One map for everything
For a while Skydex had several maps and none of them were the map. The flight minimap in the corner. A bigger map behind it. A separate one on the spots hub. Each knew about different things, each drew them differently, and none of them were much use on a phone.
That is now one map.
What is on it
Press M in flight, or tap the map button on mobile, and you get the whole world full-screen with layers you can switch on and off:
- Ships — the live AIS traffic, the same vessels you can photograph from the air, filterable by type.
- Flying spots — real-world places people actually fly, from the spots hub.
- Your fleet — the vessels you have collected.
- Your places — anything you saved, plus places shared with you.
- Cities — searchable, so you can find somewhere by name instead of dragging across an ocean.
Tap a ship and you get its card: what it is, where it is going, and a Fly here button that drops you above it. Tap a spot and you get the same treatment. The map is not a picture of the world — it is a way to get somewhere in it.
The same engine everywhere
Under it there is now one slippy-map engine shared by the game and the web hub, with the layers defined as data rather than as three separate implementations. That sounds like an internal detail, and it is, but it is the reason a filter chip behaves identically in the sim and on spots.skydex.online, and the reason adding the next layer is a small change rather than three.
The base layer is licensed ESRI satellite imagery by default, so the world under the markers actually looks like the world.
The mobile part is the point
The honest reason this got built: the old big-map was a desktop artefact. It assumed a mouse, it assumed a keyboard shortcut, and on a phone it was close to unusable — which is a problem when a large share of people who try a browser game try it on a phone.
The full-screen map is touch-first. Taps are sized for thumbs, the filters are a chip row along the bottom where your hand already is, and the panels for your fleet and your places open as sheets rather than as floating desktop windows.
Small things that mattered
- The corner minimap stayed, because glancing is not the same as browsing. M promotes the glance into the full map.
- Spot markers now come down as a compact tuple payload with rounded coordinates instead of full objects, so the map can show every spot rather than the newest few hundred.
- Clicking a filter chip no longer throws away your scroll position. A tiny thing that made the catalogue feel broken.
- The spot pages link to our map, not to a third-party one — the point of having a map is to use it.
The plan and the phases behind this live in the repo as docs/world-map-plan.md, if you like that sort of thing.