Week Six Report

This week was sort of a transitory week, with other stuff getting in the way, so it was spent mostly planning for the coming weeks.

I did however manage several modifications. When switching from Minisec to MTsec, I discovered that the Universe size changes, which broke the planetary object map display. The positions of the objects in MTsec were also outside the constraints of the universe boundaries, which is illogical. But apparently there is no guideline in place to stop this. So in order to come up with a scaler variable that would work for both Minisec and MTsec, the program now has to determine the size of the actual universe. The javascript then takes those dimensions and converts the position of each object into a distance percentage from those bounds, and then translates that into pixel distance with the browser viewport height as a constraint so that everything is basically viewable within the browser. It took a while to come up with this solution and I don't particularly like it, but it works for now.

The other fix I had to implement was the custom scroll bar to the system panel, since apparently I forgot to apply it last week. However, the whole scroll thing seems to impede usability somewhat and I might have it switch to a scroll based on the mouse scroll wheel, which technically is more intuitive than the scroll bar in general. The only problem with this is for people that don't have a mouse wheel. I can't particularly imagine such a group to be the majority, but it's still bad practice to exclude them.

I had planned to do the design panel, and I did research a bit on how I'd implement this. However, there seems to be a bug with MTsec (the ruleset that supports the design dialog) in that the server isn't sending over the commands for a player's home planet. I'll have to wait till this is fixed before I handle constructing the design dialog, which will probably take me about two weeks to complete with the amount of python and javascript coding that will be required.

I had also planned to put the order's list onto the clickable system info panel, but after looking over the order's class again, it's looking like I'll have to deal with that when I do the right-click orders menu for an object. This also led to the realization that because the map only displays planetary systems, it will be difficult to get at something like a ship that's parked in one of those systems. I don't want to have to use the system pulldown dialog since I don't really like it in general.

So for this next week, I'm going to have to implement a rollover panel for the systems on the map that will display all the objects within a planetary system. Once that is done, I can also deal with the right-click order issuing and having the orders show up on the info panel. Optimistically, I want to say it will only take me a week, but given how big the order's class is, modifications to that will probably require two weeks. We'll see by next weeks progress report. After that, I should be able to deal with the design panel.