The One-Character UWP

[robject]

You heard right, the One Character UWP. What the heck is that good for?

It's good for viewing 20 sectors of star data in a text editor, where one character represents one hex. It's quick, it's very dirty, and it's best for when you don't care much about most of the data.

Granted, you can't encode very much data in one character. But you can stuff a little bit in there, maybe just enough for a first glance.

For a Traveller, the UWP encodes some very important pieces of information. Critical information includes Starport, Tech Level, Trade Codes, and Gas Giant presence.

Rather than try to compress that data, the One Character UWP ranks worlds by Importance, using an arbitrary ranking scheme:

</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">First Step. Tally up points based on the UWP:

+1 point -1 point

Starport: A, B E, X
Tech Level: A+ 5-
Bases: N,W
Codes: Hi Lo
Ri Po
Ag Na
In Ni
Cp, Cx De

Treat totals of less than zero as zero.

Second Step. If a GG is present, add 10.

Result: a "digit" in the range [0-6,A-G].</pre>[/QUOTE]The result is a number from 0 to 6 for systems without a gas giant, and 10 to 16 (A to G) for systems with a gas giant. Values less than zero are set to zero.

Looking at a 'map' of a sector in this way gives two orthogonal pieces of information: how important the world is as a colony, and whether or not there's a Gas Giant in-system. Importance is an indicator of trade potential, military power, and political influence.

 

[MR TEK]

This idea is key to binary coding scheams.

each item is given a range that is a factor of 2. For example there are 6 startport types. three bits are 8 values. so divide the value by 8, and the remander is the star port code.

With a little knowledge of binary, or a simple chart, it becomes simple to see the breakdowns or even a simple program to split the code. it takes a little practise to read these codes by eye, but it is not that much more than decoding a regular UWP anyway, and you can cram a lot of data in a very small space.

Frankly, with the computer able to store pages and pages, and the fact that a game is hard pressed to cover more than a couple of worlds to that kind of depth, I would rather go the other way and expand the data display for just a few worlds at a time.

If you need to cover large numbers of systems often enouth to learn to decode such a system, coding in such a scheam would do the trick for you.

 

[kaladorn]

I see this as an excercise is technomasochism, but hey, that's what we geeks do for fun, right? I don't think I'd use it, but it isn't a bad idea inherently. If you open yourself out to a wide character, you've got a lot more data you can get in there in binary.

 

[robject]

Heh heh, technomasochism. Nice term. Is gearheadedness, then, 'pseudotechnomasochism'?

I used it (without the gas giant modifier) primarily when calculating local trade volumes between pairs of worlds, then secondarily for browsing "sector topology". Finally, I've used a variant of it for indicating the locations of ancient, ruined colonies in otherwise Barren (no sophonts) space, scattered along the edge of the 'rift sea' spinward and rimward of Known Space.

 

[kaladorn]

Don't get me wrong, using indices to summarize certain key data (really, it becomes a data extraction and analysis tool), isn't a bad idea. I just find as an overall descriptor, I wouldn't need it much. It reminds me more of an intermediary step I might leave the computer to work out when I wanted to be presented with an analysis of some of the things you discussed or a map or same.

 

[Falkayn]

Maybe just a boolean ...

1 = badass
0 = wimp

[EDIT: OK, I'm an idiot and forgot that UWP is for planets, not characters ... it's because I'm in the middle of re-writing 100,000 lines of VBA code as T-SQL stored procedures, and it's a payroll system!!!

So how about this?
1 = GM has material on this one.
0 = Go ahead, make me use a random generator, see if it gets you anywhere.
]

 

[far-trader]

Originally posted by Falkayn:


...[EDIT: OK, I'm an idiot and forgot that UWP is for planets, not characters ... it's because I'm in the middle of re-writing 100,000 lines of VBA code as T-SQL stored procedures, and it's a payroll system!!!

Ugh, ick, blech...

You are forgiven I actually thought it was just a slip of the brain back to when UPP was Universal Personality Profile while UPP was Universal Planetary Profile... or was that the other way around

 

[kaladorn]

100K lines of VB? Pshaw! 90% of it is probably UI, so really, how much app logic is there? (I'm assuming T-SQL isn't doing the UI stuff...)

(BTW, I'm kidding... I'm up to my neck in a project using VB6/VB.NET/C++/COM/DCOM and all sorts of lovely IP telephony stuff... so I can sympathize.... head... spinning... feeling... faint....)

Good luck.

