As you all know, I am not a professional programmer. I am working towards a programming certificate in Java in my free time, and I work a full-time job in an completely unrelated field of engineering. 

SO, as I progress though my courses, I've been think about projects I can do to help me learn.

One of those projects is a Java-based battle map, similar to MapTool (and all those other great battle map programs) for me to use with my group, but without most of the bells and whistles. 

I've been struggling with a couple things. 
1) how do I structure the back end - the map model specifically
2) an efficient algorithm to do 4E LOS/LOE rules (anyone know how the surfacescapes guys did this?)

I guess with all the VTT's out there, this must be a hard thing to do, since I have not found one that actually does LOS in accordance with the rules.

So, in the hope that some (or someone) of the Clan, might know something, this seemed like the perfect place to talk about it.