Colouring by date

[Olly Betts]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2005 at 11:52:37PM +0100, David Loeffler wrote:
> Random question: how hard would it be to have the range of colours used
> change dynamically based on what is visible in the Aven window, so the
> oldest bit of survey /currently visible/ is blue and the newest bit red?

It would be rather slow for a large system (which is where it's going
to be most useful).  On any movement you'd need to scan all legs to find
which are visible, and then regenerate the OpenGL models for the cave
and the colour bar.  I suspect the changing colours might be a bit
distracting too.

> (You could ask the same question for date colouring as well, although I
> can't think why you'd want to do it in this case.)

You must mean depth here...

Erin had a cave which had a vast entrance pitch with a fairly flat cave
below, which resulted in all the colours being used up by the entrance
pitch, which is similarly annoying.

We had two ideas to improve that (neither implemented yet).

One was to make the depth band widths depend on the length of passage at
that depth.  More passage gets tighter bands.  But that does mean the
colours change as you survey more, even if the cave doesn't get deeper.

The other was to allow the user to choose the depth band divisions.  But
that's kind of fiddly - something automatic is nicer if it works well.

But to address both this issue and yours, perhaps the answer is to
implement restricting the view (or the colouring at least) to a
subsurvey (or set of subsurveys).

Cheers,
    Olly