3dSkiMaps

I’m finally back to adding more ski areas. I went down some software dead ends for improvements I want to make, but decided to take a break from that.

Angelfire is a small resort in New Mexico. To me it looks like they could open up the rest of that mountain and nearly double their size, but maybe there’s some reason they don’t.

Whistler/Blackcomb is huge, as you will see if you go to their web site where they have a section that tells you just how huge they are relative to anyplace else in the world. The 2010 Winter Olympics venue is a tiny part of Whistler.

The blog looks crappy now because I upgraded to 2.7 and need to fix my css. Too late for that tonight, get it tomorrow. Also, I’m going to replace my current forum with a Wordpress plugin called SimpleForum. Maybe then I’ll keep up with it more.

Added Deer Valley with lift lines, and Snowmass with no lift lines yet. I’m still developing my tools, which is slowing things down a bit.

Took less than an hour to add Mammoth, but then I already had a batch of elevation maps I downloaded. But still, adding it to the website had speeded up considerably.

Just added Mt. Rose Ski Resort. I’ve developed a new tool for myself, to make adding new resorts with Google Earth Plugin go faster. More information is needed for the overlays, the view point, and the placemark for Google Earth. Keeping track of all that stuff for each new resort was slowing me down, so I made a tool to make it go faster.

I’ve also developed a tool for adding lift lines, and a method for adding labels, but initially I will upload just the raw overlays to have more stuff to show.

I made some lift lines for a ski mountain with my GE Plugin drawing app, save it as kml, and then included the edited kml into my kml stream which includes a Placemark and a SuperOverlay. But then I needed lift labels, so I gave SketchUp a try. It’s not really designed for this, but it’s adequate and it’s free, so I made 11 labels at a cost of about 395KB compressed.

The lift labels were in a kmz document, but you can’t include a document within a document, so I loaded it up with a NetworkLink, just before the lift line kml.

Weird thing is, even though the labels are physically… at least in the virtual Google Earth Plugin world… above the lift lines, they visually appear to go _underneath_ the lines when the model is rotated. You can see this at http://3dskimaps.com/aplinemeadows/ge .

But if you look at the same thing in Google Earth, you don’t get this Escher-like effect - the labels visually appear to go over the lift lines as they should.

Software developers are often made happy by apparently small successes. I’ve just written a very simple drawing application on top of Google Earth Plugin. Simple though it is, it enables me to draw directly onto the “Earth”. This means now I’m able to make the overlays and get them out , and then add features likes lift lines, trails, and labels separately, which is a big saving in labor.

The first to get the treatment is Big Sky, to which I’ve added some lift lines.

Added Big Sky Resort, Montana after reading about the bankruptcy of the Yellowstone Club.

I now have Tahoe’s Heavenly Ski Resort for GE Plugin. Very strange, my software for converting the elevation data to a color map rotates the data to compensate for certain geodetic factors, but this time I had to rotate it back to get it to work.

Then I tried getting the data for Mt. Rose, Northstar, and Mammoth Mountain, all in California, but the USGS data server now claims there is no elevation data for those areas. Could be just a weekend thing, I’ve run into problems on weekends before.

Since Google Earth Plugin does everything I’ve been wanting for several years, and since the VRML plugin folks never got around to making a great standardized Web3D plugin, I’ve scrapped VRML and gone to Google Earth. I hope they get Google Earth Plugin working for MacOS X soon, so everyone can enjoy. Until then, I’ll leave in the Java links which work for most of the ski areas.

I had a .htaccess error, some of my views would come up as 404, but it seemed completely random. Then I realized I had made a view feed and used .htaccess to redirect “view” to the script for the feed, so any view with the word “view” was redirected. Now that’s fixed, the view feed is now called “viewfeed” so the redirection doesn’t interfere.

Added Alpine Meadows to the GE Plugin side. Man, I lost more work than I thought with that disk crash, but now I’ll be getting back up to speed adding new ski areas. The way I’m doing it with Google Earth, it won’t take as much labor just to add a new area for viewing, and the artwork for 3dSkiMaps products will be a separate effort.