Re: [Rails-devel] Support Needed: New complex Tiles and Maps

[John A. T. <ja...@ja...>]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2014 at 8:56 AM, Stefan Frey <ste...@we...> wrote:

> Question: Is there anything you might have done different in hindsight?
>

I wouldn't have kept the .18t file format with its painful conventions for
one.

For another, I would have separated tile layout from tile drawing, and
supported the tile definition either using the high-level approach of "the
city is here, and it is connected to these locations" and letting the
layout be generated, or allow you to specify the layout (exact positions,
rotations, etc) - as it, especially on crowded tiles, I had to do
special-case layout things and it still isn't great.  I would have also
generalized the track layout to build bezier curves directly rather than
keeping all the special-case code for "if this position is connected to
this position, draw it this way".


> And: You are right, writing to Swing is an option.
> However I expect that any suitable Java svg libraries with support for
> Swing allow the creation of a svg file by writing to a Graphics2D
> object. So if java as the implementation language switching from svg to
> direct painting will be nearly transparent.
>

Let's just say I am skeptical of using an API designed for drawing on the
screen and getting good results generating SVG from it, but feel free to go
that route if you prefer.

-- 
John A. Tamplin