The Second Survey

[Mår Ekkertsen]

All factors that caused the failure of HIWG....

Thank you for your historiccal perpective. I remember the HIWG from the perspective of an entusiast who occassionly caught a glimpse of great effort going on behind a curtain.

My analogy was to distributed software development. Some of the open source projects work some don't. My uneducated opinion/gut feeling is that they fail in direct proportion to their wide openness.

 

[GypsyComet]

Thank you for your historical perpective. I remember the HIWG from the perspective of an entusiast who occassionly caught a glimpse of great effort going on behind a curtain.

Good description, and how it felt even to me at times, except I was never sure which side of the curtain I was on, and I was one of the electronically-connected ones...

 

[FlightCommanderSolitude]

Some of the open source projects work some don't. My uneducated opinion/gut feeling is that they fail in direct proportion to their wide openness.

This is not exactly precise. It appears that the ideal configuration for open development is a pyramid of sorts with a "benevolent dictator" at the top who is at once a visionary figurehead, harsh taskmaster and tireless leader-by-example to a core of talented enthusiasts and a teeming horde of testers, idea-providers, and casual contributors. The Linux kernel and the Perl programming language are notable examples.

In that sense, such projects will fail without the direction they need from the top. Critically important, however, is the tremendous well-directed labor done by the core group, and the massive quality assurance and input provided by the testers/contributors.

-FCS

 

[RainOfSteel]

Gack! What happened to this topic? Things seemed to be going swimmingly, several Great Old Ones involved, including the Eldest himself, and then . . . pffft!

We've had three or five like it in the last year, but this is the first time I've seen this one in particular (it's hard to comb all the way back through all these old Topics).

Don't make me write bad fan-filk of "I just want another Survey" set to the music "We just want another hero", or something equally soul-chilling.

Does anyone know anything?

 

[robject]

I think the place to start is to order the Imperial sectors, based on how "set" they are. In other words, the top of the list contains sectors which will likely have the fewest changes, and the bottom of the list has the sectors which will need the most work.

Something like this, for starters:

LESS WORK
Spinward Marches
Reaver's Deep
Massilia
Solomani Rim
Vland
Trojan Reaches
Reft
Core
Corridor
Zarushagar

MORE WORK
Antares
Daibei
Dagudashaag
Gushemege
Diaspora
Old Expanses
Fornast
Verge
Ilelish
Deneb
Lishun

The sector file format would be some flexible version of our current SEC files, perhaps with embedded, indented, descriptive text for systems and/or worlds.

After that, lists for each sector are drawn up, perhaps containing hex+world names that require review and potential revision. The lists are posted on the web, and updated regularly.

A sector that's "done" would be labelled "done", rather than having a link to its list of worlds to-do.

Comments?

 

[daryen]

First off, I want to once again point out how bad of idea I think a comprehensive Second Survey would be. I realize I am in a minority of one, but I still maintain it is a bad idea.

That said, I have put together a 1112 listing for the Spinward Marches, Deneb, Trojan Reaches, and Reft sectors.

While you probably don't want those, this effort did force me to examine the data on those four sectors, providing me a handy list of problem worlds and inconsistencies.

Let me know if any of that would be any help.

 

[robject]

Daryen, I would like to see them; in particular, I would like to see any changes you made to the old sunbane data, as well as the worlds you found to be troublesome.

Additionally, I would appreciate any Landgrab or other world notes you've composed for the Darrian subsector.

 

[daryen]

All of my Darrian stuff is on my webpage: http://www.caddocourt.com/traveller/

Almost a year ago I posted a thread (http://www.travellerrpg.com/cgi-bin/Trav/CotI/Discuss/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=5;t=000199) that dealt with discrepancies in the Spinward Marches.

The thread lists all (or almost all) of the changes I made to the data I downloaded from the web. (I don't know if it was Sunbane or not.)

