Welcome to my Starview utility for VGAP4.


Starview is a JAVA utility written to be either an applet or standalone. Currently it is in Alpha state (barely works). Later it should work properly and support annotation of maps. This should allow deals between players to be documented.

Starview should appear below in a Java enabled browser running Yale (for now).
People viewing this HTML page will see the text name = "mapname" value = "yale.map". This is what does it. You could try the Echo Cluster.


It is also intended that Starview will be distributed bundled with other VGAP4 tools, such as Diplomat. This has to wait for details to be worked out. Also source code will be available though licensing has to be sorted out. Some utility writers keep their source unfree!

Starview expects to read the MAP file at the current URL base. On disc that means in the current directory. So currently it must run in $VGAP/data. Later standalone mode will allow a path parameter so it can run anywhere. Indeed when embedded into a larger tool the parameters will allow switches and pathnames for maps and annotation files. Applet mode will be for using it on the web so map authors can demo their maps on web pages.

Due to the Java security model limiting "write" access annotation will have trouble in some environments. This is due to the Java security specification which does not want untrusted applets writing to your disc. It is not anticipated to be a problem in Windows systems which tend to install with fairly loose permissions. I have to take care with the SUN Java environment though.

Starview is built with the free JBuilder 6 Personal Edition IDE from Borland. It's good.

To Do

- Be able to choose map name (currently done in the HTML script only)
- Scale
- Annotation (big feature!)