[mapserver-users] MapServer Animation Examples of Pipeline Flow?

[Bill Thoen]

I've got a little project that requires an "eye-catching" display of 
flow through a network of gas pipelines. I'm using MapServer 5.0.3 (with 
AGG) on Fedora Core 9 and I want to stick with open source technology if 
possible.

Are there any examples out there of MapServer showing animation effects 
along a linear feature (i.e. road, river, pipeline, information 
flowlines, etc.) that I could look at to get some ideas?

The first thought I had was to move colored dots along a pipeline in the 
direction of flow and use a timer to pace the animation. Each dot would 
represent the day's load from a source and they would move based on pipe 
diameter, pressure and other parameters that affect flow. This works, 
but the down side is that eventually you have a lot of objects to juggle 
and performance goes to heck.

Then I thought of using a series of textures for each pipeline segment 
and swapping them iteratively to simulate an animating.

What won't work is rendering the entire map image each time; that would 
go from eye-catching to mind-numbing pretty fast. So is there a way with 
MapServer to display a map base, but allow for objects to be "floated" 
on top in such away that I don't have to re-render the the entire map 
each time? (like an AJAX tool for mapserver?)

If anyone has any ideas or knows of examples they could point me to, I'd 
appreciate it.

- Bill Thoen

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