A map is where a mission happens — a star system, a region of space, a planetary
surface. Missions reference a map and place their own objects into it; the map itself
holds the permanent scenery.
Locations
A map is a tree of locations, not a flat list of coordinates. A
system contains bodies, a body may contain places on or around it. This nesting is
load‑bearing rather than cosmetic, because of how environment resolves.
Environment resolves up the tree
Environment — fog, dust, starfield, lighting, sky — is authored per location
and resolved by folding from the root of the tree outwards to the location the player
is at. A location that authors nothing inherits everything from its ancestors; a
location that authors one element overrides just that element and keeps the rest.
Two consequences:
- Set the general character of a system once, at the root, and only override where
somewhere should look different.
- When somewhere looks wrong, the cause is often above it in the tree rather than
in the location you are editing.
Objects
Objects placed on the map are the permanent contents: stations, planets, asteroid
fields, derelicts, debris. Each has a position and a rotation, and a model.
One trap worth knowing. Object rotation values are negated when
applied — yaw, pitch and roll all invert between the file and the running game.
If you are hand‑editing rotations and everything faces the wrong way, this is
why. In the editor, set rotations visually rather than numerically and the question
does not arise.
Extent
A map's playable extent is computed by the server from its contents and sent to
clients as bounds. It is not a field you set. (There is a dimensions field on maps,
but it belongs to the galaxy generator and is not a surface map's size — setting it
expecting it to resize a map does nothing.)
Editing
The map editor is a 3D view with the location tree beside it. Selection, movement
and the property panels work the way you would expect from any scene editor.
Two practical notes:
- Save whole. The editor's save writes the entire map including its
locations. A partial save exists, and is used by the in‑game tuning panel to write
a few environment fields without round‑tripping locations it never read — but
from the editor, save everything.
- Particle clouds are hard to click. Point‑based objects like
asteroid fields have a pick tolerance measured in world units, so on a map spanning
thousands of kilometres they can be effectively unclickable when zoomed out. Zoom in
to select them.
Tuning the look from inside the game
There is a renderer tuning panel available in‑game that edits the active
environment live — fog, dust, starfield, sky and post‑processing — and can
write some of it back. That is a much faster loop for getting a system to look right
than editing and relaunching, because you are looking at the real thing under the real
lighting.
