flying!
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
fly over new orleans!
about 2 weeks ago i was talking to my friend adny about google's satelite view maps when i had this idea... it was a goofy idea, but none-the-less... i thought it'd be cool to "fly" over the maps by replacing the cursor with an image of an airplane. there were too many complications in trying to do it with javascript and frames or some other such goofiness. seeing as flash is my tool of choice lately anyway, i decided to just use that.
first thing i did, naturally, was look for a shortcut in making the airplane rotate and follow the mouse, and i found just that here, by Jamie Keipert. (actionscripts.org is a great flash tute site...) i made the airplane and attached the script to it to make it follow the mouse and all, then started taking screenshots to make the map. the map of new orleans is almost 3400 pixels square, and even at low quality takes a while to load. i want to do more (or bigger) maps, but that's a lot of bandwidth and patience. i'm going to add a few maps and am open to suggestions on desinations.
anyone who's interested in making a map is welcome to contribute, as well. fwiw, i took the screenshots for the new orleans map at the third-highest zoom setting. i was considering doing something where you could just add a url into a textfield and fly over your own images, but i have a feeling it'd just wind up being abused. instead, send URLs to jpgs and i'll add them in when i do the loadMovie function for map switching.
the hardest part was getting the land to move somewhat convincingly. everything has a tendency to default to a 45 degree angles at low speeds, but it was a compromise between that or having the map just stop moving when the plane and mouse touched. moving fast, though, i think the motion is really smooth and nice, even on my 400MHz laptop.
posted by j. Permanent Link
