From the review of #24. Two defects, both in a real browser.
The panel keeps its entries across a trip to another tab, but still replayed the acquire wipe on
the way back, and for the 380 ms that runs, its clip path swallows clicks: type "Siri", leave for
Readout, come back and click the Sirius suggestion, and the click lands on the star field behind
it — measured, the element under the pointer is the canvas, and the field stays "Siri". The wipe is
gone from this one panel: it is not acquiring anything it did not already have.
The departure field fell back to the star the view is in whenever nothing had been chosen, text in
the field or not. So a field reading "Sol" that was never resolved plotted from Barnard's Star:
"1 Barnard's Star, 2 Sol, 3 Sirius", the panel naming one departure and the route leaving from
another. Text nobody chose is no longer a departure, and the button waits until it is one or the
field is empty again.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The panel was unmounted with its tab, so leaving it reset departure, destination and range. The
range reset was also a lie: the slider came back at 3 pc while the scene kept drawing the graph at
the range last chosen. The panel now stays mounted and is hidden while another tab is open, which
still replays the acquire wipe when it is shown again.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The Sun's catalogue id is 0, and the readout's keep control was shown by
`@if (keepableStarId(); as starId)` — which reads zero as "there is no star
here". Of the six hundred and thirty-four systems the map can be inside, the
one nobody could keep was Sol.
Checked against null now, with a test that keeps star zero, because this is the
sort of thing that comes back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
A perspective camera leans everything away from the centre of the frame. In a
system that means the orbits are ellipses whose shape depends on where they
happen to sit on screen, so two planets on the same circular orbit do not look
like they are on the same circle. Plan view, in the Display panel, swaps the
projection for a parallel one and swings to look down the plane the current
scale is read against — the galactic plane out in the field, this system's own
orbital plane inside one. Circles are circles again, wherever they are.
Both halves are the feature and neither alone is it. The projection is what
makes the shape honest; the swing is what makes it worth looking at. Orbiting
still works afterwards, so a plan is where the view starts rather than a cage.
The engine now holds both cameras and keeps them in step, rather than making
one on demand: a camera that exists only while it is being looked through is a
camera whose pose is always one swap out of date. The orthographic frustum is
derived, never stored — it is the perspective camera's own frustum at the
current orbit distance, made parallel — which is why the camera flights work
through it untouched. They move the camera; the frame follows.
Three things had to be taught that a projection had changed.
Sprites. three.js turns an angular size into a world size only when it is
compiling against a perspective camera (SpriteNodeMaterial: `camera
.isPerspectiveCamera && sizeAttenuation === false`). Under a parallel one that
step is silently skipped and every star in the field collapses to a thousandth
of a parsec. The same arithmetic is now done in the node graph behind a
uniform, so one material serves both cameras without being recompiled — and
picking follows it exactly, since a star has to be clickable where it is drawn.
Depth. A parallel camera does not back away as its frame grows, so at galactic
framing the backdrop shell and half the Milky Way sit behind its own plane. Its
depth range is symmetric about it instead, which a linear depth buffer can
afford and a perspective one could not.
And distance. Half the map was keyed on how far back the camera was pulled —
the scale ladder, the crossfade, the label radius, the range readout — which
under a parallel projection says nothing at all, because the frustum sets the
extent. They all read one honest equivalent now: the distance a perspective
camera would need to frame the same thing.
Two defects found while verifying, both mine, both from this change:
The per-frame work was computed against the camera captured at bootstrap while
the renderer drew through the other one, so after a swap every label was
projected by a camera nobody was looking through.
And the zoom limits were derived from the orbit limits, which are in whichever
unit space the view is in. Reading them on the frame the scene swaps parsecs
for astronomical units pinned the zoom at the ratio between the two, and
leaving a system landed the view three kiloparsecs out. Zoom is a plain
multiplier on a frame the distance already sets, so it is bounded by a factor.
Verified: build clean, 595/595 unit including a new spec for the projection
arithmetic, 13/13 end-to-end including two that flatten a system and check the
ladder still knows how far out it is, design detector clean, screenshots of
both scales in both projections.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Restores the commit reverted off the routing branch, which is where it was
committed by mistake. The change is unmodified; only its branch is.
The map had no memory. Every visit started at the same overview, and a system
worth returning to had to be found again by name each time. A mark on the
readout and on a body's panel now keeps it, a Bookmarks tab lists what has been
kept, and choosing one goes there — a star by flying into its system, a body by
opening its page.
