New UI Design

I've redesigned the UI for the main map page. Please try it out:

http://travellermap.com/new.html

I've tested in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 8/9/10, and on iPhone and iPad - yes, you now have full UI control on touch-based devices.

Please let me know if you have any issues with the page. If you notice any glitches, it'd be nice if you check with the "classic" page as well to see if you've discovered a long-standing bug or something new with the UI.

Let's shake those bugs out!

Ω

Beta Appearance Options

There are now some "hidden" appearance options. Scroll down the controls on the top left and you'll find three new "beta" options. All of these are experimental and could change or disappear at any time.

Force Hexes

This forces hexes to always be rendered... as hexagons. This applies at the 16 and 32 pixels/parsec scale. The map usually renders hexes as squares (well, rectangles) to match the Atlas of the Imperium and route maps printed in the Travellers Digest.

World Colors

An attempt at providing more information about worlds. This currently only applies at the 64 pixels/parsec and up. The color codes are currently:

• Rich and Agricultural: gold  •
• Agricultural: green  •
• Rich: purple  •
• Industrial: gray  •
• Corrosive/insidious/etc: rust  •
• Vacuum: black  •
• Liquid water: blue  •
• Otherwise: white ○

Filled Borders

As previous discussed. It's pretty, you should try it out. This only applies when micro-scale borders are rendered - i.e. 4 pixels/parsec and up.

These features haven't been extensively tested and may not make sense in all styles. Feedback is very much appreciated.

Ω

Sneak Preview: Filled Borders

Sneak preview of the "filled border" functionality:

This is still only a 99% solution - there are tiny gaps when using "candy style" borders near sector boundaries, where a few pixels inside the border might not be filled. Only noticeable if you go looking, and fixing that would be extremely computationally expensive, so I probably won't bother. Other minor issues include overlapping polities such as the Vegan Autonomous District (Spinward Marches), Ral Ranta (Hinterworlds), and the sub-polities of the Julian Protectorate - the translucent backgrounds blend. Also, world names (and the worlds themselves) have a black background - I may try and fix that.

This will be controlled by an option/parameter, but I haven't hooked that up yet.

One issue is that this makes the polities without micro-scale borders - namely, the Hive Federation and Two Thousand Worlds - more glaringly incomplete. I could toss in "make this entire sector purple/green" placeholders like I did for Stiatlchepr. Opinions? Ω

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.

Ω

PDF Generation, Continued [SNEAK PEEK]

I have almost everything functional again under the PdfSharp code. The time consuming bit is that I was using GDI+ TexturedBrushes for a couple of things and PdfSharp (wisely) doesn't provide this, so you have to implement this manually. This actually ended up simplifying the code in several places. The only gotcha is that I was using it in a somewhat complicated way for rendering pseudo-random stars within the galactic arms at certain scales.

The old algorithm went like this:

if (inside charted space)
  draw a bunch of pseudo-random stars on the tile
else if (inside the galactic bounds)
  construct a tile-sized bitmap
  draw a bunch of pseudo-random stars on the bitmap
  load a path describing the galactic arms
  on the tile, fill the path using the bitmap as a brush

The new code looks like this:

if (inside charted space)
  draw a bunch of pseudo-random stars on the tile
else if (inside the galactic bounds)
  load a path describing the galactic arms
  use the path as a "clipping" region
  draw a bunch of pseudo-random stars on the tile

Simpler, huh? Well, yes, but it turns out that (1) it's a whopping huge path with lots of curves and segments (and I reduced it as much as I could), (2) bitmap-based clipping is heavily optimized, and (3) it's a single clip against a region, rather than once per star.

After pondering the importance of this (i.e. not very) I decided to simply ditch the pseudo-random stars away from charted space, and turn on the pretty galaxy image instead if you zoom out.

So... I'm pretty close to flipping the switch on this to make it live, but want to double check all of the changes first. But to whet your appetites, here are few more previews:

Spinward Marches - Eye-Candy - this one is a bit big (1MB) due to all the images
Charted Space

Enjoy! 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