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Scrolling through world boundaries

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Pascal5

Scrolling through world boundaries

Post by Pascal5 »

A few minor corrections for improving useability, which I guess re easy to fix...

It seems that AQ consider a world map consisting of a main square surrounded by two dimmed copies on each side. This can at times be a little confusing. One day I spent some time wondering "Why is my map so washed out?" only to realise some time later that I had zoomed into one of these copies instead of the main map.

Would it be possible to allow seamless infinite horizontal scrolling on an ever-repeating strip of world maps, all equivalent? This seems to be the most logical and intuitive behavior to my opinion, the less prone of "getting lost" when scrolling too far away from the main world map.


Another issue pertains to the behavior for high latitudes.

The worldmercator projection used in AQ is indeed not suited for high latitudes, as the scale becomes increasingly large there with the map virtually extending to infinity. Actually, the square webmercator map standard limits latitude to about 85°. AQ currently allows to scroll away toward poles very far away from the useable map, with no practical limit. Eventually, you would nevertheless reach 90° latitude, where buggy behaviors appear: When quitting AQ and relaunching it, the map position is wrongly shown, with vertical scrolling locked.

I think that it would be a good thing to clamp latitude within webmercator limits (Who among us plans to travel past 85° latitude anyway?) so as to avoid all confusions resulting from scrolling to latitudes where using worldmercator projection just doesn't make any sense (That's why you turn off scale display at those latitudes, right?).
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Re: Scrolling through world boundaries

Post by Psyberia-Support »

Hi Pascal and sorry for the delay.
Yes I agree with you, it would be much better if the map could be scrolled horizontally without limits. This is planned.
Right now unfortunately it's not possible due to technical limitations, this is why the map is "shaded" out of the main area.
Little by little I try to remove those limitations, and hopefully one day everything will move smoothly when crossing the date line.

I also agree with your second point.
In fact, the application is not particularly using the "worldmercator" projection, it uses the projection of the main map (the map displayed at the bottom).
Maps and layers displayed over are re-projected "on the fly" to this base projection.
So a simple hard coded maximum value would not be correct, but more something like a working range of the current projection. I honestly never thought to that.

To resume, I'm aware of those "flaws", it's just a matter of prioritization...
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