Plasma – Maps v2

All my messing around with OpenGL has finally payed of a litte. I was able to introduce a small feature to plasma which makes the user able to rotate, zoom and move around the generated map of a system. The fun part is: All the 3D calculations (or what I think of it) is done in the browser by a small javascript, so it is  (somewhat) fast and produces no server load at all.

Thanks to this you can now move view maps that leave the ecliptic like Guanaga Proxy in Freelancer Evolutions. This makes understanding such systems a lot easier, since the top-down view is not much help at all.

By the way, this is the first time I admitted Javascript is good for something at all.
Half a year ago  I would have said everything with “Java” in it is unusable and not needed for (yes even the coffee and the island) but since I was forced to deal with Java and Javascript I’m starting to like it both. Still not sure about the coffee. (Or coffee at all).

I think I’m losing it, but who cares. (Not me)

Addition: I can implemented much nicer looks now by mapping the z-coordinate to the z-index property of CSS.

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Plasma – Maps

While I was still trying to replace IONCROSS with Plasma, I figured: why not replace Datastorm as well?
On my machine Datastorm takes around 10 Minutes to read all the information on systems, items, markets, bases and ships into its database and shows it. Plasma reads the same (including also the .cmp files for the ships to get all possible hardpoints for a model) in around 3 seconds.

Next thing to do was to build a nice output into the website and this is what came out of it (after a long fight between me and Cascading Style Sheets):

All images rendered in Minefield (Firefox 3.0 beta), because in Firefox 2, Opera or Internet Explorer the grafics look kind of pixelated. Thats because I can’t use transparent PNGs in IE. I have to use GIFs and downscale them and only Minefield can scale transparent GIFs bicubic which looks a lot better.

Plasma – New Design

I finished the new design for the plasma webinterface a few days ago, someone told me the old one was too “white”.

This one is darker now and it has a cool scaling Freelancer-style dialog around the main page.

It was hard enough to make this one look good in my Firefox, but I had to redo it completly to make it look usuable in the Internet Explorer. Opera still screws up the dialog size in the middle.

Also included in the features are now clan creation, clan management and a clan storage, the administrative part is yet to come (I’m scared about that)