Route Finding

How long does it take to get from Regina (SPIN 1910) to Woochiers (SPIN 2207) at Jump-1? A long, long time:

I've added a route finding feature. Hit the route button to the right of the search box.

• Start/end location can be entered as Sector Hex, e.g. Spinward Marches 1910
• T5SS sector abbreviations are okay: SPIN 1910 works too
• Otherwise, the map uses the nearest matching world name. So you can plug in Regina and Woochiers (but it might get confused if there are duplicate world names)

Caveats:

• Not usable on mobile-sized screens yet
• Can't click/tap to set locations
• Can't filter route (e.g. only wilderness refueling, no red zones, prefer Im)

But even given that, it's still fun. Here's Regina to Terra at J-4:

And at J-5:

Route Finding Wish List on the Traveller Map Trello Board

API documentation is up: http://travellermap.com/doc/api#route

I also fixed some routing bugs in Path Finder but that utility is now considered deprecated and no longer linked from the main page. I'll keep it around as it allows route calculations in custom sectors, but it probably won't get more love.

And congratulations to Mongoose Publishing on the new edition of Traveller! Ω

Route Rendering

(Disclaimer: not an April Fool's joke)

I made a slight tweak to the way routes are rendered.

Old:

New:

Look closely at how the routes intersect the world disc. Previously they came extremely close. So close, in fact, that they actually are drawn first - right to the center of the world! Then the world is rendered by painting over the routes with the background color, then the world itself renders. Now, the routes are rendered with the endpoints offset slightly from the world. Which is closer to how a human would draw the routes, and matches classic work like posters and LBBs.

I made the change to improve the rendering when a background was present, like these cases:

Old:

New:

Note how in "old" the routes intersect the world, whereas in "new" the routes don't. This was never a big deal, but I'm experimenting with rendering styles where backgrounds are more important.

I don't normally announce such subtle tweaks in rendering, so why even bring this up? 

There may be places in the data where routes actually go right through other worlds. Here's an example in Deneb:

If you look at Unxava, Sorel, or Ibsen you can see that the route doesn't stop at those worlds. Previously, the painting over with the background color would have meant the route line and the world disc would never touch. You also wouldn't have been able to tell if the X-boat route from Dawn to Zeng was one J-4 or four J-1s. This new way of rendering distinguishes the two cases, although it doesn't look quite as pretty.

(Aside: hand-curated sectors like the Spinward Marches would avoid putting a route across other worlds like this, because a key factor in creating X-boat routes is looking good. The routes exist primarily to add visual interest to the maps, rather than convey important data. The notion of communication routes impacting gameplay by allowing players to "race the news" was a later innovation.)

There may be cases where a route should be broken up. When transcribing routes from print I may have made incorrect assumptions. If you spot any such anomalies, please let me know.

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Metadata Doc

A long time coming, but I finally wrote up slightly more human readable definition of the XML metadata format.

http://travellermap.com/doc/metadata

It doesn't explain everything, but should cover everything you actually need: borders, routes, allegiances, subsectors, labels, stylesheets, etc.

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Route Maker

I added a Route Maker tool to facilitate entry of route metadata by simply clicking on a map. It's a bit rough, but it's similar to a custom desktop application I put together a few years ago when I was inputting all of the Travellers Digest routes. Not too fancy, but better than typing.

Eventually I'll get Border Maker added as well, and ideally unify everything into a Metadata Maker or some such.

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Hive Federation Completed

Mark Humphreys has submitted the sector data, borders and routes for the last of the hitherto uncharted sectors of Hiver space, as well as updates to the other sectors, so it's all filled in on the map:

• Avereguar - new!
• Blaskon - new!
• Centrax
• Folgore - new!
• Gzirr!k'l
• Kidunal
• K'trekreer - new!
• Nooq - new!
• Porlock
• Ricenden
• Wrenton

Awesome work, Mark!

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Get your Hiver on

Thanks to exploration work by Mark Humphreys, three new sectors in Hiver space have come online including world data, borders and routes:

• Gzirr!k'l - straddling the Two Thousand Worlds and the Federation with a buffer zone of client states between. This sector bore the brunt of the Hiver/K'kree War in ages past, and bears the lingering scars.
• Ricenden - home to Guaran, the Hiver homeworld
• Centrax - home to Glea, the Federation capital

These aren't the final data or metadata, so expect some refinement over the coming months, and perhaps a few new sectors nearby.

