FT PRG Making campaign maps with ftmap

For those interested in campaign maps - this is just a thought
but the ftmap game mapping utility can be use to create star maps.

You just need to create some graphics for the stars and labels then work out
their coordinates. It will take colour images and uses their transparency
settings.

You could use actual star positions on a coordinate, The scale could be ly or
parsecs.

If you type in the coords and naming data in the ftmap file it will produce a
high resolution map in the universally readable GIF format and label all the
stars for you.

Too apply campaign labels such "here be dragons" you can either create an
image label to place at the required label position as a normal game object
(but it will try to label the label so give it a null name) or annotate the
background image directly (preferred)

If you feel really keen you could get a picture of a spiral galaxy such as
M100 from the hubble archives and use it as a background for the map and place
the stars appropriately. Any background should be scaled to fix the final map
resolution of it will be stretched (and muck up your labels)

The beauty is that you can vary the background image and hence
the campaign setting, then 'standard' stars can be re-overlaid.

ftmap runs on Unix & W95/NT systems and can probably be compiled
for the Mac too as the code is portable.

download ftmap from here:-

http://www.yorvic.york.ac.uk/~hodgson/newweb/ftmap_download.html

read about ftmap here:-

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Station/3565/ftmap.html