Traveller Map News

Rendering Fixes

2012-02-01T21:08:00.000-08:00

Two quick rendering fixes.

With "World Colors" checked, white-on-white worlds (e.g. Spinward Marches 0622 in Print style) should now have an outline
Borders are now rendered as closed paths, which means small gaps near the "start" of each borders should be gone

The latter one was actually a substantial effort, but it's been sitting unpublished on my dev machine for some time now and I think I'm happy with the change.

CORE / Stellar Data

2012-01-31T22:57:00.000-08:00

The data for a number of sectors was based on Jo Grant's CORE data repository. Unfortunately, they were not taken directly, but from another map site, which had filtered out the stellar data. I've gone back and pulled data from the original sources for:

Aldebaran (with Home 1009 added)
Amdukan
Arzul (Ingukrax)
Astron
Banners
Canopus
Esai'yo
Faoheiroi'iyhao
Ftaoiyekyu
Fulani
Hkakhaeaw
Iphigenaia
Langere
Neworld
Star's End
Theta Borealis
Touchstone
Ustral Quadrant

The following sectors are based on the CORE data but already had stellar data, and also had trade codes/comments generated so I left them alone:

Hlakhoi
Iwahfuah
Staihaia'yo

Beta Appearance Options

2011-11-18T19:05:00.001-08:00

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.

Small tweaks and fixes

2011-11-16T20:36:00.001-08:00

Just fit and finish:

The Spinward/Rimward galactic direction display indicators are now rotated to match the Imperium Map poster (tested in IE8, Chrome and Firefox)
Double-clicking now correctly centers what you double clicked on. Previously, it was off by 15 or so pixels (half a parsec)
The Credits display at the bottom now shows the subsector name (and index) for the targeted location..
Some macro-scale labels were cut off too early as you zoomed in. I fixed that, but also tweaked the scale thresholds for various elements. The new thresholds are documented in the info page

Subsector names vs. clutter

2011-11-14T08:23:00.001-08:00

Subsector names no longer render at 64 pixels/parsec scale (that's the standard zoomed in level). The map was seeming too cluttered to me. This does mean less information will be available on sector posters, so I may revert this change.

Macro Routes and Label Cleanup

2011-11-13T21:20:00.001-08:00

I've added "macro scale" routes - the Jump-5, Jump-4, and Zhodani Core Routes, visible at low zoom levels. These aren't visible if you zoom out too far because they make the map ugly. They also disappear if you zoom in, well before the micro-scale routes, because they don't line up well. I'll try and fix that - I've already tweaked K'kree Outpost borders in Gn'hk'r/Gelath slightly.

Other changes and bug fixes:

Polity labels now wrap correctly in PDF Posters (example)
Added CORS note to API docs - short version: modern browsers make the JSONP hack unnecessary
Fix glyph layout in the side-bar Legend
Smaller names at the macro scale (e.g. J-5 Route) now show by default. This changes the map's default option value to 1015. Older permalinks won't have this set, adjust if necessary.

Sneak Preview: Filled Borders

2011-11-12T15:58:00.001-08:00

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?

Credits Links

2011-11-06T20:34:00.001-08:00

A minor tweak I've been meaning to do for a while now: in the "credits" area at the bottom, the sector name is now a link to the LBB generator page, and a link to the PDF poster generator is added after the sector data link.

I've also started some substantial modernization work to the HTML/CSS/JavaScript behind the page. If anything broke please let me know, as I'm not being as diligent as I could be in testing on all browsers.

Completely unrelated: I've also started experimenting with shaded regions as a rendering option, but while a 95% solution was easy the 100% solution will require more thought and effort - dang hexes! This is not enabled yet.

Metadata Tweaks

2011-11-01T21:23:00.000-07:00

Some minor cleanup:

Tweaked label positions for: Foreven, Beyond, Touchstone, Riftspan Reaches, Reaver's Deep, Dark Nebula, Ustral Quadrant
Tweaked borders for: Reaver's Deep, Daibei, Dark Nebula
Tweaked polity names for: Reaver's Deep (per Sector Sourcebook)
Added travel zones to Reaver's Deep (per Sector Sourcebook)
Made the sector.htm demo page show polity names on the "centerfold" map

Polity Labels / Reaver's Deep

2011-10-30T20:06:00.001-07:00

I did a pass around the edges of the Imperium and tweaked the polity labels (yellow names) that appear when zoomed in. I tried to position them in non-horrible location. I also tossed one in for the Islands Cluster. Additional suggestions welcome.

