The route search stops after MAX_VISITED stars and returned null, which everything downstream read
as "the catalogue holds no chain". On the real catalogue that was wrong for real questions: Sol to
HD 120147 (136 pc) at 5 pc is 50 jumps, and the panel said there was no route. The budget also sat
under what the shipped catalogue needs, so it is now 40 000 rather than 20 000: both that route and
a star at 170 pc are found, and Sol to HD 2626 at 6 pc, which used to be refused after 4.7 s, plots
56 jumps in about 2 s.
A search now reports whether it gave up. The range search no longer counts a give-up as proof that
nothing routes below it — that is what reported ranges up to 29% too wide — and it stops after two
of them, since those are the probes that cost the most and settle the least: for HD 2626 at 3 pc it
offers 5.92 pc in about 4 s, against 6.13 pc in 4.7 s. At the panel's widest range the refused route
and the range search are the same question, so it is asked once. Where nothing can be said, the
panel says "Too many stars to search at this range." rather than claiming there is no route.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
- The budget counted CSS pixels; lines are drawn in device pixels, so a screen scaled to 150% or
200% drew 1.5-2x the calibrated line. It now counts the canvas's drawn pixels.
- A graph was re-asked only when the drawn stars changed, so with a star budget covering the whole
catalogue, or a resize, its budget and centre stayed wherever the layer was turned on. A view that
chose its stars again now asks, and a graph is rebuilt when the stars, the range or the budget
changed (the budget by more than half the margin, or its centre by more than 5 pc).
- From inside a system the budget was worked out in astronomical units about the system's origin.
Graphs are now asked for in parsec space only; the flight back out asks.
- Comparing budgets let a request re-asked with a slightly different one supersede its twin, and the
twin's rejection cleared the state of the request that replaced it. A rejection now clears it only
for the latest request.
- The worker sorted every link to keep a few thousand, 2.2x an unbudgeted build. It now bands links
by distance, keeps every band before the one the budget runs out in, and sorts only that one:
142-168 ms on the real catalogue against 233-388 ms, 103 ms unbudgeted, returning early when all fit.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
With the drawn set following the view, the layer at 8 pc cost the integrated Radeon 503 ms a frame
at 30 pc from the Sun. Measured, the cost follows the length of line on screen (about 10 ms per
million pixels near the Sun), not the number of links: 100 000 links were 12 ms at the opening
view, 25 000 were 61 ms at 30 pc. So the budget is a length: a million pixels, turned into parsecs
at the depth the view is centred on, spent on the links nearest that centre by their nearer end.
Orbiting with links at 8 pc on the iGPU: 12-18 ms p50 at every pose measured, no long tasks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The jump-link graph linked the whole catalogue: 3.7 million links at 8 pc, 7.4-7.8 s in the
worker and a 443-515 ms frame on the main thread when they landed, and most of them between stars
that were neither drawn nor clickable. A graph request now carries the star field's drawn stars,
and the worker links only those, over an index of its own with cells as wide as the range. The
scene asks again once a new drawn set has held still for 250 ms.
The renderer is handed the graph's bounding sphere instead of computing it: three.js walked every
vertex on the main thread in the first frame that drew a new graph, 48-55 ms at 8 pc.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Route plotting ran on the main thread, and so did the jump-link graph:
- the range search for a far target, HD 2626 at 236 pc, takes 4-5 s;
- the graph at 8 pc is 3.7 million links, 6-10 s to build, then as many
link objects again to turn into vertices.
The map stopped for as long as either ran.
A Web Worker now does both. RoutingClient sends it the catalogue's ids and
positions once, and it keeps its own spatial index. A route question comes
back with the route, or with the range that would open one. A graph comes
back as one Float32Array of segment vertices, transferred rather than
copied.
On the scene side, only the latest route request is shown: an earlier
answer arriving later is dropped. Only the graph for the range last asked
for is drawn. The Routes panel says "Plotting…" and holds its button while
a request is out.
collectJumpLinks gave way to jumpLinkSegments, which writes the vertex pairs
straight into floats rather than building link objects first; the scene was
its only caller. The routing module (routing.ts) is the message protocol and
the one function answering it, so the worker is a dozen lines, and the same
answers are worked out in place where there is no Worker, as in the unit
tests' DOM. The worker is built with its own tsconfig, as the Angular
builder expects.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The route search widened evenly from the departure, Dijkstra-style, with a
budget of 20 000 stars. On the Gaia catalogue those are all within about
40 pc of the Sun, so it found no route to anything farther at any range:
Sol to Mirfak (155 pc) failed at 3, 8, 15 and 30 pc alike. Every failure
then asked minimumRangeBetween what range would work. That search widened
the same way with a 30 pc ceiling, and it ran for up to a minute on the
main thread before giving up with nothing.
routeBetween is now an A* search. Each star is queued by the distance
travelled to it plus the straight line on to the destination, on a binary
heap rather than a linear scan of the frontier. It heads for the
destination instead of flooding the core around the departure.
minimumRangeBetween bisects the range, one routeBetween per step, because
whether a chain exists can only become truer as the range grows. Its
answer is always the longest hop of a route actually found, so a range it
names always opens one. Its ceiling is now the Routes panel's own
maximum, MAX_JUMP_RANGE_PC: a range the control cannot be set to is no
answer, and raiseTo already clamped any figure above it.
The spatial index keys its cells by one number packed from their three
indices instead of an "ix,iy,iz" string. A search visits up to 125 cells
for every star it expands, and building those strings was half of what a
route cost. forEachWithin hands neighbours over unsorted and uncollected,
which was most of the other half; within is now that, gathered and sorted.
The no-route line said nothing in the catalogue bridged the gap; it now
says no chain of jumps up to the panel's maximum reaches the star, which
is what was searched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <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
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5