Post #1176965

2026-04-16 00:46 UTC

I learned a thing. I'm messing around with a way of showing height of an aircraft without just reading the numbers. Lower the cognitive barrier for someone using the map. I tried drop shadows that change based on altitude but they read very poorly over the map so I'm scrapping that idea. I don't want to use color as I want high threat targets to be color coded for traffic alert info when flying. So these leaves perhaps shape / size to play with. Here is a picture of the map with drop shadows. Not great. I'm not much of a designer but I'll prototype some things and see what reads best. #godot #avgeek #aviation

Replies (2)

@clolsonus@social.makerforums.info 2026-04-16 01:16

@Aut@hachyderm.io I'm super curious if you come up with any other ideas. Neither I nor google gemini have thought of anything I like. Somehow a line depicting height above ground could be interesting, but that just collapses into a dot on a top down map, lol. My mind wanders to the old "elite" space combat video game that had a sort of orthographic view in combat, but my brain could never parse/leverage that very well in the heat of the moment so it's that's not feeling like the right way to go for me. https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/elite-dangerous/images/4/43/Sidewinder-Cockpit-Interface.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20170605142211

Open ##1176964
@schrockwell@mastodon.social 2026-04-16 01:57

@Aut@hachyderm.io Is this for use in-flight? For safety’s sake I only care about relative altitude. So like +8 for “800 feet above me”. Easier to grok than trying to do math.

Open ##2983076