New UI is now Live!

Since it's a long weekend here I've decided to bite the bullet. The new UI is now live as the default.

If you need the legacy UI you can temporarily reach it at:

http://travellermap.com/old.html

... but I'd appreciate it if you let me know why you're switching back.

Note that I have not yet replaced the iframe.htm stub, in order to give the new UI a few days to bake. Eventually that will become a redirect to just http://travellermap.com/ - the main page detects that it's running in an iframe and hides the UI. Ω

What sectors should get an official treatment?

Over on CotI, Robert Eaglestone let the proverbial Aslan out of the bag:

...the Tuglikki sector book (Deneb's rimward neighbor), which is in its early stages of writing... 

Question for the readers: what other sectors do you think should get an official treatment, and why? Dive into Imperial sectors in more detail, or detail settings beyond the 3I?



Ω

Data Overview 2014

Belated "Happy New Year!" - time for the annual data round-up. Past Overviews

Here's what's new since 2013:

• Adjusted Deneb borders, per T5 Second Survey.
• Regenerated borders in the Gateway Quadrant
• Per the T5 Second Survey, polities of only two worlds don't get borders/allegiance, and are simply "owned" worlds. This mostly affected Reavers' Deep, Trojan Reach and Glimmerdrift Reaches
• All of the Hive Federation fleshed out c/o Mark Humphreys
• Group One's classic version of Theta Borealis
• Stiatlchepr by Dale Jenkins
• Holowon by Brian Smaller and Mikhail by Ed Anderson - both adaptations of personal campaigns
• Placeholders in K'kree space - maybe we'll get some official data for the Two Thousand Worlds someday? Pretty please?
• Spangele by 77topaz - although Dale Jenkins sent me a version as well at almost exactly the same time!

Those last two notes should be a reminder: any unofficial data can get paved over or simply removed at any time. While you can always ping me to see if someone is working on a sector, I may not be able to share details in all cases.

Someone remind me again in 2015, okay?

Ω

Design Competition - World Data Sheet

Okay folks, anyone want to crack open a text editor and exercise their CSS and HTML chops, and come up with a World Data Sheet?

Here's an example (which pulls data from travellermap.com incidentally):

http://www.joffrehorlor.com/Roleplaying/UWP/system.php?SystemID=1505

... but there are lots out there.

What's the context?

If you click on a sector in the new UI, the download menu offers links to download posters, booklets, etc. There would be an additional section if a world was clicked on, linking to this page. The "credits" area at the bottom of the screen would also link to it when world data was shown.

What should be on it?

• Name
• Appearance - we can use the "candy" images for now, that is images for Hyd 0-A + Siz 0, scaled. Take inspiration from the "Traveller Trading Cards" that FFE was toying with a few years ago.
• Location - sector, subsector, hex
• Neighborhood - jumpmap (J-3? and stats for nearby worlds; think Elite's LOCAL command) 
• UWP - decoded
• Trade codes - decoded
• Bases - decoded
• Zone - should be VERY obvious
• Allegiance - expanded
• T5 extension fields
• Stars
• ... what else?

What should it look like?

• As a first stab, the classic GDW/FFE look for Traveller Forms & Charts - lots of whitespace, careful formatting emphasizing content, etc. 
• It would be fun to offer a different style, e.g. like something TAS would print out for you, with big Amber Zone / Red Zone warnings plastered across it.

If you know JavaScript this can be coded up using the JSONP APIs, but if you want to hard-code the fields I can adapt a static design pretty easily.

I'll figure out prizes (beyond fame and glory) if there are any entrants. 

Ω

Custom Booklets

Experimental support for custom booklets is up at:

http://travellermap.com/booklet.html

I've tested this in Chrome and Firefox. If it works in IE it will require at least IE9. You can use your own data or pick an existing sector, although for an existing sector it's faster to just use http://travellermap.com/booklet.html?sector=name

A lot of "fancy" script and Web Platform APIs are used, so it may be fragile. To fetch custom images using form within a page requires using the FormData, XMLHttpRequest with response type Blob and FileReader, and since there's a gob of asynchronous processing that needs to go on I bit the bullet and used ECMAScript 6 "Promises" polyfill I had sitting around. If none of that makes sense, you can take away that it's more programming voodoo than usual.

I also had to implement HTTP POST support for the sector data and sector metadata APIs; it's pretty boring - they just parse what you send and spit it back out, but it can be used to parse SEC and get T5 Tab Delimited, or MSEC and get JSON out.

Ω