The upgrade to 4.6 means that if you are running Mono and you have a VirtualRadar.exe.config to fix the Mono SQLite v4 error that the old versions threw on startup then you should remove the .config file, it's no longer required.
There is no .NET 4.6 for Windows XP, so if you're running XP then do not install this version. The current release version will be the last one that runs on XP.
The SVG graphics have three benefits over the old system:
1. The graphics are drawn by the browser, not by the server. It reduces the workload on the server.
2. SVG is an XML format and can be manipulated by the JavaScript that builds it, which means that you can change the colours of the aircraft markers to match whatever conditions you like (as opposed to the current selected / not selected colours).
3. The appearance of text on markers should now be consistent between Windows and Linux installations. Linux installations have a hard time drawing text on graphics so they had to use labels under the marker, which never looked very good.
The downsides with SVG are:
1. It increases the workload on the browser.
2. Older browsers can't draw SVG. The intention is to support a a fallback to server-drawn markers when the site is running on old browsers but that's not in place yet. The 5th November preview adds support for falling back to bitmap markers when the browser doesn't support SVG.
3. The server would automatically scale the font for long strings so that they would still fit in the marker. I haven't figured out a way to reproduce this in SVG so if you have long text in the marker it will get clipped.
I've tested the SVG markers on Chrome, Firefox, Edge, IE11 and iOS9 mobile Safari and so far they're holding up, albeit with some small differences between them.
Not all of the markers have got SVG versions in place yet. If you added your own markers then they'll continue to work, it's just that the text will look different because it's coming from the server or a marker label.
There are some new global options to control the generation of the SVG:
- aircraftMarkerUseSvg (boolean, default = true) -- Set to false to switch SVG off entirely (Removed - SVG can now be switched off in Tools | Options | Web Site)
- svgAircraftMarkerSelectedFill (CSS colour string, default #FFFF00) -- The fill colour of the selected aircraft marker.
- svgAircraftMarkerNormalFill (CSS colour string, default #FFFFFF) -- The fill colour of the not-selected aircraft marker.
- svgAircraftMarkerAltitudeLineStroke (CSS colour string, default #000) - The colour of the altitude stalk
- svgAircraftMarkerAltitudeLineWidth (number, default 1) - The width of the altitude stalk
- svgAircraftMarkerTextShadowFilterXml (string, SVG XML) - The <filter> tag that is applied to add shadow to the text on the marker. It must have an id of "vrs-text-shadow-filter". Set to an empty string to remove the filter entirely.
- svgAircraftMarkerTextStyle (JavaScript object) - An object with properties named after SVG style attributes (illegal JavaScript names such as font-family need to be in quotes) and values that control the appearance of the marker's text
Code: Select all
{
'font-family': 'Roboto, Sans-Serif',
'font-size': '8pt',
'font-weight': '700',
'fill': '#FFFFFF'
}Code: Select all
svg - a string that contains the SVG. Don't include the <xml> tag at the start of the SVG.
aircraftMarkerStatusFillPaths: An optional array of IDs of paths in the SVG that should be filled with colour to denote the status of the aircraft.and the JavaScript that the TS compiles down to here: https://github.com/vradarserver/vrs/blo ... dedSvgs.js
If you want to use marker colours to denote different aircraft states (other than selected / not selected) then at the moment there's no easy way to hook your code in for that. It'll be coming in a future preview.
You should certainly see a lot less bandwidth consumed by images.