Experiment …… ? 8

Derived from the D3.js example force_cluster.html and gist 3104394.

Features

• all of gist 3104394 @ github
• collision avoidance approach based on a grid (quantization of position)

A FAILED EXPERIMENT

As you can see: the visual behaviour is not good (it may look okay, but it should be an improvement upon gist 3117757 @ github.

Lesson learned: I should’ve known by now that trying to press-roll a single force into doing both layout an grid-based positioning/collision avoidance is a pipe dream. On to #3…

Usage

• Side the ‘debug level’ slider to see the various debug levels visually; the hospital curves are (top): force.alpha and (bottom) total x/y change squared: a measurement for the amount of movement of nodes in the graph. Note that the bottom curve is inverted, so that when both meet, you’re getting close to done. :-)
• Click on node to expand or collapse. When a node has ‘bundled’ outgoing links, the first click will expand only those (a.k.a. 2nd display mode / expand state = 1), the next click will then expand the group node itself.
• Click on hull (which shows up when you expanded a group node) to collapse the group.
• Drag node to move entire graph around.

Notes

• grid quantization is based on the biggest node, so that each node is guaranteed to fit in a single slot (this limits your viable positions, and hence the maximum number of nodes you’ll be able to ‘safely’ fit in the given area, though!)

• ‘tick’ event does the magick: this attempt tried to cajole the force layout into playing nice by feeding it the quantized positions as .px/.py target data instead, riding the same ticket that the force-internal ‘charge’ code does. No dice. Influence is too little, and when you beef it up, you’re getting toasted in all sorts of other ways.