Recently, I've been working on some software to map the worlds of GDW's Traveller universe. There are some very nice software packages already out there which will display star maps of the Imperium and surrounding areas, but I want to map the worlds themselves, in a way that can be presented in 3D simulation programs such as Celestia.
The first stage was to parse all the existing world information that is available on the net. This provides us with a map of the star systems.
Stage two was to then add to that information, generating all the missing worlds. The original Traveller world generation routines were writtin back in the 80s, when computer resources were limited and access was quite rare. Information for a whole star system was compressed to a single line of text (and that was the expanded format) that describes a single planet in each system. I've generated details on the missing worlds, though moons are currently still ignored.
As can be seen from the gallery, this data can be exported to Celestia, and view as a 3D universe.
The current stage is to generate random world textures. I'm working on the premise that quantity is better than quality, so the texture algorithms aren't brilliant (there are far better world mappers out there than me), but they're designed to be fully automated, and quick enough to generate maps for several hundred thousand worlds (the current count, and remember that is still missing any moons which will probably increase the number by an order of magnitude).
The map generation also needs to be linked to descriptive text, so if randomly generated world text mentions that the thousands of islands make an ideal holidy destination, the map needs to show thousands of islands. To keep things simple, I'm using a classification scheme which defines worlds according to geology and ecology.
Star System Toolkit
Based loosely on the Traveller style of world generation, I'm working on putting together a Java based toolkit for creating, managing and displaying a universe in a way suitable for a pen-and-paper roleplaying game.
Though modern computers can process and display data far better than they could in the 70s (when Traveller was first created), it's nice to not need a computer when gaming. Because of this, the maps will still use the Traveller idea of 2D space based on a hex-grid, with sectors and sub-sectors and at most one system per hex. It's completely unrealistic, but it's easy to use and visualise.
However, systems will have multiple worlds, and the maps will contain more information than standard Traveller maps display.