Hi,

Richard is right. But I have another question. Wy do you wants to display 20000 pushpins ? Nobody can see or count them.

I should take another approach. Wy just display pushpins as needed ? For example limit them to 1000 or so (even less, 100 or 200). Nobody can click a pushpin if there are 1000 on the screen.

You have to design a algoritm to display the pushpins equally of course. Not just limit them.

Finally when a user zoom in then he has more resolution and can click on a pushpin.

My English is not good, but do I make sence what I try to say ?

Unfortunately the whole point of my display is to let the pushpins overlap... this generates a shading effect at higher altitudes and while allowing users to zoom into see the location of a specific record at lower altitudes. Even if I could figure out how to get the same effect using smaller dynamically generated pushpin sets the act of updating the linked data or re-importing sizable numbers of pushpins would probably cause a similar lag as the user zooms around using custom symbols.

I don't expirence any lag issues with the build in pushpin symbols and I'm trying to figure out how to get the same high speed performance out of custom symbols.

Richard,

I took a look at your site and you seem to really understand how to work with graphics in Map Point. I though I was using the smallest image files I could. Do you have any advice on how to generate smaler image files for mappoint?

Thanks for taking the time to post.

Glenn

I guess you are looking at the GridImp screenshots? GridImp draws data as shape objects rather than pushpins.

Could you post screenshot(s) of the effect that you are trying to achieve?


Richard

Unfortunately I can't post the shaded map because my client wants to keep their data confidential... and to remake the map without giving away their business data i'd have to recreate all the icons. Do you have any advice on how to make icons that use less memory? You mentioned uncompressed using uncompressed bitmap files... I'm farily familiar with photoshop but i'm no image optomization guru. Is there some trick to creating images that work well as symbols?

"BMP" (ie. "Windows Bitmap") files have compresion options, but they are usually uncompressed.

I'm not sure if it would make much of a real different, but it would make sense if you used the simplest format - therefore reducing MapPoint's required processing time?

Richard

I've been using making 3 color BMP's and selecting no compression in Photoshop. To get an icon's file size really small I've tried to strip all the extra information out of the color table and trim the icon down to the pixels essential to its apperance. I'm not an expert at this process and so maybe I could go back and make my icons smaller... Either that or I've just hit the limitation for custom symbols.... It just seems odd to me that the performance is so much better with the built in symbols.

thanks for your time

glenn

I don't know the code so I'm only guessing, but MapPoint probably stores the built-in symbols in its ideal format - the custom symbols will have to be converted.

The built-in symbols might even be compiled in with the main MapPoint executable - this would also help with speed.


Richard

I think so too... I'm going to post on the Microsoft Map Point Forum and see if anyone knows (1) how Map Point stores its built in icons and (2) any way of storing custom icons the same way.

I still think you're on to a loser. Even if the images in the correct format (I suspect BMP or something very similar is used), you will never have them stored in exactly the same way as the MapPoint symbols - in the same data structure(s) in memory.

I think you have to live with the speed or find another approach (hence my question about screenshots of what you are trying to achieve).


Richard