Sectors away from the Imperium still need editing. Also, the government names I have for Reaver's Deep are in terrible shape. What should I use as the source for those?

Leave a comment if you see labels that could be improved.

New Legend

2011-10-30T00:39:00.000-07:00

A comment inquired about an updated legend to include more of the base types. After playing with updating the Legend Sector I realized that far too much space was being taken up that way. So I went back to the trusty old Spinward Marches poster and based a new legend on that. It's visible by a link in the control panel on the right.

You may notice a few consequential changes:

The layout UI and rules for the panels have changed - you can now expand/collapse any of the sections - Styles, Search, Legend and Scroll - by clicking on the header.
To implement efficiently required dropping support for IE6. Sorry, it's just not worth it.
The JumpMap API now takes an optional border parameter which allows you to drop the border. This is used by the legend to render the images "live", matching your current style.

Cleanup & Border Updates

2011-10-24T20:32:00.000-07:00

Mish-mash of updates:

At some point recently I broke the default state of the flag controlling rendering of local polity names so they should now by default to rendering again.
I dusted off the border calculation code (doc, demo):

Added a page that will generate borders for a map sector considering the 8 adjacent sectors. Try it. Sorry, doesn't work with uploaded sectors yet, but that should be easy to make work.
Fix border walk termination logic (would leave in a duplicate hex if the polity had a vertical left edge)
Added heuristic for bridging 1pc gaps in polities

The SEC API now optionally accepts sx/sy coordinates instead of sector (name)
Work around what looks like a Chrome 14 bug with object creation. var o = {}; o.x = 'foo'; was claiming that the property was read only in some cases.
Updated borders for: Fa Dzaets, Trenchans, Gvurrdon, Tuglikki, Mendan, Amdukan, Deneb, Corridor, Solomani Rim

Bits Not Atoms!

2011-10-22T13:10:00.001-07:00

As an FYI I've just put all of my hardcopy Traveller materials into storage. There is a slight chance that this could impact my ability to update the site, so I wanted to give everyone a warning. I haven't had to refer to them in a while but you never know.

While I was packing I did notice that the Vegan region borders on a printout of the site map did not match the Solomani Rim supplement, though. I'll try to fix those soon!

Deneb, Ziafrplians, SectorMetaData, bug fixes

2011-09-12T19:57:00.000-07:00

A few recent updates, tweaks and fixes:

Updated data for Ziafrplians from Don McKinney. This is the same data as used for the Zhodani Alien Module recently published by Mongoose, now a canonical part of the OTU. Check out the book for many more details about the sector, of course.
Updated data for Deneb by Robert Eaglestone, including a few X-boat route tweaks. This is part of the ongoing T5 data cleanup project. Expect the rest of the Domain of Deneb to follow at some point soon.
A new SectorMetaData API
Tweaked Candy Style rendering. Now includes UWP at high scales, and scales a little more nicely.
Fixed behavior of the experimental touch version when moving from "pinch" to "drag" (i.e. letting go of one finger while the other is still touching)

Bug Fix: Response Content Types

2011-08-03T21:08:00.000-07:00

In a recent change I accidentally made the "Data" APIs (Coordinates, Credits, JumpWorlds, Search, Universe) produce JSON instead of XML unless otherwise requested if the default was XML. This has been corrected - the default content types should now be as documented in the API page.

While I don't intent to change the default data format for any API call - to maintain compatibility - new APIs may default to JSON... at least, until the Next Great Format comes along. To be robust, make sure you're requesting a specific format using the HTTP "Accept" header. Currently supported formats are:

XML: text/xml
JSON: application/json

New Printer-Friendly Style

2011-03-02T12:57:00.000-08:00

Based on a handful of requests, I've added a new style, "Print" (a.k.a. "print" in the API) which is better suited for color printing than either "Poster" (which consumes black ink) or "Atlas" (which is grayscale-only).

The colors for routes, borders and bases should be left alone unless they're close to white, in which case a default color will be used, unlike "Atlas" style where fixed colors are used everywhere. This was a bit of a rush job so I may have missed a few cases (where I need to explicitly override a color) or introduced bugs, so let me know if something doesn't look quite right.

