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Topic: UQM on Google Maps (Read 3499 times)
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youBastrd
Frungy champion
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Posts: 67
It's real velour, just let yourself go.
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Today I quickly threw together an implementation of the UQM map using google maps. It's not yet production quality, but it's a neat proof-of-concept. The WoW players did this some time ago, and dammit we're not going to let them beat us! 
http://paulforest.com/uqm/map.html
For future expansion: It would be really slick to improve the graphics and functionality, and get it to"production-quality."
* vector-based, and very high resolution
* very detailed when zoomed in, showing individual systems
* Adding functionality to toggle co-ordinate lines
* Adding functionality to show (hyperspace) mini-map
* Adding functionality to show quasi-space map somehow or another
* Adding functionality to toggle spheres of influence (transparency layer? works everywhere except Opera)
* Adding functionality to make each star clickable (?). Display stats for each star (?). Toggle display of resource/bio availablity on each star (?)
Anyone willing to help out with this?
Some background on how Google maps works:
* Main Javascript code is stored on Google servers, there's a public API that you use to call their code from your page's javascript. Typically Google will host the satellite images themselves, but in this case we want to host them all ourselves, as I've done here.
* If you want to see the code, just do a view source on the page. It's not much more than a hello world. Actually, it's kinda busted.
* The images are sliced out of the largest, most detailed image you can find. A script is available for Photoshop that allows this. For this script, your image's length and width must be a multiple of 256 (but they don't have to be the same). Edit the script to tell it which zoom level to use. It's a little tricky, I still haven't figured it out to be honest.
* Links:
http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Maps-API/browse_thread/thread/2d876fa71ec07e9f/050bc3fed5c19c09?q=photoshop&rnum=7
http://mapki.com/index.php?title=Add_Your_Own_Custom_Map
http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Maps-API
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Anthony
*Smell* controller
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Posts: 358
Star Control Lives!
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Very nice. Very high quality.
It's a lot of work. This is the first time I've seen anyone do this with Google maps.
Don't give up!
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youBastrd
Frungy champion
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Gender:
Posts: 67
It's real velour, just let yourself go.
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wow, yeah, I forgot about that one. Sage's map was the most detailed sc2 map ever made. It seems to be down now, which is a shame if all that knowledge, code and data is lost.
The google maps API is really slick, so it can probably do just about everything anyone would need, if we're willing to do the legwork on it. So in terms of doing all the crazy features everyone will inevitably ask for, we don't have to build, test and maintain the javascript, it's available now. It's just a matter of figuring out the API and building some backend stuff if needed, maybe a pull in all the planet info on demand from a database? Like an AJAX kinda thing? Yikes, that's a pile of work...
Here's the one from World of Warcraft, very detailed with a bunch of cool features: http://mapwow.com/ I can't even imagine how big that universe is and how long it would take to make this webpage.
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