BigBang VGA Planets starmap generator

What is BigBang ?

BigBang is a starmap generator for the VGA Planets game. It was written with Turbo Pascal for DOS. It allows you to alter the files xyplan.dat and planet.nm, which contain the coordinates and names of the 500 Planets in your VGAP universe. BigBang will create disklike clusters, where you can define parameters like the radial and angular density functions of the stars, which means you can create flat disks, pie-sliced-disks, spiral-arm galaxies etc. You can also generate uniform homeworld environments, e.g. every homeworld will have 4 "moons" within 49ly radius. Every player can have an own name for his sector, ... , well, go and play with the program, and please excuse the somewhat archaic user interface.
Please read theREADME and USERDOC files for details.

News

Sep. 4th 2000

I applied the tppatch to version 0.21 exe files. Version 0.2p should now run on even the fastest machines. Since I do no longer use DOS or Windows as my home OS, I would appreciate if some TurboPascal programmer and VGA Planets player would like to take over this project. I can not continue to develop it. How about adding a nice Windows GUI ? Grab the sources and send me a mail if you are interested!
... And there is this patch thing: Due to an error in the Turbo Pascal Unit CRT, this programm will not run on any machine faster than (about) a Pentium at 300 MHz. Normally. Dirk Franken sent me a patch by Andreas Bauer which fixes the problem. So if you have a "fast" machine, make sure you download the "xxp" version of the program.

Download

BigBang is Free Software, as defined by the GNU General Public License This means that you can download the programm and it's source code free of charge, and you have the right to modify and redistribute this software!
The files are gzipped tar archives. use untgz.exe for DOS or the popular Windows archiving tool WinZip to extract them.

Developers version 0,21 with pascal sources bbsrc021.tgz
User version 0,21, only exe and data bbexe021.tgz
User version 0,2p, only exe and data bbsrc02p.tgz (this is what most people want)

Sources of documentation

BigBang needs a heap of values to generate a new universe. To make life easier for beginners, I included sample configuration files for two popular setups with the package. You can go from there to create your very own VGA Planets universe. Please read the README file before you start to wildly edit the parameters.

Contact the author

Please feel free to let me know what you think of BigBang, if you found any bugs or want to submit new code!

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Last modified: Mon Feb 2 20:06:23 CET 2004