Google Earth Integration Phase II
Google Earth Integration Phase II
This version includes a globe created with FT3. Roads, Rivers, Provinces, Political Boards, and Database integration created with Google Earth / Google Docs. In this version, as players find locations, they automatically appear on the globe. Locations that are known, but unexplored, do not include the informational text and further reading links. All data is streamed instantly from a private server. What do you think?
Image 1 shows the top level data (Provinces, Oceans)
Image 2 shows the detailed data (Locations, Roads, etc) Black icons are places known to the party, but unexplored. White icons are known and explored. Missing icons are places that are unknown.
Image 3 shows the Database Integration
-Avotas
This version includes a globe created with FT3. Roads, Rivers, Provinces, Political Boards, and Database integration created with Google Earth / Google Docs. In this version, as players find locations, they automatically appear on the globe. Locations that are known, but unexplored, do not include the informational text and further reading links. All data is streamed instantly from a private server. What do you think?
Image 1 shows the top level data (Provinces, Oceans)
Image 2 shows the detailed data (Locations, Roads, etc) Black icons are places known to the party, but unexplored. White icons are known and explored. Missing icons are places that are unknown.
Image 3 shows the Database Integration
-Avotas
Comments
-Avotas
If you feel like putting together a tutorial fur us coding impaired it would be extremely nice ;-). Good job!
How much work is it maintaining a solution such as this? I am working on a brand new campaign world for myself, and I plan to continue working on it as the campaigns in it progresses. So obviously, I will need to update frequently. Is that something that is doable with this solution?
Also, you say that locations appear instantly on the globe when players find them. How is this handled?
The players client requests information from a database, controlled by a spreadsheet publicly assessable on Google Docs, then returns the data that appears as markers within Google Earth. The spreadsheet contains templates for text, positional information (lat/lon), the actual bodies of text, hyperlinks to outside websites or other blocks of text within the spreadsheet, links to images, links to marker styles (I'm designing custom ones like Skyrim's World Map), and some other goodies.
90% of the work is done by the spreadsheet database, and there is almost no coding involved. You can find out more at Spreadsheet Mapper 2.0
There are two modifications I made to the process, both dealing with visibility. The first is a distance based visibility, so things fade in and out based on how far you are from the ground. That helps with the visual overload of 250 places on the map. I will explain how that is done in a few weeks. The second is revealing places the players have found, and that is actually handled by having a second spreadsheet with the entire world data preloaded that just gets copied and pasted in the linked spreadsheet when I am ready to release it.
Some things to remember,
Always publish your changes, don't relay on automatic publishing (it's slow)
In Google Earth right click the link and "refresh" it. There is a command to refresh it every time someone moves, or after so many seconds, and I will explain how that is setup later on too.
Ok. I haven't started this game yet (I will post a request for players in a month or so) but trial runs has proved it to be fairly easy to keep up and running. The players will be playing on MapTool, and Google Earth will be their online/offline "overland" map.
More later!
-Avotas