Another Non-Update

Nothing to report yet (June got busy!) but I have been doing some behind the scenes work.

The tiled, dragable map display logic used for the main map (and iframe) and the touch version were completely separate code. If you've played with the touch version you know it has some nicer features, such as intermediate zoom levels and using available images while others are loading so zooming in is a much more pleasant process. I've been working to unify the code between these, and it's almost done - I just need to get the overlay and the you are here features for the iframe API ported over and I can push the update.

As a side effect, this will allow devices supporting touch events (iOS, Android, etc) to interact with the main map page, although the interface will still be kludgy. That'll be the next thing to fix, followed by those data updates I was promising. Ω

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.

Ω

PDF Generation [SNEAK PEEK]

I'm playing with the PDFSharp library which provides PDF generation capabilities for C# with a liberal license and can be used with ASP.NET handily enough. The library nicely supports using the same rendering primitives to output via GDI+ or PDF, so I can actually just convert the site's entire rendering stack onto PDFSharp (which looks a lot like System.Drawing anyway) and then simply pass it either a bitmap or a PDF into which to render.

After a couple of hours of playing, here's sample output from the Poster API:

http://www.travellermap.com/tmp/spinward_demo.pdf

Warning: don't blithely hit "print" - I'm not doing anything clever with units yet, so I don't know how many pages it will try and span. Examine the print options carefully. :)

This is not live yet - there are several things not working yet and I'm concerned about performance when suddenly have the main map site running through this code. But so far, it looks promising.

When it is live, you'll be able to use the Tile, Poster and JumpMap APIs to generate PDFs by specifying either a Content-Type HTTP header or a query string parameter in the URI (since we can't always control header generation). Ω

Border Generation

I've written up a paper and demo page on the updates to the allygen algorithms by J. Greely I used to generate most of the borders that weren't previously documented.

• Improved Automatic Border Generation for TRAVELLER Sectors
  
• Demo Page

The modified allygen code I used isn't terribly pretty, but is available on request. I'd like to clean it up before publishing it. The demo version is reimplemented in JavaScript and is much easier to read. I encourage you to check out the source.

Would a full blown web app that lets you copy/paste .SEC files and interactively generate border descriptors (useful for sec2pdf ) be useful for anyone? Ω