Qoppa Polli

I wanted to test the text renderer, which is definitely an essential part of the game, so I created a star name generator. The names are supposed to be generic, but when you colonize a planet you will be prompted to rename, and it will make a suggestion based on your species.

There are currently 6142 names that it can generate. Here are some examples:

Noir Coronae
Theta Diplodoci
Ni Terrae
Aqua Vici
Ni Ophidiae
Dio Orientis
Aghan Serpentis
Pansa Veni
Gimel Polli
Omega Gemini
Mu Planae
Kappa Loligo
Disigma Incubi
Kappa Animae
Phagun Angelae
Omega Planae
Aleph Succubae
Omega Genii
Aqua Avis
Psi Cloolu

Most of these will not fool an amateur astronomer, but they are a bit more creative than they would be otherwise. And there are some surprises for the observant and knowledgeable.

The text renderer, however, was not working well. Even after debugging one could hardly read the text. It was using a method by which the computer draws the symbols with polygons. When drawing such thin lines as was required by the smaller font sizes, the rasterizer missed the polygons entirely, leaving out the lines. I will create a bitmap based text renderer for my next attempt, which should work very nicely.