Wing Commander: Privateer Logical Map

I got curious during a recent replay of Wing Commander: Privateer about the "logical" structure of the game map. As in: if you detangled the mess of jump points without regard to their actual "physical" location on the map, would it be possible to draw the map on a 2D Euclidean plane without having any of the jump lines intersect?

So, I loaded the map info into Dia 0.97.3 and fiddled around until I had something that looked good. This could be arranged in a number of different ways, of course. It looks like there's a single unavoidable crossed-jump-line, no matter how you arrange the systems. I've included a couple layouts here -- in all of the layouts, it's the jump between XXN-1957 and 119CE which conflicts with the jump between New Constantinople and Newcastle.

Humboldt Quadrant has been colored in blue, Potter Quadrant gets green, Clarke Quadrant gets red, and Fariss Quadrant gets gray. Click the images to get the full-size versions, or the SVG links to get more-nicely-scalable versions.

v3: With Exploratory Services + Righteous Fire Additions

This version attempts to keep the quadrants roughly where they are in-game, and includes the various systems unlocked throughout a full playthrough of the base game and Righteous Fire (namely: Delta, Beta, Gamma, Delta Prime, and Eden). The Eden connections end up forcing some real weird placements for Nexus and Junction!

• Dia source file: privmap_rf.dia
• SVG: privmap_rf.svg

v2: Base Game, More Accurate Quadrant Placement

This version attempts to keep the quadrants roughly where they are in-game, compared to my v1 version. It only includes the systems available from the very beginning of the game.

• Dia source file: privmap_v2.dia
• SVG: privmap_v2.svg

v1: Base Game, Original Layout

This version mostly didn't care about quadrant placement, and Humboldt + Fariss especially are pretty distorted compared to the in-game version. I sort of still prefer this one aesthetically, but I think v2/v3 is probably the better map overall. As with v2, this version only includes the systems available from the very beginning of the game.

• Dia source file: privmap.dia
• SVG: privmap.svg

Other Attempts

As usual with this sort of thing, the first thing I tried was throwing it into Graphviz, but didn't have great results with it. I always struggle to get neato/fdp graphs to look decent in there. It did provide a nice jumping-off point for manual tweaking, but I ended up abandoning it before too long. Here's my source file, though, in case anyone ends up wanting it: privmap.gv.

License

To the extent possible under law, I have waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Wing Commander: Privateer Logical Map. This work is published from: United States.

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