(This is all unofficial data, of course. That will be obvious to long time visitors, but I'm going to try to be more explicit going forward given that I'm hosting both official and unofficial data without much distinction.)

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Julian Protectorate Routes

More data cleanup happening - see the comments thread at http://travellermap.blogspot.com/2012/02/data-corrections.html:

• Hinterworlds out-sector routes
• Gvurrdon allegiances
• Kaa G!'kul UWPs
• Other misc tweaks

Mike Kuehn submitted trade routes for the Julian Protectorate - that's Amdukan, Mendan, Ingukrax and Star's End sectors, with a few tweaks in Antares and Empty Quarter. Ω

Macro Routes and Label Cleanup

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.

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Metadata Tweaks

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

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Deneb, Ziafrplians, SectorMetaData, bug fixes

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)

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Whither Dando?

Sharp eyed visitor Andrew Storey noticed that Dando (Verge 2123) had vanished, leaving an orphaned xboat stop.

This is one of the locations that was identified as a mismatch between the Atlas of the Imperium and the GEnie data during the COTI cleanup - there's no world in that hex in AOTI!

As such, the world was removed, but the route remained. Fortunately, the xboat routes in verge are my own creation (pretty much the only one on the map!) so it was easy to reroute those lost couriers through nearby Turin. Ω

Data Overview 2009

At the start of 2008 I posted a data overview, showing how much things had changed since 2006. This should probably become a yearly tradition, so here's the official 2009 overview:


Not a whole lot of change. So far as I can tell by doing a "blink compare", at this scale the only differences are:

• Routes in Delphi
• Coreward half of Far Frontiers
• Rework of Kaa G!'kul
• Sector data updates to Theron

Anything else I can plug in, dear readers?

(I used TortoiseIDiff to do the blink comparison. I used a similar technique while doing the Solomani and Aslan Dotmap Reconstruction.) 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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What's Missing?

Apart from dorking around with experiments, the actual content of the site is reasonably stable. So I was pondering... what's missing? What are the gaps in the data that we should endeavor to fill in? Let me throw that question out to the readers.

Off the top of my head:

• Borders in K'kree space
• Borders in Hiver space
• Coreward half of Far Frontiers (I have an email out to James Kundert)
• Routes in Ilelish, Zarushagar, Gushemege, Delphi, Alpha Crucis
  

What else?

This is a subtly different question than "what should I do next?" - I'll post an updated roadmap soon for comments. Ω

Yiklerzdanzh Routes

Browsing through the HIWG CD I came across a bitmap of the Yiklerzdanzh sector including routes, so I added those.

There's no distinction between Zhodani "xboat" routes and others... some were easy to interpret (the Meichntid Ibl and Talpaku Communality have obvious self contained networks) but the long chain of routes into the L and O subsectors is a bit odd. I'm interpreting the routes as a continuation of the Zhodani routes into unincorporated territory to bolster the Consulate's influence in the area. Oddly, it avoids the Consulate outcropping that seeps into the Vanguard Reaches.

If anyone has more data on this I'd be glad to clarify. Ω

Routes for Dagudashaag

Based on the excellent Traveller fanzine Signal-GK, I've added routes for Dagudashaag.

The routes are based on the sector xboat route maps printed in Issue #1. One of the routes shown there are missing from the subsector map in #4 (1409-1709), but the route is logical so I left it in.

Hats off to Leighton Piper for the reprinting work, Andrew Pickford for the original subsector map work and the rest of the Dagudashaag Development Team: J.Duncan Law-Green, Adie Stuart, Stuart Machin, Jae Campbell and Alison Nash.

I tweaked inter-sector routes into Vland and Core to join things up. I'm still not happy with the mess in Laraa near Reference (Core 0140) but I guess I need to wait for the rest of the reprints.

PS: Where's Telura Subsector, in issue #7 according to the Traveller Bibliography? Ω

Metadata/Credits Preview and other Minor Updates

I've updated the code behind the site (both the server side and the client side). There aren't any dramatic changes noticeable by users, but there might be bugs - so let me know!

