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by Jens on Friday 23/May/2008, @00:51

Strange question: Would it be possible to create and load old Earth maps into Marble? Like the ones from nasa that show the continents 65m and 250m years ago?

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Re: Marble
by jospoortvliet on Friday 23/May/2008, @11:37

Of course ;-)

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Re: Marble
by Torsten Rahn on Friday 23/May/2008, @13:33

Yes, it would be possible as long as the maps get provided in plate carrée projection (also referred to as "Equirectangular projection"):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_carrée_projection

There are morphing tools and HOWTOS on the web that can tell you how to morph ancient maps into the desired projection. It doesn't require too many skills. It's just a matter of doing research on the matter, finding out about the copyright and legal terms and sitting a few hours in front of the computer to tweak the map according to your needs.

Have a look here:

http://spin3d.com/

The "equirectangular image" that is the result after half of the tutorial is what you need.

Once you got an appropriate image it's very easy and a matter of less than five minutes to get such a map imported into Marble (and doesn't require a single line of code):

Just have a look here for more information on how Marble deals with maps:

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

We'd be very much interested in getting free data for ancient maps and would like to offer them for download via GHNS in Marble!

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Re: Marble
by Jens on Saturday 24/May/2008, @15:44

Ok, thanks. I'll see what I can come up with. Main problem is the low detail level of most prehistoric maps, since they are generated anyway you should expect them to be bigger than 800x500...

My idea stems from PC-Dinos (1993/94) which was a rather cool program and back then I spend (way too) many hours with it. It was the reason I bought a cd drive, it came on two (or even three) cds and you had to swap them quite a bit when changing continents. Today this will probably fit in just a few megs.

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