GRLevelX Trial Support Forums

After several frustrating days, I finally have the shapefile support in decent condition. Remember, I live by the old programmer's saying, "if it was difficult to write, it should be difficult to use"

Download the latest .exe and sample TIGER style files:

http://www.gibsonridgesoftware.com/grw8 ... level2.exe
http://www.gibsonridgesoftware.com/grw8 ... ds.sty.txt
http://www.gibsonridgesoftware.com/grw8 ... gy.sty.txt

The documentation for the style files is in TigerRoads.sty (I upload them with a .txt extension so browers don't get confused).

When you run the new exe, you'll see a new "GIS" main menu item. Under it are the commands for controlling the various gis features. Click on "Load Shapefile" to bring up the shapefile import configuration dialog. Select a Shapefile and a corresponding Style file. REMEMBER to change the style file when you choose a different type of shapefile (this has bitten me many times). As you zoom in, more shapes will become visible based on the threshold settings in the style file.

The set of loaded shapefiles persists until you switch to a different radar site.

Also, I've added the ability to turn off the various overlays on the radar window (including the radar sweep itself). I recommend turning off the "Base Roads" when zooming in on an imported road shapefile since my base file most likely won't overlay properly (different scales).

Couple of other things, polygon shapefiles are drawn as an outline only and there is no query capability.

Comments and suggestions welcome.

I forgot to mention a few things:

1) You have to press the "Import" button for the shape/style file set to actually be imported. I leave the dialog box up so that you can add multiple files.

2) When the shapefile dialog box is up, you can drag-and-drop .shp, .dbx, and .sty files onto it. I find it easier to d&d from the Explorer.

3) You can load the same shapefile again. The old import will be replaced. This is handy when you're adjusting the entries in an .sty file. You make changes and then re-import the shape file to see the results.

4) There is a limit of 32 imported shapefiles.

Actually, I'm pretty pleased with the implementation. It's no more difficult to import the shapefiles than any other comparable program. Thanks.

The only other recommendation I'd make would be to include in the style files, if possible, an option to change the width of the line files.

Other than that, excellent job!

Regards,

Mike

How is the speed when you zoom in enough to show everything on a road file? On my 2.2GHz P4 with an old ATI 9200 card, it's pretty zippy.

Having a user-defined width would be nice. It would double the memory usage for those roads so it would need to used judiciously. Would you like to define the road widths in meters or in pixels? In meters would make them scale as you zoom in. Pixels would be the same width regardless of the zoom factor.

Anyway, it's been pretty quiet on these boards lately. Hopefully, I'll have something by the end of the week that'll spice things up a bit. I'm putting the Level II drawing code into my real time Level III app so that it'll have all of the same features (shapefile import, palettes, zooming, panning, etc.) plus the usual Level III stuff like TVS, Meso, Hail, warning boxes, etc.

Speed was fine. No degradation on my 1gig 256mb. As far as user definable width, I would assume that pixel width would be memory friendly so that would probably be the way to go.

Can't wait for the level III app. I'm losing sleep!

Regards,

Mike