Also, be aware that the Sunbane data is deeply flawed to the point of being unusable. Its randomization method was not relevantly random. (There have been other threads that discussed that one.) Except for sectors that have been published elsewhere, you will likely have to completely regenerate stuff from AotI and skip the Sunbane files.

 

[robject]

Thanks.

Yes, I recall the stellar distributions being wildly different between some of the inner sectors.

 

[daryen]

It was more than the stellar data (which is almost uniformly crap across all of Traveller).

It was the world UWPs themselves; they are deeply flawed.

 

[Flynn]

Originally posted by robject:
I think the place to start is to order the Imperial sectors, based on how "set" they are. In other words, the top of the list contains sectors which will likely have the fewest changes, and the bottom of the list has the sectors which will need the most work. [...]

I notice that your list doesn't include Empty Quarter sector. Any thoughts on why? And do you think MWM would like my work on that particular sector?

Just asking,
Flynn

 

[Chuck Anumia]

Originally posted by daryen:

It was the world UWPs themselves; they are deeply flawed.

YES!

Fix the flaws then print the survey.

 

[mad13142000]

Then there are those of us who would like to finish fleshing out ALL of the sectors in Chartered Space...<sigh>
Yeah, it's been a year since I posted anything new in my quest for mapping the Extents, but...well...It's been a YEAR.
oh well.
I still think that a new 2nd survey would greatly enhance the playability of Traveller. Too many GMs hate the legwork that Traveller requires for good play, and that's why the game isn't as popular as others with more detailed worlds... IMHO

-MADDog

 

[RainOfSteel]

Ooo! One of my favorite topics, revived again.

Ok people, I'm really going to get working on "I Just Want Another Survey" here. You've been warned.

 

[robject]

I think a number of good points have been brought up here.

For example, Thrash gave a good synopsis of procedure: fix the most important worlds, then connect them into the X-Boat route. I think that framework would go a long way to making the Imperium more accessible [read: a resource for gaming] without needing to define every single world. It's also an easier goal than solving every problem at once. Once the routes are fixed, we can evaluate our progress, estimate the time required to do the rest of the Imperium, and decide if it's worth the effort.

I also agree that there needs to be a dedicated team that likes to work together to do this, headed by someone who has Avery's goals for Second Survey clearly in mind, as well as a more intermittent collection of helpers.

However, I think the bottom line is that Marc wants all the UWPs corrected for the Imperium. So any "official" efforts will probably be in that direction.

 

[parmasson]

{Raises hand in back of the room}
Is the idea to have printed survey or a CD-ROM?
One of the biggest problems I have is communicating world data to players.
Considering all of the unofficial clickable maps available on-line has anyone given consideration to an electronic publication instead of a printed book? It could be issued one sector at a time as areas are corrected and mistakes could be more easily fixed.
I am sure this has come up before but I just thought it worth mentioning.

 

[GypsyComet]

I would disagree that a First Survey is useless, if *only* to provide grist for the Library Data mill. It can be used to reveal the early winners, the alien worlds, the lost causes, etc.

I agree with another point, however, that the past randomly generated sectors need to be, if not tossed out, then hand-crafted into a final useful state. A lot of attention was paid to Diaspora at the end of MT, to provide the proper historical frame to fit a lot of New Era work into. Similarly, the Domains of Deneb and Gateway have had a lot of attention, including the "great stellar revision" of TNE.

I would note that there are a few sectors in Known Space that are, officially, known only as dot maps or pages in the old Atlas. This includes sectors for which the random UWPs were badly flawed, effectively, but also includes a couple "core" sectors, Daibei among them, that managed to lose those files completely.

As such, a list of what is good, bad, or non-existent should be first, assuming Marc still wants the "Grand Survey as Benchmarks" project to proceed.

Secondly, broad parameters and regional adjustments should be formalized for both stated eras in each sector. A sector that is "long settled, rich, and highly populated" in one era may not be in another.

