Is there any way Michael's considerable modeling talents could be used to give us a 3D universe map?

It would be especially nice if it was maneuverable like the ship models in the ship purchase screen.

Ooooooohhhh. Eye Candy! This would rock.

But-maneuverable with Zoom features!

after all the ships are added, intercepters and capital class ones, and new missions, and better hud and, and, and, ..................

I've actually been playing around with an idea concerning nation specific Nav Maps. Basically I took the current map into Maya, and place spheres at all the points. Then I moved them back and forth until I got something that looked the same from the original camera, but drastically different from two other cameras placed in the scene.

For instance, the original map became the UIT-centric version. Dau is huge on the map, and Itan is very, very tiny. It would require zooming in to see properly.

Same with the Itani map, Itan is huge, and Dau is a speck.

Repeat and manipulate for the Serco map.

So what you would end up with would still be a 2d map (that you could zoom way in on), but the three nations would all have very different and specific versions.

Anyway, I almost have them done actually... I'll post them when I do.

I think it would be really cool to know how many of each nations systems are actually in the same galaxy. Potentially every system could be in a different one, which would make space travel to other systems without the wormhole impossible with current tech, even at light speed. Which will make the exploration expansion way cool when(if) it's introduced.

I think it was always a given that each System was in it's own Galaxy but that may be presumption on my part.

Well, the Backstory says Sol II was "on the other side of the Galaxy" from Sol. Doesn't say anything about the others, though Deneb (if our Deneb is the real Deneb) is also within the Milky Way.

I always heard that all thirty systems were in the Milky Way, just... spread apart...

there's no reason the systems need to be in seperat galaxys (or in the same galaxy either). it's really just a matter of what's cooler, and personaly i don't care for the multiple galaxy idea. the Milky Way is esily big enough to have any arbitrarily high number of systems without any of them being "too close". even at light speed it would take years to travel between prety much any 2 stars. and well our ships travel at velocities that don't break tripple digets in M/s so light speed isn't a velocity we should worry too much about.

Odia's closer to Earth than Deneb is!

http://en.wikipedia.org/Corvus_constellation <--- take note of the beta star, "Kraz" >_>

Did you mean Luis's modeling talents? Not that Michael isn't possibly talented in that area too, I have no idea.

Anyway, we've toyed with realtime maps every so often. Ray has had a prototype 3D map thing for a long time. But, we've always planned on moving in that direction once we started to have universe exploration and expansion. Prior to that, we'll probably stick with what we have.

Part of the required featureset is that the map actually expand in realtime with newly explored systems. So something "modeled" wouldn't exactly be ideal, although it would be constructed client-side from previously-modeled primitives.