Guild City

[Redrobes]

You could, in theory, have an infinite number of zoomable layers

Yes you could but each one is 16384x16384 pixels which is a lot of bitmap to upload. So its more about the effort of maintenance than anything. My ViewingDale app did it on the fly so you didnt have to do this but were on a forum with HTML and Javascript at our disposal so were limited.

The composite map is built on-the-fly using the individual district maps whose positions are defined by some gridding system magic.

I build the composite map from peoples uploaded thread attachments and put it all into my ViewingDale app which does do it on the fly, then export it as one large bitmap to upload to the guild.

The more zoomable maps there are the more room for errors to creep in, so keeping it simple is crucial, so the number of zoomable layers needs to be limited. Am I understanding this correctly?

Its more about management and effort of the amount of huge files we have to upload on every single update of the map. If someone changes a small item in one of their sectors of the city and creates a new attachment then we have an automatic WIP Scraper here on the guild which I wrote the original of some long time ago and improved by RobA. Thats run every half hour or so and it looks out for new WIP attachments with the ### Latest WIP ### tag and generates a page of the thumbs with links to the latest thread post. Its normally used for the monthly challenges but its also used for the community threads too. I download a copy all the new latest images that I dont have and update my local set. I put them into my ViewingDale app which aligns them and composes all the parts together and I export one large 16Kx16K bitmap of the whole city. I have another app I wrote to break up these large 16K bitmaps to LeafletJS compatible tiles (256x256) for the zoomy javascript engine called Leaflet. Once you upload 5000 or so of these tiles then in a browser you get to zoom in and out of everyones sectors like google maps up to a resolution of 16K in a browser window of say 1280.

So thats how its all done