Strictly for time-savings, sectors with no useful data should have it generated randomly. There are some sectors that have been fan-developed (which should have been identified in step 1) which could be used as starting points, or not.

Next, all sectors, random or not, that are not in current publication (which means anything outside the Domain of Gateway, frankly, though Diaspora and the Domain of Deneb have been tackled recently enough), needs to be hand-adjusted for planetological anomalies, inexplicable populations, and neighborhood trade environments. This step will be toughest, since the "Economic Model of the Imperium" is one of the hottest ongoing arguments to this day, making adjustments pretty much guaranteed to annoy *someone*.

Keeping context across sector boundaries will be a point of concern as well, particularly if different people work on them. Since even one sector is a LOT of work, this may be unavoidable, but having a backwater corner in a sector ignore the effects of a superpower just over the sector/domain border is one of those things that will annoy the closet economists for another decade or two.

 

[robject]

There are some overarching themes for Second Survey to think about.

First, the distribution of industrial, high-population, high-tech worlds needs to be sanity checked, especially in the central sectors. Vland and Ilelish spring to mind, and Core.

Next, the distribution of rich, agricultural worlds.

Then, those worlds and the capital worlds can be connected to other worlds as needed to form the Xboat routes.

I've been storing Xboat route information at the end of UWP data; do people prefer a separate block of route data, perhaps at the front of the sector file?

</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">Core Sector
xxxx Ring/Ray yyyyy

A:Foo Subsector
B:Bar Subsector
...
P:The Last Subsector

xboat routes:
1010 1012 1014 1018 1020
1020 0820 0420
1020 1220 1224 1214 1225
1801 1804 1906 2010 2111

Foo's Planet 0101 X100100-G Lo Ni 111 Un G5 V
...etc...</pre>[/QUOTE]

 

[inexorabletash]

FWIW, I dodge the issue of inventing a new artbitrary text file format and store everything but world data in XML. And it would speed up my site's restart time if I stored the world data in XML too, since I use a very liberal regexpr to parse the world data.

I use one file (which started life as the "Consolidated Traveller Region Name List") which contains all of the metadata for my map. A rough schema is:

<Sectors>
<Sector>
<X>sector_x</X>
<Y>sector_y</X>
<Name>sector_name</Name>
<Name Lang="language_code">other_name</Name>
<DataFile>data.sec</DataFile>

<Subsector Index="A">subsector_name</Subsector>
<Subsector Index="B">subsector_name</Subsector>
...
<Subsector Index="P">subsector_name</Subsector>

<Route Start="hex" End="hex" Type="XBoat" />
<Route Start="hex" End="hex" EndXOffset="0" EndYOffset="0" Type="J-5" Color="White" Style="Dashed" />
...

</Sector>
...
</Sectors>

Any element can have metadata attributes:
Source="The Travellers' Digest #19"
Href="http://zho.berka.com"
Author="James Holden, Mike Mikesh, and Nancy Parker"

I can have distinct credits for each item (world data, routes, borders, subsector names, etc). Right now I don't do anything with the credits, but keep your eyes peeled.

The nice thing about the XML approach is that I can throw in as many of these attributes as I want - and right now my parser simply ignores them.

The XML format is rough - it was easy to throw together in C#. I'd probably add <Subsectors> and <Routes> wrappers in before I was going to suggest this as an interchange format.

Additional features would be:

- Borders
- Dates, e.g. you could specify world data for different eras)
- World "tweaks", e.g. add/remove worlds in the metadata, w/o changing the world data; modifying worlds by a regression algorithm, etc.

FWIW, Galactic has a format for routes, but it is subsector-based. J Greely also has an ".msec" format defined here: http://dotclue.org/t20/

 

[marvo]

Originally posted by daryen:
It was more than the stellar data (which is almost uniformly crap across all of Traveller).

Here here. All those planets around red dwarf stars are just plain wrong. Another crazy one is the pop A planet around Deneb. (Factor 1,000,000 sun block required)