Sins II Dev Journal: Stellar Cartographer - The Next Step in Map Making

Recently I polled the community to understand where Solar Forge falls short in map creation. It took me about a month to poll the data; after several weeks I’ve come up with a working prototype on what we think will be a massive improvement. Now that the new app is closer to release, I wanted to go over the functionality and improvements we have made to this replacement over Solar Forge.

Let's start with the basics: This isn’t Solar Forge, this is all-new from the ground up; and made for ease of use and convenience in the hopes it will foster some really great community generated content.

This is the basic layout of the application as you will be interacting with it. When opening the application or starting a new map, it will always start with a random star at world origin so you are aware of what's center and that a star is necessary. On the left-hand side is your galaxy generator. This part of the application is hooked directly into the game's galaxy_generator.uniform, so as to allow you to drag and drop any planet type into the map creation viewport without having to find a specific one via a drop-down menu. It also allows mods to add their own custom planet types easily and have them visually reflected in the application.

The right-hand panel contains node properties, transform options for viewing and your scenario information. Node properties are the settings for the individually selected planet/well/star. It will allow you to tinker with the individual settings of a single object. Transform is the section used to custom tailor the map making experience to your needs. This allows you to adjust phase lane thickness, planet/star size, orbital trails, the ability to toggle phase lane and planet ids and quite a bit more.

At the bottom are the Scenario and Map Info sections. Scenario is essentially a live feed for how many planets and stars are on your map, while also allowing you to designate the name and description. Map Info is simply a random map generator, with seed control for repeatability.

Now let's take a look at the viewport itself: We have made significant improvements to how maps are visualized and read while under construction. Starting in the upper left-hand corner we have some basic viewport controls for color-blindness, covering the big three. Under it, is a conveniently located button for random map generation that will use saved settings to generate maps. The top right-hand corner has the legend. Solar Forge suffered from a lack of easy readability. We are making every attempt to mitigate that here by not only using map images in the viewport, but also by providing a real-time legend for what's what: From planets to phase lanes and ownership. All readable at a glance.

On the bottom right is a basic atlas, so you know which direction is which when designing a map; and on the bottom left is a measuring tool to understand exactly how large the map you are making truly is. Given that something like a Novalith has X-range it's important to understand the distance between map objects.

At the top center of the viewport are your mode controls that allow you to specifically control what parts of a map you are building.

View is essentially a read only way of viewing a map. You can select individual objects in the viewport and tinker with their Node Properties, but you will not be allowed to move anything. It will keep the elements of your map fixed but selectable.

Planets is your orbital body placement mode - planets, gravity wells and stars. All placeable and moveable in this mode. Simply grab it from the left panel and drag it into the viewport.

Lanes is your phase lane creation and edit mode. While in this mode, simply click one object and drag to another to create a phase lane. The application will automatically detect when you are connecting stars/wormholes and create the appropriate lanes without any extra work on your part. This would also be what you would want to use to delete phase lanes (in planet mode they are unselectable entirely).

For viewport functionality we have made some additions that we hope will help to considerably cut down the time it takes to make some fun maps. On top of just being able to switch modes without always having to use the viewport buttons, you have the ability to easily visualize your selection of objects, copy/paste, mirror along an axis, and the really fun part: circular array or grid array duplication.

The inspiration behind this feature is the ability to duplicate a single section into a 10-player map quite easily without having to copy/paste and move every section. Simply select a chunk you want to array and a center, and it will do the heavy lifting for you. The same applies for grid array, it allows you to lay out how wide and tall you want the grid to be as well as spacing.

You can also measure the distance between gravity wells; this was a requested feature by some of our more ardent map makers. It's not necessary for everyone, but little things like this allow each person to cater their map making experience to their specific needs.

The final options in the viewport context menu are the parent/child options. This allows you to easily set up the relationship between a child and parent object (think planet and moon). By selecting what you want to be a child object (moon or otherwise) and dragging to the object you want it parented to.

Now that we are past the base functionality, let's talk about the fun stuff. We understand that over the 15+ years of Sins 1 that a lot of you may have maps that you have fond memories of and would like to easily carry over to Sins II. I spent some time solving this problem. Our Legacy option in Stellar Cartographer is designed specifically to open Sins 1 maps natively and convert them to Sins II's newer JSON standard.

On the left side are the Sins 1 planet type entries and on the right is Sins II. This also allows for personalized entries to make it easier for mods to move over maps with planet types that may be unique to them.

This next feature is a simpler version of an old one: the galaxy generator. With some simple numerical inputs, you can generate a map of your desired size. There are also seed inputs that allow for predictable generation.

Our hope is that eventually this tool can be used to create and control scripting for custom scenarios. Right now, it can be used to open and observe custom scenarios. The Create Scenario option is grayed out as we evaluate the best way of approaching that problem.

The last bit of functionality we added to the map maker was the ability to not only create the map image you wish to use for your custom map but save it out with the map when you have finished with your project.

Icon Maker allows for a large amount of control in terms of how you choose to generate your map image. Currently, we use it to data drive our map icons so that the icons we use in game represent the map itself.

Icon Maker Controls:

• Rotation & Zoom (to fit it properly in frame)

• Navigation (move the map data around to fit in frame better)

• Planet and Phase Lane Sizing

• Coloration of Objects in Scene

• Drop Shadows for Contrast

• Outlines Effects for Emphasis

• Output Resolution

As well as allowing you to manually select a map or data drive from the map you’re currently working on, the application has the ability to use any square background image, so don't feel like you have to use what is provided. That is just what we use internally to represent a map's size. Once you’re happy with it you can close out the Icon Maker and the application will remember your configuration so when you save out the map in its entirety it will also generate the image as well.

This tool is in active development. Watch for its release for early testing in the near future!