2006-09-22

It's been a while...

A smattering of updates I wanted to put on the live site. Nothing too fancy. So, in no particular order...

Classic-era xboat routes for the Diaspora sector have been added, c/o Mark "Geo" Gelinas, Sr. from his Geo-verse site. These were originally printed in the Terra Traveller TIMES, Issue #27 - Mark has done an awesome job in putting issues of his fanzine on-line to keep the data alive. Mark was the HIWG sector editor for Diaspora and went on to help create the Astrogator's Guide to the Diaspora Sector for GDW. The Astrogator's Guide only has Rebellion-era maps and hence no xboat routes. Yay - this fills a hole... and it's semi-official to boot!

I've added client side imagemaps for the mobile map. Clicking in the middle of the map zooms in. Clicking towards an edge scrolls. Probably not useful on phones, but great on a Pocket PC.

I've made additional corrections to the borders and worlds in Far Frontiers, including correct Zhodani Consulate borders.

Small government labels can be placed a little more sensibly now. Right now this has only been done for Far Frontiers, but I can manually place government names now instead of auto-generating them in the center of a polity. I may get around to manually placing more in the future.

Speaking of metadata, the MSEC generation now produces labels - either the auto-generated ones or manually placed ones.

I've snuck in an easter egg (does it count if I write about it?) - double-click the Traveller logo to hide it and get a little more vertical room for the map.

Behind the scenes, I've refactored a lot of the rendering code to separate out the rendering styles (e.g. what colors and fonts to use) from the rendering logic (e.g. for each world in a sector...). There should be no visible change, but this will make it easier to add different rendering styles and tweak the visual appearance in some cases (e.g. show hexes instead of boxes at 32 pixels/parsec). I'm still not finished with the code but I don't think I broke anything. If you see anything odd, let me know. Ω