Local storage, not an account. This map asks nobody to sign in, and a list of
stars somebody liked is not worth a server. Every read of that store is
defensive, because it is a string a person can edit, another tab can write, and
a browser can refuse to hand over at all: a bad entry is skipped rather than
losing the rest, duplicates are collapsed since two entries for one place would
each toggle the other's control, the list is bounded so a hand-edited store
cannot decide how much this renders, and where storage is denied outright the
bookmarks still work for the visit — they just do not outlive it.
The name is stored alongside the id rather than looked up, so the list reads
before the catalogues have loaded, and a bookmark to something a later
catalogue no longer holds still says what it was instead of decaying into a
bare number.
The tab is offered even when it is empty, and says what the mark does: a tab
that appears only once you have already found the feature is a tab that never
taught anyone anything.
Choosing a kept place hands the panel back to the readout, the same move as
choosing a search result and for the same reason. That behaviour is what the
end-to-end spec caught missing — the readout it asserted on did not exist,
because the panel just used was still covering it.
Verified: build clean, 587/587 unit, 11/11 end-to-end, design detector clean,
screenshots at 1440x900 and 390x844.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
This reverts commit bd3a5a4. The bookmarks work was committed onto this branch
by mistake — it belongs to its own pull request, and it has one, branched from
this branch's own tip. Reverting rather than rewinding because the branch is
published and a pull request is open against it: the diff this pull request
shows is what matters, and after this it shows the routing change alone.
The map had no memory. Every visit started at the same overview, and a system
worth returning to had to be found again by name each time. A mark on the
readout and on a body's panel now keeps it, a Bookmarks tab lists what has
been kept, and choosing one goes there — a star by flying into its system, a
body by opening its page.
Local storage, not an account. This map asks nobody to sign in, and a list of
stars somebody liked is not worth a server. Every read of that store is
defensive, because it is a string a person can edit, another tab can write,
and a browser can refuse to hand over at all: a bad entry is skipped rather
than losing the rest, duplicates are collapsed since two entries for one place
would each toggle the other's control, the list is bounded so a hand-edited
store cannot decide how much this renders, and where storage is denied
outright the bookmarks still work for the visit — they just do not outlive it.
The name is stored alongside the id rather than looked up. That way the list
reads before the catalogues have loaded, and a bookmark to something a later
catalogue no longer holds still says what it was instead of decaying into a
bare number.
The tab is offered even when it is empty, and says what the mark does. A tab
that appears only once you have already found the feature is a tab that never
taught anyone anything.
Choosing a kept place hands the panel back to the readout, which is the same
move as choosing a search result and for the same reason: the panel has done
its job and the thing to look at is now the scene. That behaviour is what the
end-to-end spec caught missing — the readout it asserted on did not exist,
because the panel that had just been used was still covering it.
Verified: build clean, 587/587 unit, 11/11 end-to-end including a spec that
keeps Earth, leaves the page, comes back to it from the list and forgets it,
and one that keeps Proxima Centauri, flies out to the field and flies back in
by what was kept. Design detector clean, screenshots at 1440x900 and 390x844.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The map could say where a star is and what is near it, and nothing about
getting from one to another. This adds the question and the answer: pick a
departure and a destination, choose how far a single crossing may be, and get
the chain — how many jumps, how far in total, and every star on the way, each
one a step you can fly to.
A jump link is not a feature of space. There are no corridors out there; a
link is a question asked of the catalogue, which is why the range is the
user's control rather than a constant. Two facts about that catalogue decide
what the answers look like, and both are stated in the code because they read
as defects otherwise. It is magnitude-limited, so it is dense around the Sun
and thins with distance — within 50 pc a 3 pc range links 99% of it into one
piece, while over the whole 250 pc reach the same range leaves most stars
alone. And a gap in it is a gap in what has been catalogued, not in what is
there.
That is why "no route" is not the end of the answer. Where no chain exists at
the range asked for, the panel says which range would open one — the chain
whose longest hop is as short as possible, found by the same search with the
cost of arriving somewhere being the worst hop taken rather than the sum — and
offers that number as a control to accept.
Departure defaults to wherever the view already is, so one field is usually
enough. Sol to Vega at 3 pc: four jumps, 10 pc, by way of Barnard's Star,
Struve 2398 B and HD 155876. Narrow it to 0.8 pc and it says 2.26 would reach.
