We now have an “IT_ Tracer“ to visualize the Trails… looking good.

Even though in my head I see it as a tracker (inline with Information Trails), my programmer obviously looked at it more from a “Draw” point of view (as he accomplished most of the Tracer’s ability using DRAW)… so, go figure. It really doesn’t matter what it’s call at this point. I am just glad that the Tracer works, and beautifully, too.

However, the JAVA applet is not doing as much as we wanted it to, because it is a web applet, and thus suffered from a lot of restrictions. And some of those restricted functions has to do with accessing files from the server… which is a “no no” in JAVA Web applet!

Since I have no great desire to distribute the Tracer online, nor even using it as an browser-based tool, the conclusion is to drop the JAVA applet but create a “program proper” instead. Hopefully this does not incur too much overhead, since the JAVA functions and User Interface can both be reused. I also believe that a “Zoom” function will come in handy…

It was funny that the coordinates actually became inverted (inadvertently) because NWN position the origin of the the Cartesian coordinates (0,0) at the top left corner. Glad it was something well documented. Amusing, and not too hard to fix.