Traveller Sector Import Maps

Micco40 · February 2011

Just to make it clear....I LOVE you guys at ProFantasy!!! :-)

What a great, great feature. I had been trying to recreate some of these maps using the templates and it was simply taking FOREVER! (not Foreven :-))

I figured it out thanks to the discussion Torg Smith and Ralf had in another thread.

FYI, in Win 7 i figured out that I had to run Cosmo with the "Run as admin" feature.

This Importer works like a champ.

Again, thank you so much for including this feature. It made my little Traveller heart very happy.

Cheers!

Ralf · February 2011

Thanks for you kind comments. I just love sitting at the screen and watch the sector importer do all that work for me.

Kudos to Mark Fulford for writing it and for travellermap.com for providing the data.

I do have some comments from Mark on how to provide your own data for the installer. I thought this might be useful:

Posted By: Mark Fulford
The sector converter gets sector data via http file access. If you can put files on a web server (either online or local), you can create your own sector data and use a custom configuration file to point at it. To create a custom configuration file, start with cc3\system\traveller\example.cfg and change the following lines to point at your own content:

msec source = http://www.travellermap.com/MSEC.aspx?sector
sec source = http://www.travellermap.com/SEC.aspx?sector

At its simplest, your content can be static text files. If you know web scripting, you can create dynamic web pages that react to the sector name. The following is an example of pointing to static content on the localhost server (running on your own machine):

msec source = http://localhost/empty.txt?sector
sec source = http://localhost/sector.txt?sector

The converter will tack "=[sector name]" to the end of the URL because this is how sector names are passed for dynamic content.

For static content the "?sector" bit allows that sector name to be tacked-on without breaking the URL. When you run the converter you will still have to choose a sector name but, whatever you choose, the output will be the same because the static file only knows one sector. To output different sectors you would need to change the content of the sector.txt file each time.

With web scripting you can take the sector name from the URL to give per-sector response. The list of sector names within the converter is hard-coded but you can use custom sector names by running the converter outside of CC3 and passing the new sector name (and the config file) on the command line. e.g.

TravellerToCC3 config=system\myconfig.cfg,sector=my sector

The final part of the jigsaw is to understand the sector and msec file format. The msec is the one that defines borders, labels and x-boat routes. This would be very difficult to create manually but you can skip this part by using a static link to an empty file, in which case meta data simply won't be processed. For the sector files we use the standard UPP format, which is fully defined here: http://www.travellermap.com/formats.htm

TravellerToCC3 command line options can be used to improve the interface. The command line options are:

sector=sector+name
script=file+name+for+export+script.scr
config=configuration+file.cfg

Use + signs to replace spaces and commas to add options. Example usage:

TravellerToCC3.exe sector=My+Own+Sector,script=c:\some+folder\output.scr,config=system\myconfig.cfg

Duroon · February 2011

Is there a way to import and print a simple subsector map instead of an entire sector? If not, is that something that can be added in at some point?

Torg Smith · January 2012

Ralf,

In your quote by Mark Fulford toward the end, there is a command line argument called script. What is this? Is there any information on this script that I can use to create one?

To all,

What do I need to look up to support calling localhost on my computer? Will my Visual Studio 2010 be good enough to start a web service to host these files? My Bing Foo is pretty good, I just need to know what to look for. I am a platform developer not a web dev.

JimP · January 2012

Your ISP may or may not allow you to host a web site on your home computer. You should check with them on that.

I have my sites at http://www.cwahi.net/ and my paid domain and Crestar at: http://www.crosswinds.net/ Note that Cwahi, being the freebie sites, has php, etc. restrictions.

I'm not a web developer, but I have 16 web sites on those hosts.

If you just need a place to host a few files, maps, etc. I can do that on my Crestar site as I have for several people here.

Torg Smith · January 2012

I thank you for the offer, but I want to be able to do this at any time. Visual Studio will spawn a temporary web service that should not be visible from the internet. I am guessing I will need to create an ASP website project that serves up those files. Once I have the project setup I will be able to use it at any time. I have created web services before, just not web sites. I will just need to study up on the ASP projects.

Ralf · January 2012

Torg, the script (an externally saved CC3 macro) is the one that the Traveller Importer exe generates and then runs from CC3 to create the actual map. You could theoretically take this and make adjustments to it, then manually run it from CC3. In your CC3/System/Traveller folder should be a scr file called "sys_traveller.scr" - this is the default script that CC3 creates.

Torg Smith · January 2012

No I am not seeing that file in there. I have my file explorer set to make all files visible. I even ran the import and checked while it was running to see if it deleted it after the import and did not see it in that directory.

Torg Smith · January 2012

Ok, I found it. It was in the root CC3 directory.

Torg Smith · January 2012

So the exe TravellerToCC3 gets the information from the user and specified configuration file. It downloads the information to generate the script file. It then runs the script inside of Campaign Cartographer.

Ok I get it now. I was hoping it was something for between the download and the generation of that script (as I did not know that it generated a script).

The script was an interesting read for a creation of a map by script.

JimP · January 2012

I have copies of my sites on my hard drive at home to test various configurations. I don't run php, nor asp, but I can view the html without any addons to my computer.

Many of my sites are cms/blogs, so those i do have to put online to view the results of the page making. I save as my maps as bmps or pngs to look for things that may not be obvious to me in CC3.

Torg Smith · January 2012

Cool that was cake.

I just needed to create a web site in Visual Studio 2010. I did not create a blank one, just a plain Jane default site. I then put the two txt files in the directory with the existing site files. I ran the web site in debug mode and it opens the default page in a browser. I copy and pasted the path in the browser (minus the file name) into my custom configuration file for accessing localhost. I appended the file names empty.txt and sector.txt to the path. It found the files without problem.

Thank you for posting that information.

JimP · January 2012

You're welcome.

Starwolf · July 2012

Is it possible that the Traveller Sector map import can be updated so that simple txt files with sector data can be imported rather than go through with editing config files and set up local hosts?

Torg Smith · July 2012

They had said that they would try to do an update on the importer that would include the trade codes towards the end of last year. I made couple feature requests and that is one of them. They have not replied. I suspect it is too low in the priority stack. Here is the thread that it was discussed in. The requests was in the last post.

http://forum.profantasy.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=2541&page=1

goldscarab · October 2019

Now that I have my Cosmographer working and I have made my own sector data and sector metadata files is there a way to just feed those files into the input without bothering to setup a temporary website - as I build up a library of sectors this step seems a little problematic and it seems like you are basically reading in the formated data files anyway... ??

JimP · October 2019

You could type up text files with similar names of each sub-sector and place therm and the maps in folders by sub-sector, and the sub-sectors under their sector.

jslayton · October 2019

If you want to load a sector file from your local disk, use TSECIMPORTM and the URI for the file. For your local disk, use "file://" plus the path to your file. For example, if the file is named "sector.txt" and is located in "c:/temp", then the command "TSECIMPORTM file://c:/temp/sector.txt" should import the file from your disk.

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Traveller Sector Import Maps

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