New T5 Data Drop

Another T5 Second Survey data drop from Don McKinney. This one rolls in updated data for Ziafrplians and Gvurrdon, and fixes a few glitches like extra TL-G worlds that sharp-eyed users have noticed.

I've also rewritten parts of the page that display dynamic data - search results and the credits/links at the bottom - as well as the booklet generator to use Handlebars.js. I had been using JsonT but wanted to move to a more modern template system. Handlebars is derived from Mustache but supports paths which I needed. This should not have changed anything except for a slight performance improvement, but as usual let me know if I broke something.

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Labels, Retina, and Theta Borealis

Some minor but shiny stuff:

• Display updates and animations now use requestAnimationFrame if supported, and I used Chrome's developer tools to look for hot spots and removed some inadvertent forced layouts in loops, which should mean lower CPU load and "reduced jank" when panning the map.
• Thanks to 77topaz for pointing out that I'd broken the map in older versions of IE. A quick fix to my requestAnimationFrame polyfill and the map should be happy in IE9 again.
• I tweaked the presentation of polity labels seen when you first load the page - they wrap so they're a little more readable now. Sector names now wrap too, which more closely matches the Imperium Map poster. I was also able to bump up the font size. In summary: the initial view of the map should be prettier.
• If you view the map using a modern browser that supports devicePixelRatio on a device with a high-density ("retina") display, such as an iPhone 4S/5, iPad 3, newer MacBook, Android, or even the shiny Chromebook "Pixel", the tiles are now rendered with higher quality. Summary: more pretty!
• On a retro kick, I swapped in the data, borders and routes from Group One's Theta Borealis Sector supplement. Watch out for the Zerp! Note that the double worlds in the original's hexes 2901 and 2118 are not shown on the map and won't appear in the data.



Original - Group One	TravellerMap.com

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World Name Rendering

I was in a brick-and-mortar game store today and flipped through one of the Mongoose Solomani books. After noticing some glitches in the map (rendered using this here site!) I got off my duff and made a long-awaited tweak that ensures that world names are always rendered on top of nearby hex's zone indicators. It's a minor detail but should improve the situation in a couple of places.

On the "TODO" list but not yet done is ensuring that glyphs always have a background; some of them (e.g. Research Station, Prison) are difficult to see if the world is also a red zone.

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Get your Hiver on

Thanks to exploration work by Mark Humphreys, three new sectors in Hiver space have come online including world data, borders and routes:

• Gzirr!k'l - straddling the Two Thousand Worlds and the Federation with a buffer zone of client states between. This sector bore the brunt of the Hiver/K'kree War in ages past, and bears the lingering scars.
• Ricenden - home to Guaran, the Hiver homeworld
• Centrax - home to Glea, the Federation capital

These aren't the final data or metadata, so expect some refinement over the coming months, and perhaps a few new sectors nearby.

(This is all unofficial data, of course. That will be obvious to long time visitors, but I'm going to try to be more explicit going forward given that I'm hosting both official and unofficial data without much distinction.)

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Site Offline for Server Upgrade - COMPLETED

I've filed a request with my service provider to update the server to a new version of the HTTP server and OS. The site will be offline for up to a few hours (barring anything catastrophic).

As Sam (the man) Jackson says in such circumstances, "Hold on to your butts!"

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Update:  4:47PM PDT

The site is up but has moved to a new IP address. It may take several hours for DNS caches across the 'net to resolve to the new address. In the mean time you can access the site via:

http://travellerma.web707.discountasp.net

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Update: 5:28PM PDT

At least for me, http://travellermap.com is resolving. It may take several more hours for that address to resume working for you, so use the temporary URL above if necessary.

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