In The Pink
The town creation code has been running for a few days now, and after a tweak or two I’m fairly happy that it’s a reasonable start. I’ve just rolled the server map back to restart the town creation again following a fix, but they should soon repopulate. Although the addition of some pink hexagons is hardly going to mean much to the casual observer, to me it really starts to add a flavour of the sort of organic construction that I’m looking for and I’m more interested in the project than I have been since the first few months when I was working on the initial map generation.
While looking at the map in the browser, I had noticed that the zoomed in view was quite slow to load. This was because I had changed the max zoom to have smaller cells (and therefore more cells) than my earlier tests and this meant that the html for the imagemap was very large, nearly 180KB, in fact. Considering the probability that I will want to change the map view to some form of AJAX in the future, I didn’t want to spend any time fixing this. Happily, I remembered that I hadn’t turned on page compression and the minute or so spent looking up the directive to turn it on was enough to fix the slow loading. If only everything was that easy.
