That's actually a good idea, to encode info in the star names

One thing you might want to consider is seperating which syllables are used in each part of the name. Especially if you want your players to instinctively get an idea of where the star is from it's name.
Otherwise you could have names like Gooba gooba goo. Or a clearer example might be if Alpha Centuari III was known as Alpha Theta Gamma. It works as a name but it's less likely for the casual observer to figure that it means The gamma planet of the Alpha Star in the Theta constellation.

Also, if that is one of your aims, you might want to consider dividing the galaxy into quads (or cubes) rather than concentric rings, as it will be easier for the player to realise 'All the stars in this area have similar first names' rather than 'All the stars in this concentric ring have similar first names' (unless of course they are given some sort of visual cues to think radially rather than linearly).

That will be two cents please :P

Following your naming system.....

"Please buckle up as we approach the star system 'As If Man'. If you enjoy your stay here please visit our sister star 'I The Man'"

Coudn't help. Sounds like a decent naming system.

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There's 39 symbols on a Stargate, and staying within our galaxy (ie, using only 7 cheverons) there's 7.7519 * 10 ^ 10 (77 billion) permutations

Oops, color me emberaseed. ;) I knew I should've gotten my facts striaght before I go and make statements.

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a longstanding complaint I've had is that I just can't see 39 symbols encompasing the entirety of our galaxy.

Yes, my thoughts too. If you only put stargates on planets of interest, you might get by, but I want something which is able to name all the _stars_, and there are many more stars than habitable planets (I would assume). You'd think those Ancients would have planned ahead better. :P

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don't worry if it doesn't sound English (especially considering how much of English came from other languages...) you'd probably run out otherwise

I've already shown that "running out" isn't happening with 3366 sounds for each digit. With 7 sounds, you can describe every star in 12 trillion Milky Way galaxies (using the larger estimates of its size). I don't even want to think how advanced we'd have to be to have catalogued every star in 12 trillion galaxies.

As for the non-Enlish sounding aspect... Well, I love the way English sounds. I realize that modern English is more the illigitimate love child of all the other languages, but there are sounds which sound more English than others. Names that have j in the middle or end tend to sound very alien. Names with J in the beginning tend to sound aramaic (at least how English thinks aramaic sounds. For instance, we say Joseph, but the Hebrews pronounced it 'yosef' (which is also why 'y' is left out)).

Other sounds suffer from similar pitfalls. I wanted the names of stars to sound very English to the player in my game, and names like pujab and wazhure don't really have the sound I was looking for. I suppose I'm aiming for how late Middle English or Early Miltonian/Shakespear English sounded. However, especially words beginning in zh sound very cool (pronounced like the s in measure), so if anyone else modified my system for their own game (or heaven forbid real life :P ), they can add or remove whatever sounds they want. Number of sounds isn't a tremendous worry since they will compund to create many more phonemes.

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The angular accuracy is more important closer to the galactic plane, since this is where the stars are at their most dense

Not quite right, but a valid point. The problem as you get closer to the core is not angular accuracy, but radial and 'height' accuracy. Near the center, you end up with a very thin plane perpindicular to the galactic plane. Such a plane (I've found) can hide stars at it's opposite corners. To sum it up:

Max distance within one of these "boxes":
Fringe: 1.732 LY
Core: 1.414 LY

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Perhaps a non-linear scale might be better, giving you more angular accuracy near the galactic plane.

If I were to create a scaling such that radial distance and z height were made more accurate the closer to the core you get, it would solve this problem nicely. However, I'm not sure how this would be implemented exactly. (at x distance from the core, you'd have to know what ring you're in to be able to name the star.) Perhaps I'll work on it when my eyes aren't so heavy... ;)

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you might want to consider dividing the galaxy into quads (or cubes) rather than concentric rings, as it will be easier for the player to realise 'All the stars in this area have similar first names' rather than 'All the stars in this concentric ring have similar first names' (unless of course they are given some sort of visual cues to think radially rather than linearly)

The only problem with dividing the galaxy rectangularly rather than cylindrically is that:

In cylindrical, some parts of stars' names would remain constant as you: orbit the galactic center, raise or fall from the galactic plane, go farther or closer to the core within the galactic plane.

In rectangular: only time names stay partly constant is when you raise or lower and move parallel with the axis of the quadrants, which lacks any form of relation with the form of the galaxy.

Plus I imagine players moving more or less either in an orbit around the core, above or below the glactic plane, or towards or away from the core. If the core is the focal point of movement, (as it is in two out of three of the examples above), cylindrical makes better sense than rectangular.

However, data about the stars inside the game is in rectangular, and I'm still debating on how to present star coordinates to the player in-game. But for any kind of naming system, cylindrical or maybe even spherical coordinates are best.

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Overall, it sounds good, I'm impressed by your attention to detail.

