Dastardly Plot

Returning to more interesting matters...

Creating an Arrakeen texture for Celestia as faithful as possible to the map given at the beginning of Dune will require translating something like this


into something like the following.


Or, more accurately, into something like this:


This will involve measuring the coordinates of a massive number of points on the original map and converting them into points on the texture. A real PITA, in other words.

I've decided that the quickest, most efficient way to achieve this will be to write another single-purpose utility app. This one will take as input parameters the size of the map image, x and y coordinates of the map center point and point to be converted, map distance to a given line of latitude (probably 60 degrees N, in this case) and the size of the destination texture. It will output the x and y coords of the point on the texture.

Creating the texture will still take a considerable amount of time, but less than trying to do it by hand!

(Note: Since no map of the southern latitudes is provided and only limited information given in the books, I will leave the southern hemisphere essentially untouched.)