New stuff:

• You can now specify ?sector=name&hex=xxyy, for example: http://www.travellermap.com/?sector=Verge&hex=2612 - the page will automagically navigate for you, if it can find the sector. You can leave out the &hex=xxyy part too.
• MSEC.aspx and Poster.aspx now return an HTTP 404 error if they can't find the target sector, instead of defaulting to Spinward Marches
• Ran jslint.com over the client side scripts, and did some cleanup.
• Added preliminary sector data and metadata for Kaa G!'kul/Numbis based on work by Mike McKeown
• Created routes, cleaned up borders for Verge
  
• Trojan Reach, Riftspan Reaches and Ealiyasiyw borders cleaned up a bit
• Canopus subsectors added
  

The big pending change can be seen in-progress here:

http://www.travellermap.com/index_creditstest.htm

As you scroll/zoom the map, world data and sector metadata (author, source, URL, etc) will be shown at the bottom of the page. The metadata isn't formatted in a particularly attractive way at the moment, nor is it complete, but this is the direction I'm planning to take with metadata. I may overlay the data on the map itself (lower right corner) rather than having it outside the frame - I'm not sure Ω

1100, here we come!

I'm much more of a fan of the Classic Traveller era (1100) than the earlier or later eras, and I'm attempting to have the map match that. To that end, I've "rolled back" the Trojan Reach and Reft sectors to match the Atlas of the Imperium allegiances. The data remains the same - based on DGP's Travellers' Digest #20.

I've also done a handful of additional border generations and route reconstitutions (from existing data). Here's the full list of changes;

• Foreven: Added routes, allegiances and borders
• Spinward Marches: Tweaked an outsector route from 2140, outsector border
• Vanguard Reaches: Added subsectors, allegiances and borders
• The Beyond: Added allegiances, routes and borders
• Trojan Reach and Reft: Added 1100-era data, borders and routes
• Far Frontiers: Border tweaks to align with Vanguard Reaches, Krobob allegiance corrected to Zh, Sorens added based on Trail of the Sky Raiders, corrected location of Afellahlah, Sorens allegiance corrected to Td
• Poster.aspx: Show friendly error if no matching sector
• MSEC.aspx: Show friendly error if no matching sector
• MSEC.aspx: Group output by allegiance

Any requests for sectors to tackle next? Ω

It's been a while...

A smattering of updates I wanted to put on the live site. Nothing too fancy. So, in no particular order...

Classic-era xboat routes for the Diaspora sector have been added, c/o Mark "Geo" Gelinas, Sr. from his Geo-verse site. These were originally printed in the Terra Traveller TIMES, Issue #27 - Mark has done an awesome job in putting issues of his fanzine on-line to keep the data alive. Mark was the HIWG sector editor for Diaspora and went on to help create the Astrogator's Guide to the Diaspora Sector for GDW. The Astrogator's Guide only has Rebellion-era maps and hence no xboat routes. Yay - this fills a hole... and it's semi-official to boot!

I've added client side imagemaps for the mobile map. Clicking in the middle of the map zooms in. Clicking towards an edge scrolls. Probably not useful on phones, but great on a Pocket PC.

I've made additional corrections to the borders and worlds in Far Frontiers, including correct Zhodani Consulate borders.

Small government labels can be placed a little more sensibly now. Right now this has only been done for Far Frontiers, but I can manually place government names now instead of auto-generating them in the center of a polity. I may get around to manually placing more in the future.

Speaking of metadata, the MSEC generation now produces labels - either the auto-generated ones or manually placed ones.

I've snuck in an easter egg (does it count if I write about it?) - double-click the Traveller logo to hide it and get a little more vertical room for the map.

Behind the scenes, I've refactored a lot of the rendering code to separate out the rendering styles (e.g. what colors and fonts to use) from the rendering logic (e.g. for each world in a sector...). There should be no visible change, but this will make it easier to add different rendering styles and tweak the visual appearance in some cases (e.g. show hexes instead of boxes at 32 pixels/parsec). I'm still not finished with the code but I don't think I broke anything. If you see anything odd, let me know. Ω

Far Frontiers! Borders! And more!

