Sky cultures¶

This document describes how to create your own sky culture for use in Nightshade NG.

A sky culture is a data set that defines how a particular culture sees/saw the sky. This can include constellation lines, constellation names, constellation art, constellation boundaries, and star names. A sky culture can also include translations for display in other languages.

Overview¶

A sky culture is a directory that contains all the individual files to define it. A sky culture is loaded via the sky_culture StratoScript command.

Culture Name¶

Name your culture directory something obvious, like “polynesian” or “arab” for those cultures. This will be the default name of your culture.

To define translations for the culture name in other languages, create a culture-name.tab file. This is a tab delimited file as follows:

LOCALE  TRANSLATION
C       Western
af      Westers
az      Western
ca      Occidental

The header line is required and the first translation must be for locale 'C’, which is the default translation value.

For backward compatibility the culture name will be read from an info.ini file as a last resort.

Constellation Lines¶

Create a text file called constellationship.fab which contains one line per constellation. Begin with a three character abbreviation to identify the constellation internally, followed by the number of line segments, and then a list of two Hipparcos star IDs per line segment (begin and end points). All values are separated by spaces. Example:

Aql 8  98036 97649 97649 97278 97649 95501 95501 97804 99473 97804 95501 93747 93747 93244 95501 93805
And 5  677 3092 3092 5447 9640 5447 5447 4436 4436 3881
Scl 3  116231 4577 4577 115102 115102 116231
Ara 7  88714 85792 85792 83081 83081 82363 82363 85727 85727 85267 85267 85258 85258 88714
Lib 5  77853 76333 76333 74785 74785 72622 72622 73714 73714 76333

Constellation Names¶

Create a tab delimited text file called constellation-names.tab. Each line defines the translated name of a constellation for a given locale.

ABBR    LOCALE  TRANSLATION
AND     C       Andromeda
ANT     C       Antlia
AND     af      Andromeda
ANT     af      Antlia

The header line is required and the first translation must be for locale 'C’, which is the default translation value.

Constellation Art¶

Create artwork for each constellation desired. Black will be made transparent when rendered, so transparency is not required.

Create a file called constellationsart.fab which contains one line per constellation with art:

Leo western/a.leo.png 84 86 54872 208 76 47908 178 150 49669
Sco western/a.sco.png 25 186 85927 175 108 78401 71 226 82729
UMa western/a.uma.png 04 94 67301 142 102 53910 244 58 41704
Cnc western/a.cnc.png 106 22 43103 187 236 40526 85 216 44066
Ari western/a.ari.png 38 81 13209 192 60 9884 34 151 13914

Each line begins with a constellation abbreviation followed by the relative path to art image. Next is a list of three sets of three values. Each set contains an x value in the image, a y value in the image, and a Hipparcos star ID to line up with that point in the image. The image x and y values are either pixel values, or if less than 1, will be interpreted as a fraction of the image width or height respectively. For example x = 256 and x = 0.5 would both be at the center of a 512 pixel wide image. The proportional values means you can scale the image without having to adjust this file.

Star Names¶

Create a tab delimited file called star-names.tab as follows:

HP      LOCALE  TRANSLATION
0       C       Sun
677     C       Alpheratz
746     C       Caph
1067    C       Algenib
2081    C       Ankaa

0       de      Sonne
677     de      Alpheratz
746     de      Caph
1067    de      Algenib
2081    de      Ankaa

The header line is required and the first translation must be for locale 'C’, which is the default translation value. The HP column contains the star’s Hipparcos ID.

For backward compatibility, a star_names.dat file will be read as a last resort.

Loading a Culture¶

Example StratoScript:

sky_culture action load path myculture

Here 'myculture’ is your culture sub-directory, located within the same directory as the script.

Share!¶

Cultural traditions are continually being lost around the world. Help collect and disseminate this information by sharing your sky culture with the Nightshade project.

Be sure to create a README file with your contact information and what sources you used to create your sky culture.