AMIUBCSMAS 0.3

or

Alberto's Most Incomplete, Undocumented and Badly Coded
Stars! Mapper, Analyzer and Simulator

(called "StarAna", as in STARs! ANAlyzer, by friends)


WHAT THIS PROGRAM DOES

- Given a set of map/pla/fle files and some additional data you
  provide (race designs and any other stuff you feel like typing in
  such as planetary stats and queues), it performs a simulation of the
  "future" for N years, taking into account: pop growth, queue
  construction, mineral usage, mineral mining, concentration decay,
  terraforming (approximate), fleets carrying pop/minerals.

- The information (both the one from the files and from the simulation)
  can be accessed on-screen through windows and browsers. Also, a
  report-log file with all the information is generated.  The
  information includes: habitability tables, planetary
  growth/production/mining/terraforming, "suggestions" about pop filling
  threshold crossing and mineral shipment, global empire stats (pop
  growth, resource growth, total minerals/mining, etc).

- Generate a set of maps not normally available in stars, the list is
  too long to be written, since it features some kind of "basic
  functions" that you can compose to generate more complex displays.
  You can have the "space ownership display" as in starmap as well as
  all the stars! display types plus lots more.....
  Some examples:
  * Population
  * Population filling (color changes at 25%/33%)
  * Population growth
  * Resource output
  * Report Age
  * Gate coverage
  * Mining rate
  * Mineral concentration
  * Surface minerals
  * "Global" habitability

The multi-valued displays such as surface minerals or concentrations
use a method which is more intuitive than the Stars! histogram:
basically makes a planet look bigger if it's good, the marker is a pie
chart indicating the proportion.  A 100/1/1 mineral concentration
world is a fat blue ball, while a 1/50/100 one is a fat ball 2/3
yellow and 1/3 green. "Global" habitability exploits this method to
put the habitability for ALL races on a single display. Useful in team
games.

- The fleet information can be displayed in the same way as the
  planetary one. Unfortunately, the reduced amount of data of the .fle
  files make this display less useful. It can provide some useful
  displays, anyway, such as drawing the "triangles" of a size related to
  the fleet composition, mass or cargo, which allows for very fast
  spotting of the important fleets.


WHAT THIS PROGRAM DOES NOT

- Run smoothly and without problems, even if I have smoothed out
  most of the problems of the last version it is still a hacked thing.
- Play the game for you.


WANNA TRY IT?

You can see some screen shots and read a sample report-log file at:

http://mokulen.univ-lille1.fr/games/stars/starana/

You can download the AMIUBCSMAS 0.3 package from that page as well.

Note: this version is definitely more user-friendly than the old ones,
including more and more windows which permit to access all the data in
an intuitive way. Still, it's not an "install and click" application:
you'll need to use your brain to use it. Anyway, if you're able to
play Stars! you should have no difficulty.