I've been working on a bunch of different pieces, some of which are "close enough" to roll out, others need additional work. But I need to get things out for users to try out and comment on, so here's an intermediate step.

Far Frontiers Sector

Before FASA lost its license to publish Traveller material, Dale Kemper was working on a manuscript for a supplement for the Far Frontiers, the setting for most of the FASA adventures like the Sky Raiders trilogy, Ordeal by Eshaar, etc. Didn't know that's where they took place? That's 'cause the supplement never came out! Parts were published in Ares magazine and somewhat more in the Traveller Chronicle, but those are hard to come by.

Dale has recently started selling copies of the manuscript on eBay (seller id: sbgames999) and I picked one up. Nice stuff, and it’s a shame it never saw the light of day. I asked Dale if I could include his Far Frontiers work in the map site, and he agreed!

(Note: Dale's manuscript covers just the lower half of the sector - the top half is mostly Zhodani space. For now I’ve just left the top half of the sector empty. Also note that the data is slightly inconsistent with other publications – Traveller Chronicle, Trail of the Sky Raiders, etc. – I’ve left it as close to Dale’s original manuscript as possible, rather than incorporating other sources or corrections. Those may come later.)

Borders

At long last (and thanks to pioneering work by J Greely over at http://dotclue.org/t20) accurate micro-scale borders are starting to see the light of day! Zoom in to 16 pixels/parsec or lower and the hand-drawn borders will disappear and (if you’re in the right place, e.g. near the Domain of Deneb or Gateway Domain) you’ll see hex-level borders. Yay!

Now for the down sides:

• The border generation is not complete. Although J Greely’s allygen is an amazing tool, it does only a single sector. Rather than modifying it to handle multiple sectors I’ve been adding outsector hex runs by hand. (And if that sentence made sense to you, please volunteer to help!) So it’s been slow – about 20 minutes per sector.
• Most of my resources are in storage – all of the DGP Travellers’ Digest issues I paid far too much for on eBay and classic sources are unavailable to me right now, so I have to go on guesswork and automated border generation.

But worst of all: the map is now a hideous amalgam of different eras:

• Some of the data files are Rebellion-era (1120 or so)
• Some of the data files are Classic-era (1100)
• Some of the data files are Gateway-era (M1000)
• Routes are whatever I could find, so mostly a mix of CT and RT
• Borders are based off of the data for the sector at hand

Data files from different eras aren’t immediately obvious – you have to drill in and notice that the Vargr really made a dent in Deneb but hardly touched Corridor! Even Routes are usually not obvious, unless there’s a gap. But mismatching borders stick out like sore thumbs. Bleah.

Poster

Someone on COTI mentioned that he stitched together the tiles for the whole Spinward Marches by doing screenshots of the site. Ouch! To prevent that necessity in the future, you can now ask for a render of a sector in one shot. Just do:

http://www.travellermap.com/Poster.aspx?sector=Spinward%20Marches

You’ll get a GIF of the whole thing at 64 pixels/parsec resolution. Change the sector name (replace spaces with %20 or +) or tack on &options=nnnn – use a permalink in the main map to figure out the combination you like. I like 833, which turns off the subsector names.

Other changes

• Added xboat routes for the Corridor sector from the map in FFE04 The Short Adventures - the Memory Alpha adventure reconstruction includes the routes on a hex grid of the sector (circa 1111), in addition to the Atlas of the Imperium sector copy - w00t! The Imperial xboat network now actually connects the Spinward Marches to the core!
• Since I was dorking around with Corridor, I used the data from FFE04 to "regress" the sector to the classic era. This makes the borders mismatch (especially with Deneb) but my goal for the map is Classic Era (or Second Survey) so I actually want the DoD connected!
• In Firefox/Safari/Opera, when dragging the map, you can now drag with the mouse over the non-map parts of the page and the mouse won't freeze. Just stay inside the page itself - there appears to a bug (feature?) afflicting all W3C event model browsers such that they stop giving you mouse events outside the page, if you started the drag over an image.
• I moved the Map Style options to the top, and slightly compressed the control options, to give more room for search results.
  

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