A poor man's map editor for EVNEW users

Hi all-

Recently rediscovered EVN after going with the other OS a few years ago. Very happy with EVNEW but noticed the lack of a good map editor. However, using EVNEW's ASCII export utlities and Excel you can put together a very functional map editor for yourself.

What I did: Last night I built a map with 45 SYST resources (including XY positions on the star map and all hyperlinks) in about 1 hour using only Excel. Editing and tweaking locations, etc. will be done tonight - but I found this really easy.

If this is interesting to anyone - here's what I did (requires some knowledge of Excel):
1. In EVNEW - Saved my syst resources as ASCII.
2. Opened in Excel
3. Made a graph view of all the data as points.

At this point I'd just been dinking around and had names for all my systems, but just a placeholder for XY (I used 1,1 2,2 3,3 so they would have unique positions).

XY Editing:
Once in the graph view, you can pick up the points and move them wherever you want - if you graph them as unique series you can even get the name to post right by the circle. It even conveniently shows the distance and vector to surrounding points.

Hyperlink Editing:
I made a dropdown table of the SYST names for the Hyperlink cells - it looked at the SYST name and then I used a lookup table and printed the SYST ID# from the names I'd chosen.

To do this:
1. First make the dropdown list in the Hyperlink columns:
-Select a column of empty Hyperlink cells
-Data: Validation: Settings:
-Allow values from list
-select the column of SYST names
Done!

2. Then make a lookup table to grab the hyperlink name and return the syst ID #.
Just go to Excel Help and type in 'look up table' on how to do this.

3. Cut and paste the SYST ID #s back into the Hyperlink cells.

4. Save as .txt and import back to EVNEW.

I'm still tweaking to simplify this, but it seems pretty efficient so far - I can build a galaxy of SYSTs and link them together visually or from drop-downs. I have a visual QC and the links list only shows real SYST names, so I can't mess it up.

This is my first post!
X-24

Nice. Would it be possible to make it easily expandable to other numbers of systems? If so, you might want to consider doing so and uploading it to the add-ons page.
There is an existing Windows map editor, called Cartographer, but I've heard mixed reports about its stability.

And welcome to the boards! Make yourself at home.

Edwards

Thanks for the welcome! I can work up a fairly generic example this weekend. It will always be a little interactive for users (cutting and pasting mostly) but is easily expandable to any size galaxy.

I'll get to work-

X-24

Edwards, on Jul 20 2005, 12:09 PM, said:

There is an existing Windows map editor, called Cartographer, but I've heard mixed reports about its stability.

EVN Cartographer requires the .NET framework and, I've heard, is unstable, so this may well be useful.

question: would there be any interest in a map editor for windows which doesn't require .net (and hopefully isn't buggy, but i won't make that guarantee just yet)? i know absolutely nothing about dealing with resources, but it would be pretty easy to make one which uses the same ascii format as evnew

I would. My current method for plotting systems involves a hand drawn starmap, a giant sheet of graph paper, a bay window, and sunlight.

orcaloverbri9, on Jul 21 2005, 07:20 PM, said:

EVN Cartographer requires the .NET framework and, I've heard, is unstable, so this may well be useful.
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The Current version (when you have .NET 1.1 installed) is quite stable it just can't support more than 500-600 systems (or something like that) when you have 800 in a plug then it starts to become unusable.