of the text needed, i just don't care enough to set it up. but if there are any other excel afficionados out there, here's what i had in mind.
sheet 1 would be a grid representing the galaxy map. you'd place Xs in any cell where you'd want a star and leave the rest blank.
sheet 2 would test for blank cells on sheet 1 (it might ultimately be the page that produces the text you want). i'd use the function:
=IF(ISBLANK(Sheet1!##),##,"{text}").
the first "##" refers to a cell on sheet 1, and the second "##" refers to the next cell in the list on sheet 2 (so that you don't need to fuss with blank spaces in the final text). "
{text}" refers to the text you want outputted if the cell is not blank.
so it'd look like this:
=IF(ISBLANK(Sheet1!A1),A2,"{text}")filling in the
{text} part is the next step, and we'll take care of that on Sheet3. we need that text to resemble:
PlanetName="whatever"
X # /X (X cordinate)
Y # /Y (Y cordinate)
Customname 0 or 1 /Customname
Homeworld 0 or 1 /Homeworld
Owner race# /Owner
Quality # /Quality
RotationSpeed #.#### /RotationSpeed
Size #.#### /Size
Influence ?.???? /Influence (I don't know what this ones for)
Star starname /Star (whichever star the planet belongs to)
/Planet
plus you'd need to code for the mother star and any asteroids you want. excel can map all that text into new cells as long as you place it in quotation marks in the original reference cells, but generating the number values is where we're going to have some trouble.
you could very easily create the same star system over and over again by entering the values you want in the original text. you could also break up the text chunks into pieces and generate numbers with the
RAND() function.
i haven't exactly tested this all yet, so i'm not clear how it'd play out, but i'm pretty confident it's possible. in fact, i think it'd even be possible to enter S, P, A, R (star, planet, asteroid, resource) in Sheet1 and have Excel output the appropriate text for each; i could also probably have it check for a number value instead of "P" in order to produce planets of a particular quality... maybe S, Y, O, R, W, B, G, P for star color, and E, I, K, W and H for resource type (Economics, Influece, Knowledge instead of research, War instead of military, and Happiness instead of morale - too many letters!). hmm... you'd have to nest some of the functions in other cells since IF can only test for 7 conditions.
edit: on second thought, don't planets and asteroids need a tag to identify their parent star? or does the game assume the nearest star is the parent if it's not specified? if it's a must-have line in the programming, you might be able to use one of the LOOKUP functions to automatically match planets to their closest star... but whole systems would be a lot easier.
once Excel had been set up to generate the text you need, all you have to do after that is highlight what you want, copy, open Word, and use Edit> Paste Special> text only, then save as a .txt and rename the file extension accordingly. if you don't know excel, this probably doesn't sound simple at all.
if anyone else does know excel, this might give you the clue you need to set the thing up. i myself don't have any especial motivation to do all this, but if i find some time maybe i'll poke around and see what i can come up with. of course, if you don't have excel to begin with, it's a totally moot point as far as you're concerned.
Ok lots of chatting but no meat.... Anyone here with a REAL map editor?
maybe that wasn't meat, but hopefully it at least smelled like a BBQ?