The graph is drawn as one buffer of line segments and the route as a second,
brighter one over it, with the graph stepping back while a route is up: near
the Sun the links are a haze, and a thread through a bright cloud is not a
thread. Both fade out with the local layer, since from outside the Galaxy the
graph is a smear.
Two measurements shaped this. Asking the index for each star's neighbours in
turn — sixty-eight thousand sorted lists, thrown away — took eight seconds; the
grid now walks its own cells once and pairs them, which takes a quarter of one.
And the range control emits per pixel dragged, so the rebuild waits for the
hand to settle.
Three defects fixed on the way, all older than the routing:
hud-acquire animated with fill-mode `both`, which leaves its closing keyframe
applied for good — and that keyframe carries a clip-path. Every panel wearing
it has been clipping its own box ever since, so anything that had to escape
one was cut away and could not even be clicked. Nothing had needed to escape
until this panel's dropdown opened upward.
The routing fields returned nothing when typed into before the catalogue
finished loading, and stayed nothing until the next keystroke. The options are
derived from the query and the index together now, so they appear when the
second of the two arrives, whichever that is.
And a link was `3-7` walking one way and `7-3` walking the other, which is two
links to anything comparing them.
Verified: build clean, 571/571 unit, 9/9 end-to-end including two new specs —
one plotting Sol to Sirius, one narrowing the range until there is no route and
accepting the one it names — design detector clean, screenshots at 1440x900
and 390x844.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Four things the scene did not yet say, all about where to look.
Selection. Hovering or pinning a body raised its card in the corner, but
nothing in the scene said which point the card was about. Two hairline arcs
now bracket the body — the one mark borrowed from the ARK's control disc — and
a leader runs from their rim to the card's near edge, in screen space, once
per frame, because the body moves and the card's height depends on its
content. The selected body's own label swaps to the left of its point, since
the leader leaves the right and would otherwise cross the text.
Labels choose a side. Right by default; left when the text would run off the
right of the view, or into the reach of a label already placed to the right,
and never left when that would run off the left. The overlay hangs the label's
near edge on the point either way, so the hairline still meets the star.
Rings on the systems. A faint accent ring on every star known to host
planets — the one binary fact about a point of light worth reading at a
glance from the neighbourhood, since it is the one thing that says "there is
somewhere to go here". Drawn the way the star field draws stars, as
unattenuated instanced sprites with the ring a band of the quad's own uv, so
they sit on the field's points at any zoom; a first cut as three.js Points
rendered nothing at all under the WebGPU renderer. 634 of them are a lot at
the overview, so they are faint, small, fade with the local layer, and have
their own toggle — Systems — in the dock's Display tab.
Verified: build clean, 537/537 unit, 6/6 end-to-end, design detector clean,
screenshots at the overview, at 90 pc, and in Sol and Proxima with a body
hovered and pinned.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The overlay had grown by accretion: a search box floating top-centre, a
readout panel bottom-left, a range readout bottom-right, and nothing that
said these were parts of one instrument. This puts them on one rail across
the bottom of the viewport — the dock — with a tab strip pinned to the bottom
edge and whichever panel is open growing upward from it. The top of the
screen keeps only the scale ladder and the nameplate, so the map itself is
what fills the frame.
Three tabs. SEARCH is the old search, with its field pinned to the bottom of
the panel and the results growing upward above it, so the thing being typed
into never moves while the list grows. READOUT is the old bottom-left panel.
DISPLAY is new: five layer toggles — labels, orbits, grid, deep sky, sky —
each a real scene object switched by visibility, except the ones the galaxy
crossfade already rewrites every frame, whose toggles fold into that
crossfade instead of fighting it. The range readout sits on the strip itself,
so it is readable whatever is open.
Behaviour worth stating: choosing a search result hands the panel straight
back to the readout, since the thing to look at is now the scene. `/` opens
the search from anywhere. Below `sm` the dock is the strip alone; a tap opens
a panel as a sheet, a tap on the scene folds it away. The body-detail page
gets the same dock with only the search — the info panel is its reading.
Two things found on the way. CSS2DRenderer gives every label its own
z-index for depth order, and the label host created no stacking context, so
labels painted over every HUD panel; `isolate` on the host keeps them under.
And starmap-hud's readout tests were really tests of the panel that moved,
so they moved with it.
Verified: build clean, 535/535 unit, 6/6 end-to-end, design detector clean,
screenshots at 1440×900 and 390×844 across galaxy, galactic, system,
body-detail, all three tabs and the layers-off state.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5