Jon, Thanks for your great feedback! > The labels would end up in a field (column) in the DBF file
Awesome. > If might be easiest to put all the data into a csv file: x,y,z,name > http://www.gdal.org/ogr/drv_csv.html > Then you can either convert this to a shapefile or mapnik may be able to > read this directly via the ogr driver. I'll check out the csv option as that hugely simplifies things. > The scale is arbitrary and can be whatever you want. Often it is in > degress (lattitude/longitude) or metres or feet. In your case it could > be millons of km, light-years or whatever make most sense to you. The scale is clear as crystal now. > Are you using the 'z' values for 3D data? > If so then Mapnik may not work for you. It currently only does 2D maps > and typically ignores the z value of a 3D geometry. 'z' is out as the in-game 3D map tends to confuse people anyway. A consistent 2D map that doesn't rotate every which way will be helpful. http://old.nabble.com/file/p26874951/mapDesign1A.gif Do you see any rendering challenges with the style plan? Right now the guess is that I'll need to make multiple layers for the points as they have double borders. (I'll dive into this area more soon) Best regards, Chris Jon Burgess-2 wrote: > > On Sun, 2009-12-20 at 21:16 -0800, owntheweb wrote: >> http://old.nabble.com/file/p26869227/mapDesign1A.gif >> >> Hello gurus, >> I'm hoping to make a galactic map of the fictional galaxy from the >> EVE-Online game. I have the data (x,y,z coordinates). I set a style game >> plan (seen above, created in Illustrator). I've done some research and >> created a couple "Hello world" images. Now I'm guessing I need to create >> a >> shapefile? > > Are you using the 'z' values for 3D data? > If so then Mapnik may not work for you. It currently only does 2D maps > and typically ignores the z value of a 3D geometry. > >> One tool that may be helpful is Shapelib. There's some documentation at: >> http://shapelib.maptools.org/shapelib-tools.html >> >> Using shapelib though, I'm not sure what kind of numbers/scale I should >> be >> using. The polygon example from the link above uses numbers like 100000 >> to >> 7000000. Is there an ideal scale to use? Is there another shapefile >> generator you would recommend? Where would the labels go? > > The scale is arbitrary and can be whatever you want. Often it is in > degress (lattitude/longitude) or metres or feet. In your case it could > be millons of km, light-years or whatever make most sense to you. > > The labels would end up in a field (column) in the DBF file > > If might be easiest to put all the data into a csv file: x,y,z,name > http://www.gdal.org/ogr/drv_csv.html > > Then you can either convert this to a shapefile or mapnik may be able to > read this directly via the ogr driver. > > >> http://old.nabble.com/file/p26869227/Picture2.png >> >> Here's an image of the entire galaxy rendered in Flash. It would be >> awesome >> to get this thing in a slidy map instead (better usability for a fun >> in-game >> project). >> >> I'd appriciate any feedback you may have. Please be kind as I'm new to >> mapnik. If anything though I should have a map of my hometown running >> soon. >> Mapnik rocks my world. > > Handling 3D will probably be the biggest issue with Mapnik. If you know > what you are doing then you could transform the data to let you see the > map from an arbitrary 3D viewpoint before sending the data as 2D to > Mapnik. > > If you really want a flexible 3D rendering then you might need to look > at something which is designed specifically for this, like > http://www.blender.org/ > > Jon > > > _______________________________________________ > Mapnik-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/mapnik-users > > -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Map-of-fictional-galaxy%3A-What%27s-the-best-way-to-create-shapefile%28s%29-from-x%2Cy%2Cx--tp26869227p26874951.html Sent from the Mapnik - Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Mapnik-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/mapnik-users
