Logbook entry

Making the Inara Route, or How I Went Blind

This was a bit of a beast! Nothing about it was particularly hard/complicated, it was just a bit tedious in places - although that was largely self-inflicted due to bad planning on my part! The actual in-game part was BY FAR the easiest bit - the jumping around and exploring was a piece of cake and very relaxing! If you choose a relatively simple shape with uniform geometry, it's fairly straightforward, but the more detail you add, the more accurate you have to be with your waypoints and route density, or the lines go slightly wonky. ANYWAY:

Step 1: Scale

I wanted to make the sign nice and big, across a decent span of the galaxy; too small and it'd be a bit unexciting, too big and you have a couple of problems - star density for one, since low density = zigzaggy connections between the waypoints and even though they might appear very tiny, I wanted the logo to look as perfect as possible. Another issue would be parallax; because I was using the in-game galmap to "draw" the logo, the wider the span, the more wonky it'd look because of perspective? Anyway - long story short, I settled on a fairly solid width of about 40k, which covered most bases.


Step 2: Coordinates!

Now the first tricky bit;  EDSM (god bless you guys!) have a galactic map where, by hovering the mouse over areas, it spits out xy coordinates. Awesome! So I scaled an image of the Inara logo up to my screen size, printed it off, some comedy scissors and glue action to stick it on some clear plastic, then taped it over the screen. NOW I could hover the mouse over the vertices of the logo template and read off the coords.

Here's where it went pear-shaped. I didn't think I'd have time for the five stars over the logo, so I skipped them.



If you're gonna do something like this yourself - make sure you get ALL the data up front! Anyway, more later.

Step 3: Coords -> Systems!

With the galactic coordinates for one half of the logo, I then popped open the galmap and poked around until I found stars on or as-near-as-dammit to the coords. I'd say for the most part, they were within a handful of light years - which sounds like a lot, but considering the scale of the logo, that's a fraction of a percent tolerance, so I was happy enough The other half of the logo was obviously just a case of flipping the X coordinate, since I had centred the logo on the Origin line (crafty eh! ) So - systems found, waypoints set, off we go!

Step 4: Night. Mare.

It was an easy run around the waypoints. Finished up with time to spare - ok, cool, let's do the stars! Only thing was - I'd originally spent ages lining up the paper template on the EDSM galmap, zooming in and out to get it just right. And the pedant in me thought "crap, if I try and realign the template, it wont be anywhere near as accurate when I get the five stars coords, they might be fractionally wonky...". So after  a bit of headscratching, I had a new plan:

a) Take vector graphic of original Inara logo, and measure in pixels the distance from a known, existing waypoint to the center of the top, middle star.
b) Measure the pixel distance between two already completed waypoints, calculate the vector distance of the same stretch in terms of galactic coordinates, and create a "pixel-to-galcoord" scale.
c) Using XY pixel movements (aka, "-120 pixels across, 53 pixels up" etc) - calculate the relative center of the left two stars from the reference point in step a).
d) Now calculate the XY pixel vector from a star's centre to each of the points on one half of the star. The other side obviously will just be the same vector with the X coord reversed.
e) NOW translate both the stars' centre's and eventually the points into galcoords.
f) Duplicate the left two stars to the right two stars, by flipping the X coord to a positive integer.
g) Open galmap, map coords to systems.

Which sounds complicated initially, but when you actually think about it, is really simple stuff - just takes AGES! So for example, to calculate the galactic coordinates for the left-most star alone required all this mess:



To be honest, I could have just tried to realign the template; but I get a bit OCD about stuff like this, and any slightly misaligned points would kinda ruin the whole thing for me! So the above was the only solution, but after hours of that, I was in full-blown "kill me now" - was stupid late and my brain was already jelly from a pretty grim day at work! So yeah, that was fun. Hence if you do wanna do something like this - it's SO much easier if you do it all from a template.

The NICE thing about it all though is this; the plots etc in the vid, on the pictures - I'm sure some ppl might be thinking "hmm, I bet they're not really that perfectly lined up". In actual fact, because the Inara logo is symmetrical and since I'm using XY coords, I can 100% guarantee the route I took is absolutely symmetrical. Any slightly googly images in the vid above are because I didn't have the galmap perfectly lined up when I took the pic for the video, and the waypoints render kinda weird as they get further from the focal centre of the screen - but the coords can't lie Same with the stars - by using the centre as reference points and just flipping/mirroring half the star/s , I don't exacerbate any errors/variance that almost certainly would have happened by measuring each of the 60 points in XY pixel coords from the original reference point.

Long tedious story short - if anything, the actual route is more "accurate" than the one I pictured above, although at this level of detail in the pics and vid, it'd be indistinguishable - again, fractions of a percent.

I'm about 100% certain I've lost anyone who isn't a power nerd at this point

ANYWAY - done and done. It was fun and has given me a whole load of silly ideas for the future! But for anyone looking to give it a go, I'd definitely say take your time with the planning. You can get programs to overlay a png graphic which would make life a LOT easier to correct mistakes, but the idea of scissors, paper and glue really tickled me, so both work! If anyone wants to do the "Inara Loop", I'll post the systems below. You'll see I had to do some backtracking as I adjusted the plan on the fly at one point, so i actually think it should really come out at a nice even 100 waypoints!

Thanks again so much for taking the time to read this nonsense!

Route:


And I REALLY don't think anyone's going to be mean enough to claim I just mapped it and didn't run it, but fair's fair, so here's all 102 waypoints on galmap with  "0.00ly" markers as per BRC regs AND a HUUUUUGE thanks to poor old Sidewinder Sam, who kindly agreed to act as independent adjudicator, so he's got 102 screenies posted to him at the time of each arrival at each waypoint in discord - thanks again Sam!