A new 3d star mapping program is under development. It is being written by Jo Jaquinta, the same person who wrote the iconic CHVIEW program in the late 1990s developed originally to model the star system of C. J. Cherryh’s science fiction.

This program, currently known as TRView in honor of the Terran Republic stories is a complete re-write, but is organized along the lines of that program.

Why another star mapping program?

There are three great 3d star mapping programs out there already.

• Astrosynthesis is the most widely known. It can not only map stars and stellar empires and such, it can generate fractal surfaces and map planets and nebulae.  It’s very cool.
• Celestia is another excellent program with powerful graphics.  It can not only zoom you through the stars like the Enterprise could, it can incorporate 3d models of space stations, craft, and other objects.
• Partiview is software developed and maintained at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.  This is the same place that will receive and process the hundreds of gigabytes nightly from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope being built in Chile. They write serious software that is used by planetariums and by serious scientists.

All three suffer from two problems that TRView addresses.

• They are all hard to run. No one can walk up to the program and immediately move, center, zoom, edit or modify stars without paying the price of the learning curve for how to do things.  The user interface is opaque.
• They all focus on visual realism. They want to show you how the stars REALLY look from a point in space.
• They all simulate movement with “Star Trek” style stars gliding by, zooming through space.

For a program to be accessible to most writers and most fans, it needs to be simple to run for most things without instruction and without resorting to a manual. The program needs to be “discoverable.”

Many writers SF universes have star drives that involve jumping from one place to another.  In those universes, of which the Terran Republic is one, the network of possible jumps is critical to seeing the structure of an area. If your longest possible jumps are eight light years, you can’t get from Sirius to Epsilon Indi by crossing the intervening 30 light years.  You have to make five jumps around the empty place. If you can only jump five light years, there are a lot of stars you simply can not get to, only look at longingly across the void.

In those sorts of universes, the links between the stars and the 3d mesh they form which at a distance begins to resemble the skeleton of a sponge, is every bit as important as the position of the stars themselves.  TRView defaults to a link-based method of displaying stars.

It doesn’t do “Warp Six,” it doesn’t do Ludicrous Speed and it will never

ever

go to plaid…

Other Features

TRView has a number of other highly discoverable features that are worth mentioning:

• Routes: The program can search and find a route from one star to another, and highlight different routes in different colors.
• Siblings, Parents, Children: Some stars, even ones that are not true binaries, are too close together to separate the dots at any normal viewing distance on the screen.  TRView allows for stars to be grouped together as siblings so that when a star that is part of a group is clicked on, the information for the entire group is available. Additionally, stars can have “children” such as planets, which can further have children such as moons.  Planets can have siblings, so that Earth and Mars are siblings as well as Earth and Venus, so they are adjacent in their orbits, but not Mars and Venus.
• Custom data fields: Who can say what data fields you might need to keep track of for the systems in your SF universe.  What Polity does a system belong to? Is there a refueling stop? Is it a failed colony?  What species are the inhabitants? TRView makes it very easy to create custom fields, and then to search and report on them.
• Theming: What self respecting program these days would exist without the ability to make it your own.  TRViews extensive theming allows you to have control over how your maps look.
• Import/Export: TRView reads and writes industry standard CSV files.  You can import and export the data, modify it any way you want, delete or add stars, planets and moons, etc. all without having to be a programmer.

If you’re interested in getting a copy of TRView, join the TRView mailing list at XXXXXXX You will receive a link to download the most recent version of the program, and occasional announcements about new updates and features.

Thanks for taking the time to look at TRView.