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Originally Posted by DarkJedi613
How'd you actually overlay the dots onto the map and get the coords to do it? I was thinking about doing this last week but didn't have a chance (finals...). I was thinking about using Googles APIs (though acutally I was thinking more of one of just displaying dots but being able to view by state/country/region/etc)...so how'd you resolve into coords and then overlay those onto a map?
Also - I'm glad someone is using all the information I pulled off the TIMS system. 
Great job! |
I overlayed the dots onto the map using PHP with the GD extension. Getting the geographical coordinates I did by writing a bit of an interface to
http://www.multimap.com to use it to resolve them (which would be much easier than doing it through Google, as Google doesn't have APIs for their Maps service as far as I know, and Multimap is quite simple to parse through, I can give more specific details if desired). Once you have the geographical coordinates, it's possible to convert them into pixel coordinates (some detailed instructions are at:
http://www.web-max.ca/PHP/ ).
There's also a related thread from a while ago at
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=29199 which does things a different way using Perl rather than PHP and geoinfo files rather than a satellite map (it's US-only as is, though; but you could mix and match ideas from both, if you wanted). If you were to want to do things that way rather than with a satellite map the PEAR Image_GIS package might come in handy: see
http://pear.php.net/package/Image_GIS for details.
It's entirely possible to go beyond what either of us have done, though. I think it might be cool to do something like:
http://physos.net/~physos/worldwide/test.html (mouse over the points on the map). If you're planning to do that, though; I'd strongly suggest caching the generated map image (since it can take a while). Also, if you're going to make one of these, cache the coordinates for teams, etc. from Multimap (or whatever other one you use); otherwise you're going to end up being way too harsh on the server.