New Year New Maps!
Have progressed well over the last few days (and the few days before Christmas) getting the Google Maps fixed up. I now have a clustering algorithm implemented (admittedly not a very sophisticated one, but it does the job) so we don’t end up with loads of overlapping markers when the user has zoomed out (see below):
Without clustering:
With clustering:
This appears to work quite well with around 100 or so different markers on a map (not yet tested for much higher numbers of markers). The ‘cluster’ that each marker belongs to for a given zoom level is cached in a database, this is to save having to recluster the markers on the fly – which will get really resource intensive for large numbers of markers. We should also be able to use more efficient clustering algorithms without having to change any of the map interface code.
Few more things that I’m working on now…
- Using different marker icons depending on the number of users in a cluster (larger icon = more users)
- Moving the maps so they become part of the MSG client rather than part of Moodle (as they currently are) – this shouldn’t be a massive job, but will involve moving services currently provided by MSG block in Moodle to be from MSG & Wildfire servers
- Looking at how to implement custom maps within Google Maps API
That’s probably enough to be getting on with for now 