 

[aramis]

Lets see.. 24 letters, 10 numbers, 34 possible combinations of 1 character, drop the two "Hard to tell apart" pair's letter... 32- so 0-31 is 5 bits deep (1 is +1, 2 is +2, 3 is +4, 4 is +8, 5 is +16)
Bit Starport Present?
Bit Breathable Atm?
Bit Hydro or GG?
Bit ModPop+?
Bit EaSt+?
Reorder to fit notional conventions of importance IYTU.
Or possibly a two-character code... one for physical importance, one for social... Naw...

 

[Falkayn]

Originally posted by kaladorn:
100K lines of VB? Pshaw! 90% of it is probably UI, so really, how much app logic is there? (I'm assuming T-SQL isn't doing the UI stuff...)

(BTW, I'm kidding... I'm up to my neck in a project using VB6/VB.NET/C++/COM/DCOM and all sorts of lovely IP telephony stuff... so I can sympathize.... head... spinning... feeling... faint....)

Good luck.

Well, actually NONE of it is UI .... (OK, there may be 4 lines of code updating a progress bar). The T-SQL is currently around 6000 lines and does 60% of the VBA in a lot less time (it's hard to tell how many lines because it's split over about 10 stored procedures - got too big for a single one).

VB6/VB.NET/C++/COM/DCOM/IP Telephony sounds nasty too!

I think I did get confused with the old UPP. Well, that's the story I'm sticking to anyway!

 

[robject]

Originally posted by Aramis:
Lets see.. 24 letters, 10 numbers, 34 possible combinations of 1 character, drop the two "Hard to tell apart" pair's letter... 32- so 0-31 is 5 bits deep (1 is +1, 2 is +2, 3 is +4, 4 is +8, 5 is +16)
Bit Starport Present?
Bit Breathable Atm?
Bit Hydro or GG?
Bit ModPop+?
Bit EaSt+?
Reorder to fit notional conventions of importance IYTU.
Or possibly a two-character code... one for physical importance, one for social... Naw...

Heh heh... now that's technomasochism.

Hey, we've got 24 lowercase letters too, right? And don't forget edh(ð) and thorn(Þ), which also have uppercase vs lowercase variants... add in a couple more (maybe a couple of currency characters) and you've got 6 bits per character. Ach, the mind staggers under bit-overloading.

</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">Player 1: "OK, let's plot a course."

Player 2: "Where to?"

Player 3: "Here's the starchart." (pulls out a huge ASCII map)

Player 1: "Okaay... we're here, and we can reach these worlds here."

Player 2: "What's a "Þ" system got?"

Player 3 pulls out a sheet of paper with a 64-row table on it. "Says here it's a Ni Ag with no starport and no gas giant..."

Player 1: "No, that's no good. Look for a "J", "Q", "small-s", "3", or "$"."

Player 2: "What about these? A "K" and "W" aren't that bad..."</pre>[/QUOTE]Ugh, how horrible.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

Ummm, Aramis, How many letters are on your keyboard, again? I use 26. Had they not invented Q and Z when you were in school?

(After you drop O and I, you get 24....)

 

[aramis]

Sorry. Was thinking in greek.
Of course, russian has between 33 (modern) and 46 (pre-Classical) bukvi (letters)
Greek has 24.

Anyway, we can't get to 64 available (24+25+10=) (that is: A-H,J-N,P-Z,a-k,m-z, and 0-9) without using punctuation, accented characters, or non-english letters. At which point readability becomes a factor.

 

[robject]

Heh-heh, heh-heh. Like readability matters at this point. Heh-heh!


Alternately, one would probably find the most common 50 (or so) sets of trade codes account for the vast majority of worlds...

 

[kaladorn]

Originally posted by Falkayn:
Well, actually NONE of it is UI .... (OK, there may be 4 lines of code updating a progress bar).

Just what manner of inhuman monster writes 100000 lines of VB code *when they apparently don't need a UI*? Answer: Someone direly in need of another programming language. I'd use VB for UI stuff, but app logic can be isolated into something you can write in a really capable language (though VB.NET is getting closer).

 

[Chuck Anumia]

So we get 24 for the CAPITAL letters + 24 For lower case letters + 0-9 numerical representations right? (24+24+10)=58 designations for each part of the UPP before going into other key stokes

K?

 

[Straybow]

No, 25 lower case. Neither "i" nor "o" gets misconstrued as "1" and "0" but rather "l" gets confused with "1" for most fonts.

Not that I'd ever want to use a one-character UWP.