Sector Data Additions

A handful of new sectors have popped up on the map.

First, Katoonah, a sector rimward of the Hive Federation. Katoonah was explored by Dale Jenkins and his sons over the course of a year of gaming. They completed the exploration of the sector a scant two months before the tragic death of Dale's son Thomas. The sector is dedicated to the memory of Thomas W. Jenkins and his love for Traveller.

A brief summary of the sector polities and species, provided by Dale:

The Geanak Republic is populated with Geanaks. They resemble the minions in the game Overlord, except they are more intelligentand far less suicidal. The Human League is a Solomani extremist union. The Sylvan Alliance is a melting pot of Sylvans (Space Elves), Drea (Space Dwarves), Suerrat (Space Halflings), Kkang (Space Knolls) and Griznak (Space orcs). The Draconian Empire is based off a Solomani Asian Dynasty, and for the most part peaceful. The Reaver Bands are a mottley collections of Psycopathic Space pirates much like those found in the Hardtimes Data provided by GDW.

Thank you for sharing, Dale, and my sincere condolences to you and your family. I hope others can enjoy the sector as well, and keep Thomas in their thoughts.

Elsewhere on the edges of charted space, prolific explorer 77topaz (and nitpicker!) has opened up explorerbase and provided details for the following sectors

• Amderstun - a busy looking sector rimward of the Solomani Rim
• Tar'G'kell'p and Grikr!ng - on the Vargr edge of the Lesser Rift
• Harea and Tlyasea - to Spinward, in the Great Rift

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Data Updates

I've finally had a bit of time to make a minor dent in the backlog!

• Corrected spelling of "Capitol" => "Capital" in Far Frontiers sector remarks so that Harantz and Alzenei are properly highlighted (c/o 77topaz)
• Updated data file for Empty Quarter (c/o Alvin Plummer and Don McKinney)
• Added subsector names for Gzaefueg (c/o Alvin Plummer)
• Added subsector name for Ilelish subsector O: Zagrab (from the Zhodani Base, c/o Alvin Plummer)
• Credited Greg Videll (HIWG) for Zarushagar sector work
• Corrected Corridor 2006 Tamilaa's base "G" => "N" per Atlas of the Imperium (c/o Dan Holmberg)
• Renamed Gelath/Gn'hk'r 0704 "X!'kib'grikr" => "Aat Nokr K'ng" per GT:AR2 (c/o Alvin Plummer)
• Fixed names of Dagudashaag 0236 "Kinhe" => "Feym'n", 0739 "Hanas Soujourn" => "Hana's Soujourn" and 0840 "Uusjar" => "Uushar" per Signal GK #11 (c/o Art Gorski)
• Fixed name of Reaver's Deep 1224 "Roikhoi" => "Roakhoi" per the Reaver's Deep Sector Sourcebook (c/o Dan Holmberg)

There's a lot more to do, of course, in terms of data corrections and feature work. And, of course, overall site stability.

Also, the LBB generator ("sector.htm") now uses a more print-friendly layout and should automagically print in landscape mode with correct margins in modern browsers. (It will look best if you have the Optima font available on your system.)

NOTE: Some of the search indexes don't appear to have updated for the above changes. I'm investigating.

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IE8 Fixes

Ooops - I broke search, credits, and a handful of other features on IE8 recently.

Fixed! Sorry about that, and thanks for the bug reports! Ω

User Guide!

Hey, look at that - in a blog post over on Panzerboy Discontent, drkem99 wrote a user guide (of sorts) for travellermap.com: http://www.panzerboydiscontent.com/website/2012/04/03/ Cool! I'll have to go through it in detail to see what parts of the interface are confusing. Ω

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.

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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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