Set a country background to my Google Geomap - image

A few days ago I've explored geomaps and, however, it turned out to be easy to change the properties of the elements.
But I have two questions:
I'd like to add rivers and forests on the maps. So Ive considered to set a background image instead of the geomaps figure. But I can't find a way to get this one fixed. Is there a way to set a background picture for a country or region?
How can I change the shape of the "bubbles" when you select a city e.g. "London"? I'd like to change it to a square.
Thanks in advance for your help!

Unfortunately what you're looking for is not available in geocharts in their current implementation.
Using a background image is possible in the sense that you can use CSS to make all shapes in the map transparent, and use a background image in the div to make it appear as if the little circles are being drawn on a map with forest and rivers, but you will run in to two big hurdles:
Your map will need to be identical in size/layout to the Google Maps SVG
If Google ever changes the SVG they use (or the view/projection they use) you will need to edit yours too
This isn't ideal, obviously. You could work around it by creating custom javascript to write rivers and forests on your map, but that is going to be a huge headache (especially if you are using multiple maps/views).
As for the circles, you can't change them to squares without hacking the actual SVG in the background with javascript. While this is definitely possible (if you're really good with SVG/Javascript), it again isn't using any of the fancy features of geocharts, and is more just a custom solution that will have to be updated if/when google updates their API.
Rather than doing it that way, you may want to look in to the same implementation on google maps itself. That will allow you to use custom markers, draw custom shapes, etc. with a lot more flexibility (and a much more stable API).

Related

Monogame Extended Tiled

I'm making an isometric city builder using Monogame Extended and Tiled. I've got everything set-up and now i need to somehow access the specific tiles so i can change them at runtime as the user clicks on a tile to build an object. The problem is, i can't seem to find a "map.GetLayer("Layername").GetTile(x,y) or .SetTile(x,y) function or something similar.
Now what i can do is edit the xml(.tmx) file which has a matrix in it that represents the map and it's drawn tiles. The problem with this is that i need to build the map in the content pipeline again after editing for the changes to be displayed. I can't really build at runtime or can i?
Thanks in advance!
Something like this will get you part way there.
var tileLayer = map.GetLayer<TiledMapTileLayer>("layername");
TiledMapTile tile;
if(tileLayer.TryGetTile(x, y, out tile))
{
// do something with tile
}
However, there's only a limited amount of things you can actually do with the tile once you've got it from the map.
There's no such thing as a SetTile method because changing tile data at runtime is not currently supported. This is a limitation of the renderer, which has been optimized for rendering very large maps by building static geometry that can't be changed once it's loaded into the graphics card.
There has been some discussion about building another renderer that would handle dynamic map changes but at this stage nothing like that has been implemented in the library. You could always have a go at implementing a simple renderer yourself, a really basic one is not as hard as you might think.
An alternative approach to dealing with this kind of problem might be to pre-process the map data before giving it to the renderer. The idea would be to effectively separate the layers of the map that are static from those that are dynamic and render the dynamic tiles as normal sprites. Just a thought, I'm not sure about the details of how this might work.
I plan to eventually revisit the Tiled API in the next major version of MonoGame.Extended. Don't hold your breath, these things can take a lot of time, but I am paying attention to the feedback and kinds of problems people are experiencing with the existing API.
Since the map data is stored in a XML (or csv) file which runs through the Content Pipeline you can not change it at runtime.
Anyways, in a city builder you usually do not change existing tiles but you place object on top of existing tiles.

How can I draw images, lines, etc. on google maps

I'm investigating how I might best create an app that allows drawing of arbitrary shapes, images, etc. on google maps, based on lat/lon coords of the shapes or coords/rotations for images. Surprisingly I haven't found anything out there that offers much in the way of flexibility. Scribble-maps has created something close to what I'd aim for, but they're using flash. I'd ideally like to build something that draws on the google maps html map.
I suppose I could build a div, lay it on top of the map, and if I can listen on the map scroll/zoom events I should be able to figure out how to do everything myself. Thoughts?
You need to use overlays, check the Google API documentation.
There's an example of mouse interaction to draw lines in the Polyline Arrays section. To show images have a look at the Ground Overlays section.
I know this is a very a late response, but we have launched an API for Scribble Maps. You can check it out at http://www.scribblemaps.com/api/

How to create big organization charts like google maps?

I don't know javascript (unfortunately) and I'd like to make a mindmap-like "organization chart" similar to this one:
This map should have an ability to zoom-in and zoom-out similar to google maps, and the ability to arbitrarily connect nodes. So it is more like a free graph, not like an ordinal tree. Mindomo makes this pretty well, but it is commercial and flash-oriented.
Does anybody know of a similar solution?
My research pointed me out that this could be a svg sketch, possibly generated offline, or maybe something using canvas. A click on the node should redirect to some web location.
Google maps is good because it also hides some details, and so should do this graph map in zoomed out projection.
A few important questions:
Do you need this generated in real time based on some underlying dataset?
Aside from zooming, should the user be able to manually open/close nodes?
You can manually generate this simply using some free tools:
MindMeister
xmind
freemind
although non-traditional, can you consider using Prezi?

Sophisticated HTML5 Image Map?

I have an image of a living room, which I'm turning into a menu for a new site I'm working on. The idea is that you can click on certain items in the room, like a chair, desk, couch, etc and get taken to the desired page. I'm wondering if there is a clever way of doing this. Since the items are not simple shapes, I don't want to use a standard image map.
Thanks for you help!
I'm answering because a Google search brought me here...
Because you asked for a tool:
GIMP Has a really good Image map creation function.
Open your image in GIMP and select Filters > Web > ImageMap
From there you can create image maps by drawing on the image. Saving will generate HTML you can then tailor to your needs.
This tool looks to be a solid image mapper: http://www.image-maps.com/
I'd suggest doing this with a canvas and SVG's, it would make this quite a bit easier, and more professional.
As Korvin mentioned, doing this in SVG is probably the easiest option, because you can attach events to objects in SVG rather than having to manually specify a particular area in which to listen for events.
If you go this route, I recommend using the RaphaelJS library which has a nice syntax and the advantage of working in IE pre version 9. Here's a demo which, although it uses onmouseover instead of onclick, it might be close to what you're trying to achieve:
http://raphaeljs.com/australia.html

Geoserver and dynamic markers

I am really sorry to post this question, because most likely the solution will be really simple. But I am completely out of search string ideas.
I have a running Geoserver and some custom shapefiles describing buildings etc. I can requesting maps as pngs with the WMS interface and display on a website. So for so good.
In the next step I want to enable the user to specify a coordinate an draw a little marker on the map. This position should not be stored anywhere, I just want to draw it for this user. I am pretty sure this is possible with a WMS request and an inline feature, but I had not any luck finding a working solution and I am out of google search strings.
Please help me before I start drawing overlays over a png map.
You can do this with an inline feature in your SLD - See http://lyceum.massgis.state.ma.us/wiki/doku.php?id=wms:sld:inline_feature for an example.
You can let OpenLayers do the drawing on the client.
Check this example to see how it can be done. It demonstrates how to draw lines, points, and polygons:
http://dev.openlayers.org/releases/OpenLayers-2.10/examples/draw-feature.html

Resources