Excel star system generator

Message

solartrix · #1 Post by **solartrix** » Fri Nov 12, 2004 8:01 pm

I know this may be a little late in the game, but I had some time and built a little system generator macro in excel (ok, so maybe it's not so little...).

I think it might be useful for tweaking the tables that go into the code without having to play-test a ton of games. You can just tweak the modifiers in the the excel spreadsheet and hit the "Play God" button and bam - you've got a new system. Star type, number and positions of planets, planet size, planet temperature and climate, and specials. And there's a little chart showing the cummulative bonuses / penalties for farming, mining, production, etc.

Only trouble is I don't have a place to post it online. Can someone help?

MisterMerf · #2 Post by **MisterMerf** » Sat Nov 13, 2004 4:37 am

I may not be the intended audience for this macro, but please clarify:

What is the correspondence, if any, between the current game mechanism for generating systems and this macro?

Why is this more useful than generating a galaxy in a debug mode (assuming one exists) and querying at will?

solartrix · #3 Post by **solartrix** » Sat Nov 13, 2004 2:35 pm

Not sure there is any direct tie-in to the game code. I wrote the macro only 'cause I started thinking about how to balance out the systems within a universe - guess I had a few ideas I wanted to try out.

That led me to put a few tables together in excel. Which led me to write a long macro that pulls the tables and puts the system togehter. I presume this is sort of like how the code works.

BUT, with excel, it's really very easy to change the tables since there all there right on the spreadsheet and see what kind of affects your changes have by generating a dozen systems or so to see what happens. There's no digging around in a text file or compiling / debugging the code.

And I wrote up a little section that calculates the bonuses / penalties for each of the planets for farming / mining / research etc so you can literally see how useful the systems will be (again without having to use the code).

Make any sense?

Prokonsul Piotrus · Sat Nov 13, 2004 3:56 pm

I may be able to host it - contact me on ICQ if you still need webspace.

Bastian-Bux · #5 Post by **Bastian-Bux** » Sun Nov 14, 2004 8:03 am

Hmm, if I remember right we had that already. Didn't someone write an excel thingy when we where designing the star generation? But that was v0.01 till v0.03 I think

.

Prokonsul Piotrus · Sun Nov 14, 2004 11:02 am

File is hosted here: Link