Thanks, I hope someone else can benefit from my work ;) Glad to put back into the community, so to speak.

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"Please buckle up as we approach the star system 'As If Man'. If you enjoy your stay here please visit our sister star 'I The Man'"

Ha ha, I did notice real words cropping up from time to time, (although not spelled right, since it's all done with phonemes. 'I the man' = "Iy thu man") But with seven syllables, you'd be mighty lucky to find a star's name intelligible. Maybe you could get "Hay, look owver heer fowr stuf" Haha. Although with the way spaces are distributed it would be "Haylook Owver Heerfowrstuf"

Also, just a quick aside, I'm having trouble finding letters to represent the long sounds of the vowels

I have:
ae for a since in my head I pronounce ae as 'ay', but I know it's really pronounced like ee.

long i is the worst. Best I have come up with is 'iy', but that looks really wierd in writing.

If anyone knows a way to write these better, feel free to share ;)

How about ai? In Japanese ai is pronanounced like I (I'd post kana, but this board is the only one I know that's on western encoding and not unicode).

You guys should keep in mind an inherent flaw with naming systems based on location.

The galaxy is moving.

Although the amount of movement we will see in a lifetime is imperceptible it still occurs. This will be a huge problem if the galaxy is split linearly. Radially leaves a bit more wiggle room since the stars are roughly traveling in a circle. However, the inner stars have a shorter orbit around the core and therefore change their relative angular position compared with outer stars.

A slightly longer term solution would be to describe it as its radial distance and then as its relation to its neighbors. Kinda similar to colors on a color wheel. "Green?... well its kindof a mix of blue and yellow. Turquoise? oh thats blue green"
Something like that.

Or, if you really enjoy a static location system try describing them entirely as a color. It is a visual instead of audio representation.
Suppor impose a colorwheel on them to describe their angular direction and radial length and then use luminosity or brightness or whatever to describe the height from the galactic mean plane.

I am sorry if this has been mentioned already. I don't have time at work to read every post. Also, I am not an expert so please feel free to disagree.

I've decided to use:

'ey' for long a sound
'ay' for long I sound

I've made a short word generator, and I'll post a quick list of some words the generator produced so you get an idea how the stars will sound:

shahthshe soomdows ootha ferah vumahp eelbeyv ithoo bahki lotbees gooltoosh afrowt seeshpay touvow cheyshay shidpob eethowch ahes rouchu nupev vagay sheesowg athook outho mumud

I had the generator space it into two syllable words to get the effect of two phonemes being slured together in speech. From this list, a star would sound like:

Soomdows Ootha Vumahpee

Also, the generator stops two vowels from appearing next to one another in the same word, since aoiey is hard to pronounce.

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Suppor impose a colorwheel on them to describe their angular direction and radial length and then use luminosity or brightness or whatever to describe the height from the galactic mean plane.

That's an interesting idea. I don't know how easily it allows communication between people, but it would work as an alien system perhaps. A species which could produce different colors naturally, like an octopus, might use a system like that to describe the universe.

To compensate for the need of increased radial accuracy near the galactic core, the following will be used:

Xn+1 = sqrt(Xn/50000) + Xn

where Xn is the distance of the nth ring from the core. The first ring, X0 = 2*10^-5. This is picked rather arbitrarily. I suppose any sufficiently small initial value maybe chosen. 2*10-5 LY is something like 1.2 AU. If stars are any closer than this, even in the core, I doubt you could call them seperate.

Near the fringe, the ring is 1 LY thick. Using this method iteratively, we see that there are 100 005 rings.

A similar method will be used for the z offset. I haven't worked it out yet, but it will likely be very similar.

The only problem I have is determining which ring you are in based on your distance from the core. The brute force method would be calculating it iteravely every time, but I'm sure there's an easier method. I suppose I could crack open my numerical analysis books... sigh

Interesting thread. If you're bothered about stellar drift/jitter you simply allocate the names based on a specific time (such as 00:00:00 1st Jan 1970 UTC ;)

Has anyone looked at how Elite worked? It had automagically generated galaxies - with convincing names.

Elite does indicate one danger of generated galaxies: planets with names such as Arse - which slipped though Q&A.

Quote: Original post by LucidIon
Interesting thread. If you're bothered about stellar drift/jitter you simply allocate the names based on a specific time (such as 00:00:00 1st Jan 1970 UTC ;)

Has anyone looked at how Elite worked? It had automagically generated galaxies - with convincing names.

Elite does indicate one danger of generated galaxies: planets with names such as Arse - which slipped though Q&A.

I don't know about the original Elite, but certainly in Frontier they used actual star names for reasonably notable/nearby stars, and the rest were generated randomly by combining sets of syllables. This produced some fairly unpronounceable names, as well as the odd duplication, it wouldn't surprise me all that much if some slightly silly names got in by chance too.