Campaign Cartographer Traveller Maps

As seen on the interwebs: a preview of Cosmographer 3, which will include Traveller mapping capabilities and maps. Looks very pretty!

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Stylish Changes

No substantial changes, but some minor tweaks:

• Zones now show at scale 32 pixels/parsec (example)
• Routes now show at scale 8 pixels/parsec (example)
• In the latest Firefox/Safari/Chrome/Opera browsers, the neighbor subsector labels from the "little black book" generator are rotated (e.g. The Spinward Marches). The subsector capital is also called out in the blurb.
• Lots of internal code cleanup in the HTML/JavaScript. One of the intentions of building this site was to learn modern Web development circa 2005, and I hadn't really gone back and applied the knowledge I've picked up since then. 
• Made the legend center correctly (oops - it's been broken since I fixed the hex ratio)
• Permalink coordinates are now rounded 3 decimal places.

I broke some functionality in IE for a day before noticing; please let me know if anything still seems awry in any browser.

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Touch Map

There's an experimental version of the map optimized for the iPad (and iPhone and iPod Touch) at:

http://travellermap.com/touch

Pinch and swipe to your heart's content. It's tested on the iPad and iPhone. It also works as Web Application: tap "+" then "Add to Home Screen" in Safari and you'll get an icon to launch the map with no browser UI.

There is no credits/metadata display, option panel, or search box - yet. Performance isn't what I'd like it to be, either. At some point in the future the main URL will auto-detect iThingies and automatically serve up this version, but I'll keep this URL alive until then.

It's worth visiting from your a "real" computer using Safari or Chrome (or Firefox, though I haven't tested it) and using the mouse wheel to zoom, since it implements intermediate zoom levels which makes zooming in and out really fun. Performance is also far better.

I'd be interested to hear if it works on Android or other modern devices that mimic Apple's touch API.

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C#3.0 / .NET 3.5 and search tweak

I updated the server-side code to C# 3.0 and have it using the .NET 3.5 runtime now; this should result in precisely zero changes, but it's possible that I broke something. Let me know.

I also made two extremely minor search tweaks:

• ? and _ now work as wildcard characters, matching exactly one character. This in addition to * and % which match zero or more characters.
• Using uwp: prefix and wildcards are now mentioned in the "tool tip" when you hover over the search field. Previously these were mentioned only in the API docs.

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PNG and DOM

Two hopefully invisible changes today, but scream if anything breaks:

• I've changed the map to generating PNGs by default instead of GIFs. This is to work around a bug in embedded WebKit (seen in the Second Life Viewer 2.0 Beta) where it may not display GIFs correctly.
• I've rewritten the event handling code for the map to more correctly manage DOM events, in both the W3C and IE models. This is to try and make dragging work correctly in the IE9 Platform Preview (I'll test tomorrow), clean up the code (this was my first interactive web site!), and as a side effect it fixes mouse wheel support in Chrome.

I've tested in IE8, Safari (Win), Firefox 3.6 (Win), Chrome 4 (Win), and Opera 10 (Win). Looks good, but I'm nervous and ready to roll back if anyone sees any issues.

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Minor tweaks

Nothing big, just for reference:

• I've been correcting the routes for Dagudashaag as Signal GK issues are appearing online.
• Malorn data has been refreshed from BeRKA's copy
• I tweaked the glyphs used for bases and the font used on the map (slightly narrower now)
• I validated the links on the info page - unfortunately, many older sites are dropping offline.

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Whither Dando?

Sharp eyed visitor Andrew Storey noticed that Dando (Verge 2123) had vanished, leaving an orphaned xboat stop.

This is one of the locations that was identified as a mismatch between the Atlas of the Imperium and the GEnie data during the COTI cleanup - there's no world in that hex in AOTI!

As such, the world was removed, but the route remained. Fortunately, the xboat routes in verge are my own creation (pretty much the only one on the map!) so it was easy to reroute those lost couriers through nearby Turin. Ω