[Marble-devel] Re: marble country/timezone highlighting

[John Layt]

On Thursday 28 October 2010 18:04:13 you wrote:
> Hello, John
> 
> I've read your your ideas about highlighting in marble here
> http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/marble-devel/2010-October/001611.html .
> I am also interested in implementing these features in marble. What is
> the current progress of the implementation? May I offer my help with
> the development?

Hi Fedor,

Sorry for the delay in replying, life's very busy right now.

Basically there is no progress as yet.  The Marble sprint is happening this 
weekend at which I hope to learn what needs to be done and sort out a plan to 
move it forward.  A lot of the underlying code is already there, it just needs 
to be tied together. We also need more up-to-date data which is another 
discussion point at the sprint.

Help would certainly be appreciated, as I'm not sure how much time I'll have 
to actually code it, but I'm usually better at the analysis/design side anyway 
:-)  It's probably too short notice, but I don't suppose you could get to 
Nuremberg for this weekend?  See 
http://community.kde.org/Multimedia/MarbleWeekend.

Basically, if you read the rest of that thread Torsten referenced, there's a 
new vector drawing layer that is almost ready to be used with the country 
vector data held in PNT file format.  This format is used as it's compact and 
fast so is good for distributing with the base package.  Obviously we would 
rather use this new vector layer than the old one, so first priority is 
getting the last bugs there worked out.  

The next priority is updating the country data, the current dataset is about 
20 years out of date and the source of many complaints.  We have a better more 
up-to-date source, we just need to convert it over, possibly in a new file 
format even more efficient than PNT.  We would also need an index to link the 
reference for each vector shape to the real world country / feature via ISO 
codes or the like.  It's this attribute layer that I think will take the most 
work.

After that, it should be straight forward to develop api to pass in a 
country/feature code or feature code instead of the vector reference and have 
the right vector shape(s) coloured or whatever.

Finally, once all that is done, we can get onto doing what I really want to 
achieve, creating a stats theme that integrates the CIA World Fact Book and 
other stats and using that as a new base for KGeography.

So, if that sounds like what you'd like to see, welcome aboard :-)  I guess 
the place to start would be looking at the GeoPainter and GeoDataLineString 
("libgeodata") vector layer, the PNT file format and the Natural Earth 
dataset, and just the Marble architecture in general.  Any other discussions 
should probably take place on the Marble mailing list.

I'll let you know what's happening after this weekend.

Cheers!

John.