Atlas Rendering

I finally got around to doing something I'd intended from the start - Atlas-scale rendering.

The styles at the various scales are roughly:

• 2 px/pc - Imperium poster
• 4 px/pc - Large scale dotmap
• 8 px/pc - Domains
• 16 px/pc - Sectors / Travellers' Digest-style route maps
• 32 px/pc - Atlas of the Imperium-style
• 64 px/pc - Supplement-style (Spinward Marches poster, specifically)

Before today I simply had world glyphs (belt/water/no water) and HiPop names for 32 px/pc. Now it renders: starports, bases, gas giants and allegiances. This scale suddenly becomes much more attractive to work with.

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Old Expanses and Daibei

Routes are up for Daibei (TD #15) and Old Expanses (TD #12). The Old Expanses routes are derived from FASA's work in High Passage and other early sources - they're pretty... um... busy. Picture little xboats hopping around like jumping beans. Ω

Lots of little things

I've trickled in a lot of things since the last update. Some have been live for a while, others just went in tonight.

Mobile:

• Updated the UX of the mobile page - you can search, but there's a new "jump" button that's like Google's "I Feel Lucky" - it takes you to the nearest matching world, without bothering to show you search results. Saves a few round trips... if you don't misjump!

I grovelled through HIWG sources at the MU Archive for a few things:

• Subsectors for Gvurrdon by Roger Myhre
• Subsector names for K'kree and Hiver homeworlds/capitals

I updated the following sector data files to match the GEnie/Sunbane data, which matches DGP and GDW data more accurately:

• Core (TD #8, #9, #10)
• Corridor (TD #18)
• Deneb (MTJ #3)
• Ealiyasiyw (TD #18)
• Hinterworlds (CH #39)
• Mendan (CH #49)
• Reft (MTJ #3)
• Riftspan Reaches (TD #19)
• Trojan Reach (MTJ #3)
• Zarushagar (TD #21)

And finally, added routes for:

• Core (TD #9)
• Old Expanses (partial, High Passage #3 & #4)

I have Travellers' Digest #12 and #15 inbound, which almost completes the Grand Tour xboat routes, with Old Expanses and Daibei respectively. That just leaves Massilia in #11. So close!

But one last treat - I decided to AJAXify the page a little bit more. Instead of embedding the initial search results, I now query them from the server. There's a special search term "(default)" that will return them. Now give "(grand tour)" a try.

Any other suggestions?

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