Peter's VGA Planets page

Welcome to my VGA Planets page.

Last updated 3-June-2007.

Firstly we have my map to postscript program map2ps . This converts VGAP4 map files to (encapsulated-) postscript.

There is the infamous Interstellar Master Traders (IMT), a new race for VGAP4.

Then there is starview which is a Java applet to view VGAP4 map files on the web, or even standalone.

This also contains my Yale Stars Map for universe creation. This is based on the 3rd revision of the Yale Bright Star catalogue with extensive post-processing. Also available zipped.

The catalogue consists of the 9000 brightest stars in our sky. The layout of the stars is a 2 dimensional mapping onto the equatorial plane of the 3D star layout of the real stars. It is as real as I can make it with some restrictions. The centre is 5000, 5000 and the radius is about 2000 lyr in VGA Planets which is stretched from 200 light-years in our galaxy for playabilty. It looks like this in the Master program:

There is a readme file. Yale.map has been tested in the "For Great Justice (FGJ)" campaign and others.

By popular demand there is a YaleLite map which has the same base stars but only about 25% of them at random.

There is also a YaleLiteCompact map with the same stars as YaleLite but closer together for a faster game.

There is also a work under construction which is based on the 5th revision with a "dark zone" requested by Paul Honigman. This is also centred on 3000, 3000 and is scaled approx. 1:10. The dark zone is at 5000, 5000 is is hoped to be linked by wormholes to the main cluster. Note that two of the "pin" stars at about X=8000 are visible. Other extra-galactic features may one day be used in the game. The map file may be downloaded from yalexx.map on this website.

This version of the map solves the "multiple stars" problem using the VGAP start type codes for multiple stars in a best-fit method. The star names which appear in the game are made shorter, the Dark Zone is sparser and an annoying "off by one" bug in byte numbering within the map file has been fixed. Wormholes have not yet been implemented. The map looks roughly like this:

Then we have qspdump which dumps QSP file to a text format. There is an exe. There is also the outliar example file to help debugging QSP handling code. Qspdump shows all the deliberate mistakes on outliar.