3dSkiMaps

Oh man, it’s been a while since the last post. I had been working on Snowmass and was nearly finished with that, then I had a disk crash and then got busy with the election. Meanwhile I had been planning on getting a new machine anyway as my old one was incapable of running Google Earth Plugin. So I got that and had to spend a while getting it set up.

Anway now, finally I’ve got the 3dSkiMaps GE plugin webapp going. It’s pretty easy to use if your machine can run the Google Earth Plugin.

It’s been a long time coming. All told, I think I’ve been working on 3dSkiMaps for about ten years, always griping about the lack of decent 3D content delivery services for the web. I remember when Keyhole came out, thinking any day now I’d have something I could use. Then years later Google bought them and now finally we’ve got a plugin.

So I spent some time developing on that, and then they announced Google Earth for iPhone! So that will be my next development project.

I downloaded the Kalyway 10.5.2 iso over Limewire, and when it finished loading, it did something bad to my main hard drive. Fortunately I’ve been busy on other things since my last backup in July, so I don’t think I lost much. And I found some recovery software called GetDataBack at http://runtime.org, which seems to have retrieved a lot of items. But I’m going to have to slog through a hundred gigs of junk to find the good stuff. And even then some of it might not still be good.

Ironically, I was downloading Kalyway because I found a cheap Intel Core Duo machine running Vista, and am planning to make it into a Hackintosh so I can develop for the iPhone on that side and for Google Earth plugin on the other. The one that crashed was a Windows 2000 machine that wouldn’t do either of those things.

But like I said, I have almost all my data backed up. I had just finished up Snowmass and was getting ready to load that up to the site. I hope it’s still on there, uncorrupted. Oh yeah, and I had all my new stylings for t-shirts and posters. That’ll be a pain if it’s not there, but the hard part is always coming up with designs. Once you get it down, it’s not that hard to knock it off again.

Meanwhile, I’ll be busy recovering stuff and setting up my new machine for a couple of weeks before I put anything new on the site.

D’oh! I never published this. Now it’s already been about a month since I wrote it.

I added Cerro Catedral (aka Bariloche), and Chapelco in Argentina. I also rearranged the ordering of them so if you put it in Tour mode, the Southern Hemisphere ski areas will be arranged from South to North in each region.

Once I get enough Southern Hemisphere resorts I’ll go back to making at for the Northern Hemisphere resorts, and also adding some more up there.

Some users were having a problem where my Superoverlays for Google Earth were coming out black. I woke up 2 hours before I usually wake up this morning, and as I was drifting back to sleep it came to me.

I wanted the Superoverlays to be semi-transparent for ski areas where I only have the slope map and not the aerial photo. I set the transparency but then set the color to black, thinking that it shouldn’t matter what color the alpha channel is if it’s just setting transparency. WRONG! Well, it worked fine on my machine, but other machines didn’t like it. So I changed the color to white, and now I have transparency and I get my images too.

I fixed a few bugs in my kml-generating code, and also uploaded the superoverlay package for Arapahoe Basin, which I had apparently forgotten somehow.

I think everything will load more smoothly now. I was having trouble getting the highest resolution tiles to load, but I fiddled with some kml parameters and that seems to have fixed that. Also, some people were getting network link errors caused by my code trying to link to more tiles than actually existed in some cases. That should be completely fixed now.

The data for Portillo has some holes in it, but it’s a pretty spectacular place anyway, and the holes don’t detract too much. Cerro Castor in Tierra del Fuego is the southernmost ski resort in the world, and they have a well-done Flash website with a relaxing music loop.

I figure I should hit as many of Southern Hemisphere ski resorts before the end of Winter down there, so some other stuff might be delayed. And I’m doing these a little quickly, so I don’t know if I’m getting boundaries of the ski areas neatly the way I have been able to in the US. I never realized how much US ski areas were characterized by trees.

Anyway, The Remarkables are remarkable, and Treble Cone ain’t no slouch.

Heading down to the Andes with El Colorado Centro de Ski in Chile and Las Leñas in Argentina. There’s at least one hole in the Las Leñas data, which you can see as a kind of black and white rectangle on the steepest part of one of the peaks.

There’s a lot going on at El Colorado, so the map includes Farellones, La Parva, and Valle Nevado, I think. They’ve got no trees in their resorts, so it’s hard to tell where they start and end.

Buller and Hotham, a couple of nice looking resorts in Victoria, using the SRTM 90 meter data. I’ve added the color scale, copyright and trademark to each of the Australian overlays.

Again, I’m using the SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) data for areas outside the US. Too bad other countries don’t have free geophysical data like the US. SRTM data covers the globe, but it’s on 90 meter postings, so it’s pretty crude. Yeah, I keep complaining about it, but think of it as a disclaimer.

I figured since it’s Winter down under, I should do some Southern Hemisphere ski areas, so here are Thredbo and Perisher Blue resorts in Australia. Next I’ll do Mount Hotham and Mount Buller