Three changes to what is on the picture, and both drawings got all three.
The line from an information box to its aircraft was drawn in the
aircraft's own colour, which made it the same colour as that aircraft's
trail: a straight solid line running out of an aeroplane, in the colour of
the path behind the aeroplane, reads as more path, and on a busy picture
that is a heading nobody flew. It has its own colour now, and is dashed.
Qt measures a dash pattern in multiples of the pen's width, so each pass of
the glow divides the pattern by its own width; without that the halo's
dashes are three times the core's and the line comes out as beads.
The animation had no such line at all, which only came out when the two
were held up against each other: a label pushed into one of the outward
rings by a crowd had nothing tying it to the aeroplane it was about. It has
one now, walked along the line's own length rather than along whichever axis
is longer, so that a nearly horizontal leader and a nearly vertical one get
dashes of the same length and neither runs past the aircraft it points at.
A red flag stands where the receiver was told it is standing, from the
coordinates in the settings. The foot of the pole is the position and the
pennant flies up and to the right, so nothing the flag is made of covers the
place it points at. It is pure red in every theme: that is the one mark on
the picture whose meaning must not change with the colours, and pure red is
both the brightest red there is and the one furthest from every altitude
colour -- a softer one sat close enough to a low aeroplane on the default
map, and to a mid-altitude one on the red theme, to be taken for one. It is
drawn only where a position was actually given, since a middle worked out
from whatever flew past is not a place anybody is standing.
And the range rings: faint discs at a quarter, a half and three quarters of
the radius, concentric on the receiver and labelled with the distance. They
are translucent and they stack, so the ground inside the innermost is lifted
three times and the outer once, which gives a sense of how far away a thing
is without measuring anything. An indexed picture cannot blend, so
translucent there means moving the ground under the disc a step or two up
its own ramp of shades, which keeps the coastline and the roads visible
through it. Separate settings for the two, because a picture is studied and
a window is glanced at.
Two bugs found by the tests rather than by looking. The rings were built
across the whole canvas instead of the part of it the map is drawn on, so
they came out stretched by the height of the title bar -- four per cent,
which is invisible and wrong. And a radius of zero killed the window: the
projection collapses, every pixel maps to one point, and the graticule asks
for lines across a span of nothing until Qt aborts. The program never
passes a zero, but a caller could, and a crash is not an answer.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg
The aerodromes were never on the window at all: only the animation drew
them, and the window's map had whatever airport glyphs the tiles happened to
carry. They are drawn there now, in the same colour and the same square.
The first attempt at that had a bug worth naming, because it would have
looked like the feature simply not working. They were fetched inside the
same pass of the fetching loop as a piece of map, so they queued behind a
hundred and twenty tiles coming off a network -- and once the map was in
hand there were no more passes, so they were never fetched again. They are
their own question now, asked on the same thread but not behind the tiles,
and they arrive whether the tiles do or not. An area that has been asked
about and has none in it is remembered as none, rather than asked about
again five times a second for the rest of the night. And the thread now
starts if either the map or the aerodromes are wanted, so --no-basemap no
longer quietly takes the airports with it.
Then the themes, which change the window and the animated pictures together
because both read their colours out of the same palette. night is what this
program has always drawn and is untouched. digital, phosphor, amber and red
are the screens the phrase "air defence display" actually calls to mind: a
black tube, one phosphor, and thin bright vector lines with a halo round
them.
Three things follow from having one colour to spend, and they are
constraints rather than decoration. Height becomes brightness, since hue is
no longer free -- low is dim and high burns, which is the trade those
displays made. The map underneath drops to about a quarter of the
brightness asked for, because a tinted photograph of a county behind the
vectors is the one thing that stops a vector display looking like one. And
a country is named in two letters rather than drawn as a flag, a flag being
half a dozen colours.
The glow is done twice, differently, because the two are different kinds of
picture. The window lays each line down two or three times, wider and
fainter each pass, with the core last: trails, symbols, leader lines, box
borders and the aerodrome squares. The animation cannot blend at all, a GIF
being indexed colour, so it dilates what it has drawn and fills the halo
with the dimmed copy of the colour underneath -- and the aircraft colours
already had dimmed copies, since those are the trail shades, so an aeroplane
glows into the colour its own trail is drawn in, which is the colour a
phosphor would have spread into. The fixed colours get two rings each in
the palette for the purpose. The halo goes over the map, the grid and the
background and over nothing else that was drawn, since a halo is what light
does to the dark around a line; where two rings meet the nearer wins. It
costs about 55 ms a frame at 1400 by 1258 and the default theme skips the
pass entirely.
The palette is written over in place rather than replaced, because both
drawings and every one of their helpers hold a reference to that array and a
new one would leave half the program painting in the colours of the theme
before. There is a test that every theme keeps the aerodrome colour more
than forty units of CIELAB from every altitude colour, stated as the
distance rather than as the colour, so that a new theme cannot quietly walk
an aircraft back into the airports.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg
The Dust Council