So, from last week I’ve managed to do naff all coding other than minor tweaks to what I already have.
I’ve not been idle on the project, however. I’ve been making a list of all the planets, areas and features that I can and positioning them on an image. I’ve then been getting the coordinates off of the image and placing that into an Excel file which I’ve set up to output some JSON for me. The JSON has entries for the planet/feature/area’s name, if it has any other names it is known by, if it is a major planet/feature/area (i.e. is it important for historical events), how far along it is from the left side of the map, how far it is from the top side of the map, and what type of item it is (imperial planet, chaos planet, feature, area etc.).
Making the list was no easy task. A lot of planets are mentioned heavily in Warhammer 40K lore, but are never given positions (usually under the guise of being erased from historical records – because plot). It’s just my luck that a lot of the planets I’m going to need for the project have no officially recorded locations. Because of this I’ve just been looking through the wikia for the 40K universe and giving my best guess based on my knowledge of the novels, and the work the wikia guys have been doing. I also had a really awesome basis to start from (see Ikaan’s map over on deviantART) which not only gave me the idea of using NASA images for the background (free to use, so no copyright issues), but also had a lot of the planets listed already.
Hopefully next week I can start poking at the code again. I’m not quite finished with my list of planets as there are a few more to guess the locations of. Speaking of which I think (unless I find any more planets that need adding) I’ll only have to pull the positions of maybe 100 out of nearly 800 planets out of my butt. I think that’s pretty good going considering.