Commit Graph
3 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
SenrokaiandClaude Fable 5 68a919bd84 Route between stars, through the crossings a chosen range allows
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
2026-08-20 18:39:22 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Fable 5 7591bcc0ea Point at what is selected: arcs, a leader to the card, rings on the systems
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
2026-08-19 02:38:06 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Fable 5 4a1cc5240a Dock the HUD: every tool and readout on one rail along the bottom
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
2026-08-18 20:57:10 +02:00