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<blockquote data-quote="Agemegos" data-source="post: 4486213" data-attributes="member: 18377">A 2-D universe is no improvement. You can visualise it on the page, but&nbsp; every time you look at it or make decisions based on it it screams &quot;I am not Space&quot;.I did that with earlier versions of my setting: location had been important during the exodus from Earth, but developments had made proximity irrelevant. In the current revision I am replacing the star drive to make location matter because I want to make some places remote backwaters, which didn't work when it was one Jump from anywhere to anywhere.As for visualisation: it doesn't seem like a big problem to me. Players need to know what important systems are nearby for various values of 'nearby', and how far it is from one place to another. I use an Excel workbook wih a page of positional data to calculate distances between specified colonies and to generate lists of colonies within specified distance of a specified point (which data can easily be sorted by distance.I have a celestial globe, one of Nyrath's largest-format maps of space within 30 lightyears, soft and hard copies of the Astrogrator's Handbook, a copy of the HYG catalogue in Excel format, and software visualisation tools such as Celestia, but I find that players don't look at them during games, because they don't need too. Though of course things would be different for a strategy game.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Agemegos, post: 4486213, member: 18377"] A 2-D universe is no improvement. You can visualise it on the page, but every time you look at it or make decisions based on it it screams "I am not Space". I did that with earlier versions of my setting: location had been important during the exodus from Earth, but developments had made proximity irrelevant. In the current revision I am replacing the star drive to make location matter because I want to make some places remote backwaters, which didn't work when it was one Jump from anywhere to anywhere. As for visualisation: it doesn't seem like a big problem to me. Players need to know what important systems are nearby for various values of 'nearby', and how far it is from one place to another. I use an Excel workbook wih a page of positional data to calculate distances between specified colonies and to generate lists of colonies within specified distance of a specified point (which data can easily be sorted by distance. I have a celestial globe, one of Nyrath's largest-format maps of space within 30 lightyears, soft and hard copies of the [i]Astrogrator's Handbook[/i], a copy of the HYG catalogue in Excel format, and software visualisation tools such as Celestia, but I find that players don't look at them during games, because they don't need too. Though of course things would be different for a strategy game. [/QUOTE]

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