Discussion: RouteGadget 3D

My club is one of the organizers of the FIN5 week 2022. I have been thinking of suggesting my club to try out the all new RG version there. You can preview the viewer part it here:
https://routegadget.net/arkisto/
(just one test event with some imaginary courses and one old course training course of mine from 2015 with 2 tracks)

Any comments are welcome, especially those pinpointing what needs to be fixed to make it good enough for the FIN5 week. Works best with Chrome and you may need a resonably good computer (gaming ones being the best). Plenty of issues and things to fix, but not sure what are the essential ones.

Neat! Very, very promising stuff!!

Non-op entirely on my iPhone 12 mini in Chrome or Safari, 2D or 3D. I'd suggest getting the 2D working for phones if this will be THE RouteGadget for FIN5, and adding some verbiage like "3D not for phone", or an OS check in code to disable 3D where not appropriate.

Desktop (Win 10 w/okay GPU in Chrome) initial thoughts:

Moving around on the map in Fly Mode with the mouse tends to 'overshoot' (keep moving) compared to non-Fly Mode (try to make them 'the same'?)

When using the q, a, m, and n keys, the map rotates around the center(ish) for m and n, but with q and a the entire map moves on the page while tilting ... intuitively, I'd want q and a to work the same as m and n: the map to rotate on the center. And the m and n rotates on somewhere not-quite the center

Tilting and then moving around (zoom or grab-and-move) on the map gets very, very slow at shallow angles. This is where the '3D cool' is, so I think folks will spend time there. Perhaps a variable 'jump' distance that increases based on that angle? Challenging!

The runner dots (pentagons?) are jaggy / blobbly. Crisp 3D spheres, instead?

Forest opacity: perhaps always have the forest underneath the course and runner / route layers? Would make screenshots more compelling

Make the "Shade strength" a slider next to the Hillshade toggle (when active)? Otherwise it's a bit of a frustrating guessing game.

Same with Z-factor: slider!

Feature: perhaps adding the old 'last 30 seconds' (or variable?) highlighted route behind the runners? As a toggled option?

Feature: an "auto-follow" (and rotate, etc) feature would be great ... of course who are you following?

I'm not warm to 3-D maps and find that the straight line between controls annoying when it follows the contours. Small point.
Perhaps I'm missing where the feature is but if there were one suggested improvement I would make for Route Gadget it would be to add a leg by leg route display the same as Livelox has. That is a very useful teaching aid.

You can start animation from anywhere you want. 2D: right click map, 3D "mass start" button + click on map. Impossible to know that without any instructions.

In "fly mode" you are not supposed to touch your mouse (except maybe zoom). It is intended for making video screen recordings.You fly at same elevaton and look at the target pont (x,y,z), You move then target point with arrow keys and rotate around it with n&m. With q&a you change target z but you stay at same the elevation. Needs some getting used to and also selecting the elevation right at start.

grab-move becomes slow only if you zoom too close to your target. To get hang of moving around one needs to get the comcept of a target point, where it is, how to move it and how to move closer or furter away and around it. Typically crab-move becomes slow when you try to move ahead by zooming (insead of panning by arrows or grab-moce) and end up close to your target. App thinks you are studying something very very close to you, so grab move is slow. I wonder is it all way to difficult for most to make it worth to set it up.

I managed to get my hands on an ipad and both 2D and 3D worked with it (in Safari), although 3D restarted after a minute or so. I guess lack of memory. 3D did not open in my android phone. So I addded a light weight 3D mode for mobile devices. Tiliting rotating may need sme getting used to for those finger gestures. idk why 2D did not work for hughmac4. I added short 15 sec tails and an option to draw manually, and tried it in small recent events already so here we go FN5 I guess.

FIN5 O week is over. We decided to upoad events to https://routegadget.net/arkisto/

I also recorded some animations, here is playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG2L803_KaA&li...

One of the animations, day 4 D21E


(All went fine except some minor issues with RR courses (kid's string course). For some days those were not made using course setting software - just plain 0cad instead - so I had some extra work to click them in with purple pen first).