Minor fixes, interface tweaks

2011-02-13T14:23:00.000-08:00

In order to increase the screen area available for search results, I've increased the section of the right-hand control panel that expands/collapses to include all of the style/appearance options. Previously this included only the label options. Also, to make the "Scroll Map" buttons more useful they now scroll the map by a much greater distance, and the scrolling is animated.

Feedback appreciated. I'm still trying to retain the visual style of the GURPS Traveller mockup that was the inspiration for the site. Is that holding the map back too much? Should I move to a more modern appearance with controls overlaying the map? (I'm planning to do that anyway for the touch-based version)

A handful of tiny bug fixes:

legend popup once again shows using current visual style
blue zones (for TNE) now render as gray in Atlas style (thanks to Alvin Plumber for the bug report)
Cleaned up metadata glitches in the XML (thanks to Mark McSweeny for the bug report)
Prevent overlapping map animations

Allegiance Fixes

2011-01-27T13:23:00.000-08:00

Minor tweaks:

Included allegiance table in SEC.aspx (example)
Fix TY allegiance in Chit Botshti and Ghoekhnael
Fix Ef allegiance in Ktiin'gzat (sorry about the label placement; need to work on that)
Fix VW allegiance in Tuglikki

Blue Zones and Research Stations

2011-01-24T00:13:00.000-08:00

Two tiny changes based on recent requests:

At the request of Alvin Plummer I've added support for "Blue Zones" the convention in Traveller TNE for Technologically Elevated Dictatorships. Since the map site is nominally 1100-era, there shouldn't be any of these visible but if you upload custom data that contains "B" for the travel zone (as opposed to "A" for Amber, "R" for Red, "F" for Zhodani/Forbidden and "U" for Zhodani/Unabsorbed) it will be rendered with a blue circle.

It was pointed out by Peter Darton that the Legend is missing a description of the Research Station glyphs. I've added this, although it's probably still not clear that the "Gamma" symbol Γ is only used if the actual station identifier is not known (e.g. Research Station Epsilon shows Ε).

Any suggestions for other trivial tweaks?

Parameter Update - Styles

2011-01-21T23:47:00.000-08:00

Previously, specifying the visual style of the map ("Poster", "Atlas", or "Candy") was done via the options query parameter. To simplify this and allow room for future expansion, a style parameter has been added. This takes one of the values "poster", "atlas" or "candy". Examples:

Legacy URLs that embed the style via options bits will continue to be supported indefinitely, but new "permalinks" will use the new parameter. The API documentation has been updated to reflect the new usage.

Campaign Cartographer Traveller Maps

2010-05-28T12:22:00.000-07:00

As seen on the interwebs: a preview of Cosmographer 3, which will include Traveller mapping capabilities and maps. Looks very pretty!

Stylish Changes

2010-05-23T21:32:00.000-07:00

No substantial changes, but some minor tweaks:

Zones now show at scale 32 pixels/parsec (example)
Routes now show at scale 8 pixels/parsec (example)
In the latest Firefox/Safari/Chrome/Opera browsers, the neighbor subsector labels from the "little black book" generator are rotated (e.g. The Spinward Marches). The subsector capital is also called out in the blurb.
Lots of internal code cleanup in the HTML/JavaScript. One of the intentions of building this site was to learn modern Web development circa 2005, and I hadn't really gone back and applied the knowledge I've picked up since then.
Made the legend center correctly (oops - it's been broken since I fixed the hex ratio)
Permalink coordinates are now rounded 3 decimal places.

I broke some functionality in IE for a day before noticing; please let me know if anything still seems awry in any browser.

Touch Map

2010-05-08T12:06:00.000-07:00

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.

C#3.0 / .NET 3.5 and search tweak

2010-04-25T21:10:00.000-07:00

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.

PNG and DOM

2010-03-16T22:21:00.001-07:00

Two hopefully invisible changes today, but scream if anything breaks:

I've changed the map to generating PNGs by default instead of GIFs. This is to work around a bug in embedded WebKit (seen in the Second Life Viewer 2.0 Beta) where it may not display GIFs correctly.
I've rewritten the event handling code for the map to more correctly manage DOM events, in both the W3C and IE models. This is to try and make dragging work correctly in the IE9 Platform Preview (I'll test tomorrow), clean up the code (this was my first interactive web site!), and as a side effect it fixes mouse wheel support in Chrome.

I've tested in IE8, Safari (Win), Firefox 3.6 (Win), Chrome 4 (Win), and Opera 10 (Win). Looks good, but I'm nervous and ready to roll back if anyone sees any issues.