Mapping? you're kidding! We're working on a wxPython/ PyOpenGL based
mapping lib/application as well -- we really should talk. It's in a
bit of a mess now, but here is an older version:
https://bitbucket.org/dhelfman/maproom/wiki/Home
As it happens I just stumbled on to this recently and glanced at what it does and how it does it.
Didn't make it run though, just browsed the code a bit and made a mental note to come back to it someday.
It is usable as it is for it's basic purpose but many of the things I
imagined for it are still missing. The most important of which are classes
for managing the contents of a vbo, interruptible rendering, efficient ttf
glyph renderer, tiled raster backgrounds, classes for basic shapes and a
layered 2d scene graph.
All nice stuff to have, of course!
And of course, if it were to compete with
FloatCanvas some coordinate system transformation code should be in there
too.
There is nothing now? How do you do mapping without any coordinate
transformation?
It's for land surveyors, the areas are small and they work in a state mandated Cartesian-like system. I'm just offsetting coordinates to avoid huge numbers that would mess with OpenGL's 32 bit float accuracy. Coordinates they use look like this:
D150 7466823.174 4958088.962 -2.371
D151 7466826.289 4958085.884 -2.230
D152 7466828.345 4958084.652 -2.111
Units are in meters and the first few digits of x and y have some special meaning about the placement of the coordinate system on the earth.
Anyway, the stuff is FloatCanvas is a bit too limited anyway. In
MapRoom, we are using pyproj for full map projection suport, and
GDAL/OGR for geo-spatial data set support.
Just found out about pyproj recently, I will almost certainly want to use it too.
We do have a tiled mapp implementation there, though it only points to
tiles that are self-generated so far.
There is no documentation yet, only the few use case examples (the test_*
files). If you feel like playing with it I would be glad to answer questions
and discuss the implementation.
I'll try to take a look, yes. There could be a great opportunity for
collaboration here.
The projects are similar yet it seems we focused on different areas. The things I focused on are largely connected to making nice COGO automations and UI, easy print layout and dynamically generating the shape geometry based on the scale of the map, shape attributes and a topographic key.
It's a bit of a one-man-army situation here and I wouldn't mind collaboration at all... 
Hopefully we can merge our efforts into something that is closer to the ambitious end result.
Toni
···
On Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:20:56 +0100, Chris Barker <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote: