Question about Marble-KDE4

I don't know if anyone here can help, but, why not.

I've been playing around with some of the KDE4 applications recently, since the KDE4 desktop is pretty close to useless as it is. The applications are really nice, and hopefully KDE 4.1 will have the improvements needed for me to be able to move over to it entirely.

I'm playing with Marble, which is the new Google-Earth lookalike application. It doesn't require any hardware acceleration or anything, which is nice. My main deal here is that I would like to be able to have a nice offline program like that, to plot some points on.

Is there anywhere I could get more detailed map data for it? If you zoom in more than a few levels, everything gets blurry and useless. There's literally no data in it right now.

Thanks.

- Trip

 

Hehe. Not gonna happen, unless you have some HUGE drives. I used to work with data like that professionally (See http://www.3dnworld.com), and it's just a ton of data. Like, ortho photos of just Colorado's front range were 500MB files to get the type of resolution you're talking about.

I haven't used Marble, but I'd guess that it'd require the same kind of data source. If you REALLY want to download orthographic, georeferenced data, you can always check out the USGS site.

 

I know it's huge. I've got 3GB worth of terrain data on my drive as it is--and that's compressed. Not to mention that I have a whole DVD worth of data for TopoUSA 5.0 inside a Virtual Box image.

I just don't know how to get such data into Marble.

- Trip

 

Just wondering, wich distribution has KDE4 already?

 

I'm using Kubuntu and packages are available, but I know they're also available for OpenSUSE, and there are some in Debian's experimental branch.

I think Fedora has some as well but don't quote me.

- Trip

 

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20080114#feature

 

Aaron Seigo talks about it during the KDE4 Keynote:

http://video.google.com/url?docid=6...ndex=0&usg=AL29H21sSpEXCh8IqqBmOcZMNhmqYMeNIA

I don't think the data is quite ready yet, but it is very interesting to see how they are going about getting it.

 

Hi Trip! If you zoom into the map and your computer is connected to the internet then Marble should download further tiles automatically down to a resolution of about 500m per pixel. Indeed this isn't very much yet (however technically it proves the concept). We are actively working on getting more data available for download (E.g. LandSat data and OpenStreetMap). Technically Marble can deal with tiles down to a few cm per pixel without problems.
I'll write a document for you, so you can figure out how the data is organized internally. With some work involved this might enable you to use your own data if you are willing to spend some work on it.

 

Thanks! I'm not much of a programmer, though I am in computer science class in college... I'll see what I can do with it if I find some free time. If I can get some useful data in it... I'd love to get myself some maps of TV stations in there (it's what I do). I've made such a map in DeLorme TopoUSA, but most people don't have that software and I have to run it in a virtual machine on Linux. It'd be nice if I could distribute such a map with free software.

I wonder what I'd have to learn to try and implement some of the features in TopoUSA into Marble...

- Trip

 

Hi, sorry that it took so long, but we are pretty busy getting Marble into shape for the next Marble release. Here is some more information about how Marble works behind the scenes and how you can create your own map:

http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3269

 

Thanks! When I get some time (college is a real time-consumer) I'll definitely see what I can do with it. =)

- Trip