Four Hundred Billion Stars and a Bad Map

I built my own system map for Elite Dangerous, because the one in the game annoyed me.

The galaxy is real

Elite is unusual among games in that its galaxy is real astronomy, not set dressing. When you scan a body the game hands you a genuine Keplerian element set, the actual orbit, eccentricity, inclination, the lot. It's simulating a real solar system, and it writes all of that to a log file on your own disk as you play.

And the scale of it is the part that still gets me. Elite models the entire Milky Way, four hundred billion stars give or take, in their real positions, and the ones we've actually catalogued in reality are sitting where they should be. The rest is generated from real astrophysics rather than sprinkled around, so the galaxy holds together the way a real one would. They've folded in genuine discoveries too. Real exoplanets get added as we find them, and when a player out in the black scans something the game didn't predict, that's a first for a human being and it keeps their name on it.

The map is thin

The in-game map does display all this, but thinly. To actually make a decision I'd end up bouncing between three or four different panels, one screen for the orbit, another for the body's stats, another for whether it's worth landing on, holding pieces in my head and correlating them by hand. For a system with thirty-odd bodies that's a lot of squinting.

So I wrote ORRERY

It tails the log and draws the system live: real orbits, solved and propagated from the scan timestamps, so bodies sit where they'd actually be. And instead of numbers in a table it leans on glyphs and colour intensity, a body's type, whether it's worth your time, how far you've gotten with it, all readable at a glance without opening anything. One look at a second monitor and I know what the system holds.

One corner of an ecosystem

It's not the only tool of its kind, and that's part of what makes Elite good. There's a whole ecosystem of third-party stuff players build for it, catalogued over at EDCodex, and ORRERY is just my corner of it.

Source and Windows builds: github.com/TerjeRu/orrery