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

[J.J. Schlafley]

Microsoft's Virtual Earth and Google Maps uses a vector layer (VML or SVG) on top of their raster layer (basemap) to show driving directions.



----- Original Message ----
From: Bill Thoen <bthoen at gisnet.com>
To: mapserver-users at lists.osgeo.org
Sent: Saturday, August 2, 2008 2:06:37 PM
Subject: [mapserver-users] MapServer Animation Examples of Pipeline Flow?

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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