I'm kicking around an idea for a side project and am looking for advice on which direction to go in terms of technology. I've done some research already, but am still fairly confused as to what the realistic options are.
I'd like to make an interactive map based on a fictional world (think Middle Earth), including a timeline filter and a details section for additional information on an event or location.
Desired Features:
map on the left
details pane on the right
timeline slider/filter at bottom
Territories
color for political affiliation
displays details in details pane
labels
labels for cities
Hurdles:
Get a clean map image to work with
Map image into intermediate format (svg, geojson, topojson?)
Display map on webpage, style map, add animations, etc
Technologies
SVG
I'm pretty sure I could code all of this in SVG using events and boundaries. I've already been able to create SVG Paths from the image using GIMP, so converting the map into an SVG file seems plausible.
The issue with doing it this way is I would end up doing all the work the hard way when there seems to be lots of frameworks for this kind of thing already.
Kartograph
La Bella Italia is a very nice example and would serve as a good starting point. I love the trade route animations and the border styling with the glow filters.
The bonus here is that I know I can make an svg map, which is all this would need to get up and running.
My issue here is it doesn't seem like Kartograph is as rich of a platform as D3.js. I'm not sure if I can double dip and link some D3 stuff with the kartograph events. If I could, that might be the solution.
D3.js
The sliders, animations(hover and selection), and topojson seem like they would be perfect. But the main issue I have here is getting my image converted into a GeoJson format. From what I can tell these formats are strictly for Real World maps, using longitude/latitude.
So there you have it! I'm hoping there is some good news on how I might convert my map image into topojson so I can enjoy the benefits of D3.js. If not, I suppose I could just try kartograph and wire the events up with D3 controls.
Thoughts?
I'm currently writing my master thesis and I have the same topic like you had these days. I called my project Arda Maps. Feel free to ask me anything if have techonology questions.
I'm using the following frameworks/tools in my project:
QGIS
JQuery
D3.js
GeoJSON/TopoJSON
TimeGlider
Related
I am trying to make a copy of the popular browser game Travian.com. I am currently working on the maps and I was able to get the farms overview image as a png.
What I am trying to accomplish with that map is:
Each element (farm) should be clickable) and redirect to that specific farm page.
As you could see on the map, farms are not just simple squares.
Once I had the farms.png picture, I used on online tool to convert a png into a .svg file. Using a free software, I was able to draw circles around each map to build my svg.
This is the result:
I recently read about canvas and I was wondering if canvas would be a better option in my case rather using svg?
You need to try it yourself and see if it gets redrawn quickly enough that the game is sufficiently responsive for you. If the map is very detailed, the redraw may be too slow and make your game feel slow. You really need to try it and see. If it's too slow for you, then you may need to either:
use bitmap images, or
keep the maps as SVGs, but render them to a Canvas on first load. This way they'll be sharp at whatever resolution screen the user has.
is it possible to create a stroke with a dynamic width with SVG? I want to achieve a Calligraphy look like here, here or here.
Is this even possible? It seems customization of strokes in SVG is fairly limited. Even gradients in strokes seem to be non-trivial (see here).
There is a proposal to add into SVG standard a mechanism, that does exactly what you want:
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/WG/wiki/Proposals/Variable_width_stroke
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2013May/0041.html
There's even an example implementation available here:
https://rawgit.com/birtles/curvy/master/index.html
It is, however, by no means official and we cannot be even sure it'll ever be.
Until then you'll need to stick to Bezier curves and object filling:
You can also use calligraphic fonts, for example - Tangerine available on Google CDN:
This approach requires less work since you don't need to draw everything from scratch, but then again, using third party fonts leaves you with little control over the final result.
You can't dynamically adjust the stroke of a path element. However you could draw a path, use a fill color on it instead of stroke, then double back upon the letters at a slight distance away from the original line.
Also, if you are using the SVG on the web then you can use css fonts on text elements. There are some pretty good cursive fonts that you can use for free... just check google web fonts.
I am playing with generating dot files and then turned them into SVG graphs with a lot of nodes.
My question is that are there event listeners to detect mouse clicks on dot/SVG graph nodes?
For example, right click on a node in the SVG graph, I do something(maybe get the related information from the node and then do something),
Then how to generate dot file or SVG file to achieve this?
There are several ways to create an interactive SVG graph:
Use SMIL, an extension to svg (Example tutorial http://apike.ca/prog_svg_smil.html)
Javascript (the Raphael library is excellent)
CSS animations
In any case, you'll have to display the svg graphs in a client which supports any of those technologies (browser), and you will have to code it in addition to the svg output graphviz creates.
Just another thought on this (realizing the question is old, but maybe it helps someone coming across).
Depending on what you want to do, it may be easiest to decouple the event handling from the drawing. I mean, you can find out where graphviz positions the nodes (as well as edges, labels etc.), see, for example, this post on how to do it in python. Then you can paint the graph in the background of whatever GUI you're using, and use its native event handling to react on on_click by placing invisible clickable objects over the nodes.
If you want interactive graphs then graphviz might not be the best choice.
I'd recommend having a look at D3.js. Perhaps you could construct the graph data in json and load them with D3?
I'm trying to make 3 different circles to my website. I don't want to insert it as a graphic/image file. So I've been trying to achieve it using CSS3, but I can't really work my fingers around it.
What will it look like?
I have uploaded a picture of what I'm trying to achieve at: www.sp34k.com/etc/circles.jpg
I can't really show the code I've been trying to use to achieve this, as it all looks totally weird and nothing floats currectly.
What I've tried
What I've tried is to make 3 circles with position absolute and then use % (percentage) to determine the width of the colored parts, but I can't twist my mind around how it should be set up.
Any suggestions is appreciated,
Mike
Here is a simple try of me to achieve the effect you want:
DEMO
edit: css-only solution
It can be easily animated with javascript or keyframes. Arbitrary content would go into the inner div. To change the percentage, simply adjust the angle of the pseudo-elements.
With a little more effort this could be easily refined I guess;)
Note: the transform has the webkit-prefix, so it works only in chrome/safari - to see it in firefox or other browsers, you need to change the prefix.
P.S. I will animate it when I'm home from work.
Good one by Christoph but he is using SASS/SCSS which are comparatively slow then normal CSS because they have to be converted to CSS before browser render it so I have have a different Solution for you
try this fiddle
(This is a post that I'm moving from ui stackexchange.)
We have some irregular shaped areas...imagine a map of the states of the US. Imagine also that inside each state there is a rectangular region that contains graphics and text. We want to make each of the states react to mouseover/mouseout/click.
If it is a straight up HTML/Javascript page (no Flash), are there other ways to implement this than image maps?
If this is not possible, I would also consider just having the rectangular region within each state react to mouse events.
Does "straight up HTML" mean you can use Javascript? If so, consider the Raphael javascript library, which wraps SVG. Check out their homepage for a great overview of what you can do, including this example of counties (?) of Australia: http://raphaeljs.com/australia.html
You could also consider processing.js, which is a similar visualisation library but wraps canvas as opposed to SVG.
how about coordinates? grab your map of the us, figure out the polygons that contain a state, and every time the user clicks somewhere, get the position of the click and figure out what polygon that position is in.
the only tricky part is doing the translation from logical to physical. i.e. when you get the location of a click it'll probably give you the location in global browser positioning, and you'll need to figure out where your image is using jquery's .position().