[Mapserver-users] Animated layers

[Daniel Morissette]

Steve Young wrote:
> 
> I'm looking for some ideas or examples of animated layers. I have in
> mind creating a time-series layer of land use change. The Mapserver user
> would zoom to their area of interest then click an 'animate' button and
> have Mapserver, with the help of some PHP, cycle through a time
> sequence. The layer format could be raster or vector. I think it would
> be relatively easy to get something working, but to have it work well,
> i.e. smoothly under varying server load, would be something else. One
> route might be outputting Mapserver gifs to a gif animating utility,
> then delivering its output to the browser. Sound feasible?
> 

Going with animated gifs is very feasible: simply draw all the map 
slides in a loop and save them to disk, then use a utility such as 
Whirlgif (http://www.danbbs.dk/~dino/whirlgif/) to combine those into an 
animated gif.

That's what we do in the following site for instance:
http://dsol-smed.hc-sc.gc.ca/dsol-smed/fluwatch/fluwatch.phtml?FluWeek_Start=wk200301&Submit=View+Map&operation=Animate&FluWeek_End=wk200320

This has been discussed a few times in the past on this list (try 
searching the archives), there's even some sample code doing something a 
bit similar in:
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/data2/wilma/mapserver-users/0108/msg00261.html

Daniel
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  Daniel Morissette               morissette at dmsolutions.ca
  DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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