Where Have The Players Been In Your Campaign?
Sit back and consider, for a moment, the contiguous land mass of the Russian nation. It's huge. Wikipedia says that area is 17,098,246 square kilometers. (6,601,670 sq mi) For comparison, a city block ranges from 0.0025 square miles to 0.01 square miles.
Britannica says that "Russia has a maximum east-west extent of some 5,600 miles (9,000 km) and a north-south width of 1,500 to 2,500 miles."
When I created the full Lands of Men hex map, I took a map of Russia and then folded, spindled and twisted the map to make something new, then put my campaign into it. When I started, I had 3 hexes. Now I have... well... this. (Click to embiggen)
The areas in red are where the PCs have been, with a total of about 6 years of play (counting a 4 year campaign interregnum, we've been doing this for ten years.)
The Eastern Borders campaign is my tabletop campaign. They've ranged the most, having gone up towards the Sithasten Mountains when they freed the Marshal's daughter from the Black Brotherhood. They've traveled east to Irecia, the lost Diamond City. They've gone south into the Southron Duchy, into the Nisangel Forests to journey deep into the depths of Tuluk. It "feels" like a lot, but there is so much more to see and do!
The Southern Seas campaign is my play-by-post campaign. Those guys have been at this particular go around for almost five years. In that time, they've covered about two hexes of area, but then the pace of play-by-post is slower. Still, they've been in the mountains near orc territory, and they've sailed to the island city of Ramathia!
The Western Borders campaign is my online Roll20/Discord campaign. They started in January of 2019. While they've had a few hexes of travel while going to a nearby town of Tannia, they've mainly been in one hex of area, seeking to clear the ancient ruins of Griffon's Keep from an advance warparty of orcs, goblins and evil priests. This lies near their homebase of Gireford, a small village.
In a way, this is really cool to see, as well as eye-opening. There's so much space! So many things to discover, to see, to explore. I honestly don't think that I'll live long enough to see all of the major cities visited by PCs, much less every hex explored. That's... crazy.
Anyway, though I'd share this as I think this is hella cool! What about your campaign? Where have your players been? How much have they explored? What else is left?
Hex Grid Guide Load Time, Part 2
Last year I reimplemented my hexagon grid guide with the goals of making it easier for me to add content and also making it possible to load faster. I was able to speed up load time significantly by pre-rendering the SVG on the server. This is called "SSR with Rehydration" on Google's rendering tech page.
Last week I experimented with this a bit more. At load time, I was replacing the static SVGs with interactive SVGs. However, there's no need to do this immediately. I changed it to wait until the diagram was visible on screen (using IntersectionObserver). This helps quite a bit! The "time to interactive" score goes from 9.6sec to 4.9sec and the overall page speed score goes from 63 to 89:
I was wondering if I could make it even faster by prerendering only some things on the server ("CSR with Prerendering" on Google's rendering tech page). The page shrinks from 633k to 179k! And the page score goes from 89 to 96. Time to interactive goes from 4.9s to 3.5s:
Great! However, it started to bring back the problems that I had solved last year. This version doesn't allow printing the page, loading it without Javascript, using "Reader modes" (including Pocket, Instapaper, RSS, etc.), or Ctrl+F to find diagram text on the page. The more I used the page, the more little glitches I found. None of these are super important, but they're not going to get better. In contrast, the load time will continue to get better as cpu and network speeds increase, HTTP/2 is adopted, and compression protocols improve (Brotli, HPACK, etc.). Another consideration is accessibility. I've been told that most screen readers support Javascript, but deferring the creation of SVG using IntersectionObserver means the SVG may never get created, so it would have the same problem as printing and Ctrl+F.
I decided to keep the pre-rendered static SVG for now, with deferred interactive SVG. It's simpler for me and I have fewer corner cases to deal with. I'll revisit this in the future when I update my A* pages to load faster.
