Week Ten Report

I finally found an elegant solution to the coordinate to pixel conversion and vice-verse. When the program gets the list of objects, it takes the coordinate point that's the biggest, whether it be x or y, negative or positive, and determines how many digits it has using the browser height as the constraint modifier. That makes an easy variable to multiply/divide by to transition between space and pixel coordinate.

With that fixed, I worked on getting the trajectory of moving objects to display. Apparently Javascript doesn't have inherent drawing capabilities, so I had to go through several packages till I found one easy enough to manipulate, since the drawing is basic line geometry. If I do get time, it will also allow me to put some animation on the clicking so that it's more satisfying when a player specifies a destination for an object. There was a bit of confuddling with more of the pixel/space coordinate relationship, and whether the player clicks the map or a map object, but I think it's pretty much sorted.

In doing this, I found that I never actually positioned the objects over their coordinate, so that the images were ending up shifted down and to the right. This also led to the discovery that the width modifiers for map objects were doing funky things and that was adding to the buggyness of the rollover functionality. Ultimately I had to have the program change the widths whenever a rollover/rollout is initiated.

The click-tracking functionality is still a bit buggy, so I put a close button on the information panel. It's a bit of a hassle compared to being able to click anywhere to get rid of said panel, but until all the bugs are out that's the best solution.

I started applying the right-click functionality to the objects on the planetary system panel and the ships on the map that aren't children of anything, but there still seems to be problems with that.

So this next week is more bug testing. I think there's also some sort of bug that destroys the positions of all objects when I ship arrives at its destination, but haven't had time to address it yet.