DirectX supports very simple points and lines as colored vertices pretty easily, but you will have to convert the double precision coordinates into single precision floats. You can support more symbolic points and lines by textured vertices and GDI drawing to create a bitmap that you convert into a texture. You can vertices organized as two triangles that form a square for points or an elongated rectangle for lines. You can have transparent textures, so it's ok if your vertices are bigger than your shape. Remember that traditional Z-ordering by drawing sequence is not really going to be used in 3D since you will be working with 3D constructs. In order to fill polygons properly by using triangles you have to do tessellation. Alternately, you can draw them as a texture on a pair of triangles like with points and lines. My experience is that DirectX did not support tessellation directly, but OpenGL does. You can use Tao open GL in order to get that to work in C#. So basically you could start with the mapwindow or DotSpatial tools for reading the shapefiles themselves, pick a reference scale in order to transform the geographic coordinates into floats, and then use Tao OpenGL to get the tessellated polygons. I am not aware of any existing tools that do that sort of thing other than what we created, but there may be something out there now.<br>
<br>Good luck. <br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 12:34 AM, Carsten Troelsgaard <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:troelsgaard53c@live.dk">troelsgaard53c@live.dk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
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<p><span style="color:#1f497d;font-size:11pt"><font color="#000000" face="Tahoma" size="2">Michael wrote</font></span></p><div class="im">
<p><span style="color:#1f497d;font-size:11pt"></span> </p>
<p><span style="color:#1f497d;font-size:11pt">There are packages that will do Shapefiles for you, know you?</span></p>
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<p><span style="color:#1f497d;font-size:11pt">-mpg</span></p>
<p><span style="color:#1f497d;font-size:11pt"> </span></p>
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<br></div>Yes. I'll eventually get to the libraries. But there are some considerations. I've always been or atleast felt alone in my coding quest. Noone tought me anything (that's not true). The net.framework is HUGE from a newbie point of view .. how do I know that it doesn't already contain what I need (as it did with the tif-encoder) without learning about the nooks and crannies of it - and that's an enormous task on it's own. Around easter I had a look at the libraries of two of the dotnet-projects. I was pleasently surprised. But I shyed away becourse of the overhead. My first exe-files turned out to be executable from my web-pages. It was and they still are so small and selfcontained, that they for 'some' practical reasons can function as a 'format': The little D2-polyLine editor contains the line-data and a continous abillity to edit it .. woila! It's an exe with no consequences, but it complies to a sound design-rule: keep it simple! It does no more and no less than it promises.<br>
There is a particular reason to do the 'copying' of classes that I do: I need to get to know the gis-world (I'm a geologist), and the laborious task of dealing practically with the details IS the learning-process. I get the classes too, fine.<br>
One of the reasons that I keep coding is the posibillity to .. over time .. build a library of 'good' classes. A library that I KNOW inside out. This sounds good, but the reallity is different. So few things survive time. Sometimes, after writing a class, I feel that I can tell if it's going to be usefull in the future .. and it's again the 'I can see what it does', and it does no more and no less. I spent most of my time trying to understand .. life is too short for cryptic classes. In this respect the dotnet libraries I looked at gets an A+. <br>
If there are small dll's that deals with the basic formats it would be stupid not to use them, but the shortcut may only be exploitable in the vb-editor becourse of the intelli-sense (I don't know where the intelli-sense went in my current C#-editor)<br>
<br>
Carsten<br>
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<p><span style="color:#1f497d;font-size:11pt"><font color="#000000" face="Tahoma" size="2"></font></span> </p>
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