T5 Second Survey Data

As part of an ongoing development process for Traveller 5 the data set for all worlds in the Imperium are getting reviewed. With help from Don McKinney, the latest data is now live on the site. Thanks to everyone who's been contributing nitpicks and reporting errors - this information has been fed back into the process to help make sure the new data set is as high quality as possible.

The following sectors have been updated, baselined at 1105:

• Alpha Crucis
• Antares
• Core
• Corridor
• Dagudashaag
• Daibei
• Delphi
• Deneb
• Diaspora
• Empty Quarter
• Fornast
• Glimmerdrift Reaches
• Gushemege
• Hinterworlds
• Ilelish
• Ley
• Lishun
• Magyar
• Massilia
• Old Expanses
• Reaver's Deep
• Reft
• Solomani Rim
• Spinward Marches
• Trojan Reach
• Verge
• Vland
• Zarushagar

In addition, the following tweaks have been made:

• Added "Reavers' Deep" and "Reavers Deep" as aliases
• IFRAME no longer steals focus (which fixes the API page to not scroll down on load)
• Speaking of the API page, it now links to the correct AotI coverage area
• Fix Egyrn Subsector's name (thanks to Makoto MACHIDA for commenting)

Many of the data changes will be intentional, but obviously with this volume of cleanup there will be further glitches, so start the bug reports coming!

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Client Code Update

I've just pushed a set of updates to the client files - the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS that makes up the pages. This affects the main page, the iframe page, and the touch page. These now all share common logic which will make updates easier. The visible changes are:

• Intermediate levels are used when zooming in with the mouse wheel. This may mean that the "Scale" field in the control panel will go blank, but if you're using the wheel you probably aren't using the drop-down.
• When zooming, the previous image tiles are used until the new tiles load. Combined with the previous, this means zooming is much smoother. 
• The credits display at the bottom of the page (which shows credits, sector data, world data, and one-click generators for LBBs and Posters) now [EDIT: Based on feedback in the comments]  tracks your mouse hover coordinates updates on click/doubleclick/drag rather than just what's centered on the page.
• When you zoom by double-clicking or using the wheel the mouse position is retained, so you can "zoom in" on something that isn't centered.
• Added Facebook and Twitter buttons next to the Google Plus buttons.
• The "you are here" and overlay URL parameters from the iframe API can be used on the main map page. 
• Tweaked the [-] and [+] buttons in the control panel to be the same size. Yay for −

Note: I only tested as far back as IE8. According to analytics, I have a small number of IE7 users. If they report problems I may be able to fix it, but only if they complain. My testing on browsers other than IE,  Chrome and Safari (iOS) has been limited, but Firefox and Opera are usually pretty well behaved.

As always, let me know what I broke and I'll try and fix it quickly.

EDIT: Remember to mention which browser+version and which operating system+version you're using, too.

...

In other news - no progress on the outages. I've found and fixed a couple of bugs with cached state handling but I still see the service going down when usage is high. I have monitoring set up now so that as I make changes I can have a higher confidence that they haven't made things worse.

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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

Beta: Overlay Rectangle

On request, I've added a follow-on to the You Are Here feature in Beta for iframe:

Overlay Rectangle:

• Specify ox, oy, ow and oh as the x, y, width and height of an overlay box in map coordinates.
  
• This is rendered as a translucent overlay on top of the map. The appearance is hard-coded.
  
• This is supported for IFRAME only. There is no option for the user to move or remove the overlay.
• The details of this API are subject to change without warning.
  

Atlas of the Imperium coverage area:
http://www.travellermap.com/iframe.htm?ox=-111.95&oy=80&ow=166.614&oh=200

Spinward Marches:
http://www.travellermap.com/iframe.htm?ox=-112.104&oy=80&ow=27.776&oh=40 Ω

Jump Maps, You Are Here, and More

I was out of town for several days with my computer but no Internet connection and evenings to myself, so I did a fair bit of work on the site. A lot of the work went into fielding requested features.

What's New:

• Added JumpMap API - generate a Jump-N map for any location

• Keyboard scrolling is now enabled in IFRAMEs
• You will want to specify SCROLLING="no" in the IFRAME tag on your site
• Asteroids are now rendered as semi-random clusters of ellipses at high scales
• Add MapOptions.ForceHexes (add 8192 to always draw hexagonal parsecs, not squares)

[UPDATE 2008-02-03] Fixed use of ForceHexes for the main page and IFRAME - it was being masked out. Should work now.

• Tweak min scales for features to support 24 & 48 pixels/parsec more nicely
• Lots of API documentation cleanup
  

Beta:

• iframe.htm now takes "You Are Here" parameters (yah_sx, sah_sy, yah_hx, yah_hy) that define a sector/hex pair to put a marker on - example. There can be only one such marker, and there is no UI (or finalized script API) to set, move, or clear it.

Fixes:

• Combat client-side memory bloat by:
• Clearing tile cache after following a non-animated link
  
• Request metadata with a time threshold, to avoid hundreds of aborted HTTP requests
• Fix candy background tiling for legend (caused by a floating point underflow issue in GDI+)

Plus lots of (hopefully) invisible internal changes. Ω

Traveller Wikia Links

Thomas Jones-Low over at the Traveller Wikia has started a project to update the structured data elements of the wiki (which are rendered using "infoboxes" in mediawiki parlance) so that they generate IFRAMEs pulling from the map site, where appropriate. w00t! Ω

Data Overview, Gushemege Routes, Keyboard Controls

It's time for another look at the map's data/metadata coverage - the last one was back in 2006. Here is a dotmap render at 2 pixels/parsec showing all parsec-level borders and all routes:

Notes:

• The rendering and encoding pipeline doesn't guarantee a single pixel per world, or even uniform brightness, so the dotmap should not be analyzed too closely - just gauge data density (i.e. "this is a rift" or "there's no data for this sector")
• This does not include Chtierabl or the Zhodani Core Route which, let's face it, is just a long, mostly straight line.

I've also made two additions:

• Routes for Gushemege were added based on Traveller 1248 Sourcebook 2: Bearers of the Flame (download sector map in PDF format). I figure the Fourth Imperium xboat routes are probably pretty close to the Third Imperium xboat routes at least within the sector, since the backstory is that Usdiki Pocket fared pretty well. The edges of the sector - outside the 1248 4I borders - have sparse routes.
• You can now use the I, J, K and L keys to scroll the map as well as + and - to zoom in and out. This only applies to the main map page, not IFRAME embedded versions.

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Add a map to your site!

I was browsing the Great TML Landgrab site and lamented the fact that many of the grabbee sites don't have maps showing where the systems are.

Now there's no excuse - just add the following line of HTML to your page, adjust the coordinates, and you've got a full fidelity map:

<iframe src="http://www.travellermap.com/iframe.htm?x=-95.914&y=70.5&scale=64&options=887" style="width: 200px; height: 200px; border: solid 1px black;"></iframe>

Note that it looks like a Permalink from the site, but with one subtle difference: "/iframe.htm" is specified rather than just the default page ("/"). This is a version of the map with no UI, specifically for embedding.

You can get the x/y by finding the system on my map site and using the "Permalink" feature in the footer - click it and it will give you the full permament URL of what you've got centered. Then copy/paste into the URL above - remembering to change the URL to include "iframe.htm"

You'll get something like this:



Note that it's a fully functional map - you can drag with the mouse and zoom by using the mouse wheel or double-clicking (hold Alt to zoom out).

Go wild!

Edited 2007-03-19 to call attention to the "iframe.htm" part of the URL necessary for embedding. Ω