okay it has its own blog now

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

This is a freebie and is being written as a side project by a very busy physicist and apparently distributed as a side project by a very busy rocket scientist, this blog is gonna be sparse on the updates.

Yes it's coded in Matlab yes we know you hate Matlab.

At some point the creator (I'm gonna have to ask them what pseudonym they want because I can't keep calling them 'my beta' but again we didn't think this would happen) is intending to code this up as a .exe that users can run directly if they trust us or compile themselves and then run if they don't. This person is way more computer than I am and I'm more computer than much of Tumblr so yes this is a high bar to entry.

Yes the intention is to publish the code when it's working properly, and I'm trying to convince them to set up a github page. It's going. Badly.

At the moment it's generating random star systems beautifully, though the smaller moons keep phasing in and out and you have to check the readme to find out what the numbers mean. Generating planets to spec is stickier just at present and will be a longer time coming.

Their intention is to send me a working copy of the random generator to post sometime on Friday, so realistically you won't see that before the weekend because I have a life too and y'all are killing my notes.

Yes EVENTUALLY you should be able to input any of the parameters the generator allows for and it will output a system that meets your requirements, but I anticipate spending a LOT of time deliberately breaking it before that's up and running.

To the person who offered debugging help, I love and appreciate you but this person learned to code fortran and assembly before anything else and makes new code languages for fun so I do not think you will be able to read their code (no shade, I can't either).

To answer - no, this is the first I'd heard of this thing, I'll mention it to the physicist but I suspect actually making the two compatible will be out of scope because this was intended as a small one-off and absolutely not something that would get or need ongoing support.

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

(If I've tagged you and you're already over here, I'm sorry, but there are literally thousands of notes and only one of me and I wanted to make sure you didn't miss out on updates as they come up.)

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

(If I've tagged you and you're already over here, I'm sorry, but there are literally thousands of notes and only one of me and I wanted to make sure you didn't miss out on updates as they come up.)

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

(If I've tagged you and you're already over here, I'm sorry, but there are literally thousands of notes and only one of me and I wanted to make sure you didn't miss out on updates as they come up.)