Been a while since I messed with this. One of the main issues I've been trying to solve was a replacement for the Adobe Flash-based league maps. I wanted something truly dynamic, that would allow leagues to have completely distinct sector sets and the map could be reliably generated and displayed regardless. A coworker recently pointed me to Graphviz, and with its help, and learning a bit about applying Javascript to an SVG image (and thankfully decent CSS3 acceptance by most browsers I care to support now), I have something in the works that should do the trick.
So far, I think I've got some fairly intuitive styling cues in the map, and the info boxes could be used to add any detail about a sector that would be useful.
- Unclaimed sectors are colored light grey.
- Claimed are a brighter white background, ringed in the squad color.
- Paths between same-squad controlled sectors show up as the squad's color.
- If a sector is under a pending challenge, all paths leading to it from the challenging squad show up as a dashed line of the challenging squad's color.
- Entry nodes are hexagons whereas all others are ovals.
The beauty of it being dynamic is that it allows for Squadwar to serve other total conversions, with entirely different sector maps and numbers of sectors. It would also allow for small, medium, large, even mega-scale leagues maps, if there was ever that much interest again.
When I'm happy with it I'll have it committed to Github and checked out on the official server. Did I mention the map is click-to-drag and scroll-zoomable


