Sectors Without Number: Navigation Routes & Website Performance
Hey all,
The big news in this update is sector navigation and some behind the scenes updates for overall website performance. This allows for the creation of large sectors. There are some other little easter eggs along the way, so let’s get into it! All of this is live over on sectorswithoutnumber.com.
Sector Navigation
You are now able to build sector navigation routes between your systems and black holes. There are options to change line color, width, and type (solid, dotted, short dashes, or long dashes). Building this is all fairly straight forward, but first you’ll need to get to the navigation route builder first.
There is a new floating toolbar on the top right side of your sector map. The first option allows you to lock the map so that there is no accidental system movement after creating your sector. The second option is the layers submenu. You’ll be able to toggle navigation routes (once you have built them) and the hexagonal text map visibility. By selecting the edit button you’ll enter the navigation route builder. These layer options might also might give you a little insight into an upcoming feature (hint, hint).
Once you’ve made your way there, building routes just requires you to define the settings you’d like. For a route, select “Create Route”, click any number of hexes, and then select “Complete Route”. My recommendation here is to only build routes between two entities at a time- the reason being that if one of those entities are hidden from your players, the routes to and from that entity will be hidden as well. However, this only happens if it’s at one end of a route.
To save time while building your routes, you are now able to right click on the map to begin creating a route, and then again to complete it. Moving to click that button every time gets a bit tedious.
Overall Performance
There have been many behind the scenes changes that should significantly speed up the rendering and syncing of the your sectors. Because of this, you are now able to generate 20x20 sectors again.
Sector Summary
On the left navigation bar, you’ll be able to navigate over to the summary view. Here, you will see all of your entity types in one large table, and can click on the headers to sort by the specific columns. To download the table in a spreadsheet format, click the export button in the top right.
Internationalization
There have been a few amazing people from the Stars Without Number community that have volunteered to create translations for the website. To date, we have four new languages including German, French, Hebrew, and Swedish. You can select your preferred language when editing your profile (shown to the left).
If you are a multilingual and would like to help out with the effort, jump on over to the Google Drive Translations Doc, request access, and let me know what language you’d like to work on.
Attribute & Tag Updates
You are now able to add custom attribute values instead of choosing from one of the options in the SWN rulebook.
You’ll also notice there are now visibility toggles on attributes as well. Attributes and world tags can now be hidden from your players, like entities as a whole. You can now keep it hidden that one of your worlds has vicious Maneaters now, until it’s too late (Muah ah ah ah).
When generating a new sector, world tags will be hidden by default. To not allow this, you can deselect Hide Tags from Players in the configuration.
Upcoming Projects
Instead of doing a paid tier on the website, I have decided to start a Sectors Without Number Patreon. You’ll be able to vote on what features you’d like to see next and get direct support based on the subscription level. With that said, here are some potential upcoming projects:
- Custom Hex Color Layers: Ever had the desire to track sector threat level, intel level, alien influence, or faction influence? You’ll be able to create layers for each of these and color your hexes based on whatever you’d like to track.
- Circular Sectors: Put a black hole in the center for added awesomeness.
- Adventure, Alien, and Faction Generation: These items could be assigned to multiple entities.
- Custom Tags & Entities: These custom entities would exist outside of a single game but can be used to generate sectors or edit existing.
You can see a full list of upcoming projects on Github if you are interested. Lastly, I’d like to give an update on the growth of Sectors Without Number and thank all of the incredible new members.
To date there are about 2,300 people signed up and using the site. In addition, about 3200 individual sector edits are synced daily, on average. These numbers have increased dramatically since the last time I wrote an update. A lot of the growth can be attributed to Rollplay’s Far Verona hype. Adam Koebel streamed his sector creation process not long ago which can be viewed in two parts (part 1, and 2). I highly recommend checking those out and tuning in for his show every Wednesday on Twitch.
As always, if you run into any problems or have any suggestions for new features, feel free to message me on reddit at /u/mpigsley or directly at mpigsley@gmail.com.
