Yes - I want to make an animated map showing the passage of time
No thank you
Animated Map
I just had the most crazy mapping dream I've ever had. There was a competition held by the local council to draw a map of Weymouth showing its history and development. In the dream my entry was an animated map that was more of a film that showed everything from the Roman occupation right up to the modern day - including the British civil war damage when the Royalists holed up in the town and fought the Parliamentarians (who occupied the northern half of the town) with cannon across the very tiny harbour... also the total annihilation of the southern half of the town during the WWII bombing raids... all the way up to the present day through the history of every single building that was ever built (and often destroyed) in the town, on one huge map - right up to the Olympic developments in 2012 when the town hosted the Olympic sailing events.
(Really when you consider it Weymouth has quite a violent and terrible history and is pretty lucky to still be around! LOL!)
So the idea stems from that dream (which itself was probably triggered by seeing the recent experiments with animated GIF images used in the challenges and the fact that I fell asleep listening to a medley of John Williams film music... again!)
This is the idea...
Draw a series of maps showing the passage of time with a standing camera pov.
This could be anything from a single house with a garden showing the seasonal changes, to a whole town showing the buildings appearing/falling into ruin over the years, or how a river changes course over time.
Because of the size of animated GIFs and upload limitations it couldn't be anywhere near as huge a project as the one I embarked on in my dream, but I'm hoping that it isn't too difficult to learn how to make animated GIFs... because.... well - I'd like to do it anyway
There's just a simple 'I'm in' vote on this idea.
Last edited by Mouse; 02-17-2017 at 04:14 PM.
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I like the idea in principle, though I'm not quite as sold on the animated gif. Sometimes you lose quality when you reduce the amount of colours for the gif format, never mind the file size limitations. Your idea reminded me of this map by Tom. It shows a nice way to represent different 'snapshots' of a place at different times. I think you could probably do both, with a nice high res map and a smaller gif to show the changes through time. But yeah, I like the idea.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams"
Oh yes - I like the multiple maps in one image idea!
That's a great alternative - thanks ChickPea
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Tom's map was such an excellent idea ! What you propose would definitely help bypassing the size limitation, ChickPea.
There is a format called motion png files (MNG) and I believe they can be 24bit RGB. I reckon the map animations may have to be smallish tho, perhaps 800x600. A long time ago I remember putting one up on this site but I cant recall whether I hosted it or whether the image was uploaded using the normal attachment mechanism. I am pretty sure the wip scraper would not see it tho but you could attach normal images and the motion version of it. I'll see if I can edit one in...Originally Posted by ChickPea
Oh.... MNG support has been dropped from browsers !!!
Now its APNG
This is a link to the one in wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A...beach_ball.png
And if it shows below then the forum can handle it !
YES ! Dammit we have to use these for the zoomy map link icons ! Quick straw poll, does anyone see the ball as static or is everyone seeing it bouncing ?
Last edited by Redrobes; 02-18-2017 at 05:02 PM.
Um... its static, Red
Does it matter which browser I'm using?
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It might do. Dang ! You may have some options / preferences set so that it wont show animated content. Old browsers may not take note of some flags within the PNG file which says it has additional animated content. It seems good that old browsers can see something to display and that I would have expected the wip scraper to pick up the file. Not sure if the forum software would scale down a bigger animated image to a smaller animated thumbnail or have it as a small static image like normal.
Ah, Google Chrome needs an add on, MS Edge and MS IE dont support it (no surprise there !!!).
Last edited by Redrobes; 02-18-2017 at 05:28 PM.
That would be the problem then. I'm using Edge.
Wait on a few minutes and I'll try one of the others I've got lying around here someplace....
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Yep - bouncing slowly about once a second in Firefox.
How come I can see thomrey's map animation in Edge, and not this one?
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Did he use an animated GIF ?
You could use an animated gif for this challenge but your limited to 256 colours which is a real pain.
I am going to try a webm format video which is supported in quite a lot of browsers now - but I dont expect the forum to support it... Aaaand no, the forum doesnt even tho my browser does !
So basically it comes down to this. Either you supply a file which is an animated GIF with limited colours, or you use an APNG one with great colours only limited browser support or you supply a link for a video file like WebM which is hosted on another site. Not a great choice that eh ?
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