Batch input and output

Agemegos

G'day

My birthday is coming up, and I'm thinking of treating myself to a copy of Astrosynthesis 3.0. I just have a few questions as to whether it is likely to be suitable to my needs. The first question concerns batch input and output.

What I'd like to be able to do is to import a bunch of real-world stellar data from the Extended Hipparcos Compilation into Astrosynthesis and have it generate systems around every star in the data set. The data set in question would be every star within about 175 light-years that is hotter than about M3. That's somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 stars.

I'd like to be able to save the output so that I can do several runs and select the universe I like.

Ideally, I'd like a table of the all habitable worlds with important statistics such as their oceanographic cover, average surface temperature, surface gravity etc. Or better still, a database of all the planets in the batch searchable and sortable by selected parameters.

How easy would that be with Astrosynthesis 3.0?

Regards,


Brett

Ed_NBOS

In general, there's 2 ways to read/write external data.

The first is to use the scripting API. From within a script you'd read an external file and set up the objects in your map. Or, you'd read the objects on your map and then write it to an external file. This will require a good deal of programming experience because Astro's data is fairly complex.

The second is to access Astro's files directly. An Astro file is a SQLite database. These can be accessed using basically any language of your choice. So you're write a program in the language of your choice that reads/writes to the database. The table structure is fairly straight forward and shouldn't be too difficult to figure out. But, this requires some familiarity with relational databases.