>>5746926>>5746894>Dan O'Bannon, Chris Foss (again etc)Thank you very much for this link! I always like to read about the creative process of designers, it helps give insight into their approach for more inspiring worldbuilding! I don't know if you have already seen that Jodorowsky Dune documentary,
>>5741650but he explains how he hired Moebius and Dan O'Bannon and Chris Foss and Giger in some French castle, they were churning out all these spaceship drawings, and then when Dune was cancelled after some lamentation Dan O'Bannon went and did Alien instead hehe. Dan O'Bannon was not their first choice, they met with the Kubrick 2001 designer man (forgot his name, maybe I think it was Douglas Trumbull?? he was apparently the main Hollywood FX person of that era) but Jodorowsky in his crazed maniac cult leader psychic warrior visionary shaman mode could not work with him, he was far too professional and disciplined.
>>5746926This is very intriguing, I will have to research it a bit hehe. I have a vague idea I read some rpg (maybe some variant of Traveller space rpg rules?) where you could configure a weapon to fire through various "phases" of space, it would be an attack vector like
(1, 0, 0, 1, 1...) etc or something and a target would set their shields beforehand to certain ranges and it would determine what was blocked and what penetrates. And it introduced some other metagame, of capturing or hunting for these codes etc. I think I skim read these rpg rules somewhere, cannot find in my notes the source though.
>wormholes, tunnels, star lanes etcThe star system network graph is pretty standard, I wrote some code that experimented with good playable structures. What I found was the best technique was to create a delaunay from a poisson disc distribution, then take the Voronoi from the delaunay triangulation, then randomly remove some edges ftom the graph nodes. A variant I made was to modify the clustering of the starting points so that the central circle within the Poisson disc is tighter (ie like a galactic hub, the inner star systems are closer) whilst the outer far-flung star system branches are further apart.
However, with my method you have no control over the systems generated (beyond setting an initial Poisson disc random seed). So in the end I settled with the IAU equirectangular map instead, it is more intuitive, and anchored to a long history of stellar cartography over the centuries. Ready-made game maps, ftom wikimedia yay!
Pic related was my 2D attempt at something like the Ascendancy
>>57467213d rotating star system map. I think that primitive dos game volumetric star map looks amazing, it is more immersive than the incredible interfaces from games like Sins Of A Solar Empire or Endless Space 2 that I have seen, though those are far easier to comprehend.
