wolverine2710
Tutorial & Guide Writer
Ah, but I was proposing server-side mediated completion, where it'll autofill with any star name it knows. This way people can benefit from others having already entered star names (hopefully accurately).
If you're using the same set of stars as references for each new source star it'd be nice if they were easy to fill in, yes ?
There is a slight concern with the number of stars ballooning and making this a little clunky, but a little RESTful API to it with the server set to use some compression will mean no bandwidth worries, and I'd hope anyone playing the game has a machine capable of doing quick lookups on an array of even 200,000 elements....
The basic point is to make the data entry as easy as we possibly can so that people don't feel it's too much of a chore. Encourage as much data as possible!
I agree that server-side completion would be the icing on the cake. A simple Ajax Jquery could do the trick. Using ajax you send the current partially typed name to the server (where all 200.000 systems live) and receive a suggestion. BUT this only has to be done for the single 'current system' input field. The 9 destination input field have their name hard coded in the form and a commander only need to input distance numbers there - read from the galaxy map.
And YES making data entry as simple and convenient as possible is the key to make sure there will be potentially lots more commanders inputting there distance numbers. Especially crucial when they open up the Galaxy more. But I hope FD will be able to supply us with more numbers in the future. If done by one or two commanders its time consuming. If done by 50+ we have the coordinates for SB2 (and later SB3 etc) in no time.