3D Animation of 300,000 data points via ASP.NET?

[JohnH.]

I'm looking for general advice on how to approach an application.

I want to develop a freeware program that will plot out the positions
of about 300,000 stars near earth. This will be a 3D plot that the
user can rotate and zoom in/out. I also want to give the user the
ability to click on a star and have detailed information about that
star be displayed.

This would be a relatively straight forward task as a native windows
application. I want to develop this as a web deployed application. I
have about 14 years C/C++ experience and about a year of C# ASP.NET
experience.

In a general since how would you guys approach this? What types of
libraries/technology would you use? Is this practical as an ASP.NET
application?

Thanks,
John

[jasonkester]

JohnH. wrote:

Is this practical as an ASP.NET
application?

No.

At least not ASP.NET by itself.

Flash is probably your best bet, and you can certainly use ASP.NET and
Javascript to feed data to the .swf. But I think DHTML is pretty much
out.

Something of this scale would actually have been possible back in the
days of IE4, because that generation of browsers had very simple and
fast rendering engines. The latest crop of browsers will max out the
cpu of a 2GHZ machine with just a few hundred images being moved
simultaneously.

So anyway, the short answer is that you'll need to embed something to
do the rendering for you. Flash, Java, whatever.

Good luck!

Jason Kester
Expat Software Consulting Services
http://www.expatsoftware.com/

[Kevin Spencer]

Let me answer your last question first:

Is this practical as an ASP.NET
application?
No. It could POSSIBLY be done with an ActiveX control. See caveats below.
This would be a relatively straight forward task as a native windows
application.
Have you ever WRITTEN a 3D application, or are you just making a wild guess?
3D programming platforms such as DirectX and OpenGL are almost entirely used
for 3D rendering these days, as they take advantage of the video card
capabilities for rendering, which are much faster than using the computer
processor, and draw directly to the screen. Writing a 3D application without
one of these technologies is not only going to take you forever, but it will
run extremely slowly without using the video card.

Now, you could do this with an ActiveX Control that employs DirectX or
OpenGL to do the drawing. However, as these technologies depend upon the
video card to do the drawing, it might or might not work on different
machines. Trying to make it work on a large variety of machines and
platforms is going to be a forbidding job.

--
HTH,

Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP
..Net Developer
What You Seek Is What You Get.

"JohnH." <jo**@jrcc.net> wrote in message
news:11**********************@z14g2000cwz.googlegr oups.com... I'm looking for general advice on how to approach an application.

I want to develop a freeware program that will plot out the positions
of about 300,000 stars near earth. This will be a 3D plot that the
user can rotate and zoom in/out. I also want to give the user the
ability to click on a star and have detailed information about that
star be displayed.

This would be a relatively straight forward task as a native windows
application. I want to develop this as a web deployed application. I
have about 14 years C/C++ experience and about a year of C# ASP.NET
experience.

In a general since how would you guys approach this? What types of
libraries/technology would you use? Is this practical as an ASP.NET
application?

Thanks,
John

[JohnH.]

Thanks for the tip regarding the rendering engine. I was not aware of
that.

[JohnH.]

Kevin,

No, I have never written a 3D application before. I've done a fare
amount of 2D charts in years past. I use a library call .NET Chart
Director for that kind of stuff on web pages now. I'm taking on this
task as a learning experience. Must of my programming has been for
financial data managment and presentation apps.

Hmmm... an ActiveX Control that employs DirectX would be
interesting. I'm not overly concerned about broad distrobution since
I'm mostly writting this for myself.

Thanks,
John

[Kevin Spencer]

Hi John,

In that case, download the latest (April 2005) Microsoft Managed DirectX SDK
(it's free!):

http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/directxdownloads/

--
HTH,

Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP
..Net Developer
What You Seek Is What You Get.

"JohnH." <jo**@jrcc.net> wrote in message
news:11*********************@o13g2000cwo.googlegro ups.com...

Kevin,

No, I have never written a 3D application before. I've done a fare
amount of 2D charts in years past. I use a library call .NET Chart
Director for that kind of stuff on web pages now. I'm taking on this
task as a learning experience. Must of my programming has been for
financial data managment and presentation apps.

Hmmm... an ActiveX Control that employs DirectX would be
interesting. I'm not overly concerned about broad distrobution since
I'm mostly writting this for myself.

Thanks,
John

[Bruce Barker]

a java applet is the most common approach. see the javagl library.

for star maps you may not need 3d. you could use bitmap graphics and
javascript (see google maps for example code).

-- bruce (sqlwork.com)
"JohnH." <jo**@jrcc.net> wrote in message
news:11**********************@z14g2000cwz.googlegr oups.com...

I'm looking for general advice on how to approach an application.

I want to develop a freeware program that will plot out the positions
of about 300,000 stars near earth. This will be a 3D plot that the
user can rotate and zoom in/out. I also want to give the user the
ability to click on a star and have detailed information about that
star be displayed.

This would be a relatively straight forward task as a native windows
application. I want to develop this as a web deployed application. I
have about 14 years C/C++ experience and about a year of C# ASP.NET
experience.

In a general since how would you guys approach this? What types of
libraries/technology would you use? Is this practical as an ASP.NET
application?

Thanks,
John

[Lau Lei Cheong]

And I'll recommand SVG over Flash in this case.

SVG can do most things Flash graphics can do, and since it's actually an XML
document, you can easily store the stars' coordinates in database and render
the graphics out through XSLT. That makes maintainance of data more handy
and elegent.

"jasonkester" <ja*********@gmail.com> ???
news:11**********************@o13g2000cwo.googlegr oups.com ???...

JohnH. wrote:

Is this practical as an ASP.NET
application?

No.

At least not ASP.NET by itself.

Flash is probably your best bet, and you can certainly use ASP.NET and
Javascript to feed data to the .swf. But I think DHTML is pretty much
out.

Something of this scale would actually have been possible back in the
days of IE4, because that generation of browsers had very simple and
fast rendering engines. The latest crop of browsers will max out the
cpu of a 2GHZ machine with just a few hundred images being moved
simultaneously.

So anyway, the short answer is that you'll need to embed something to
do the rendering for you. Flash, Java, whatever.

Good luck!

Jason Kester
Expat Software Consulting Services
http://www.expatsoftware.com/

[JohnH.]

Bruce,

I want to stick with the 3D presentation. I know I'm going to
need a powerful client-side development tool for this. Right now I
think Java w/ JavaGL and ActiveX w/ DirectX are the two best
candidates.

The reason that I want to tackle this task is that I have been
unsatisfied with traditional 2D star maps. A 2D star map does a good
job of telling you where to locate a star in the night sky. However,
because a 2D map does not tell you the distance to the star it is
impossible to really understand how all of the starts relate to each
other.

The end-user goal of this project is to help me understand how
the stars around Earth are laid out and organized. I think the ability
to rotate the 3D plot is an important component. I've looked at
several static (non-rotatable) star charts done by others and have not
been satisfied with the results.

My programming goal is to learn how to deploy a 3D rendering
application over the web. I really appreciate you taking the time to
respond to my post.

John

[R-D-C]

Does SVG build on the client from XML like VML? Passing 300,000
co-ordinates could be a bit hefty.

"Lau Lei Cheong" <le****@yehoo.com.hk> wrote in message
news:u8**************@TK2MSFTNGP15.phx.gbl...

And I'll recommand SVG over Flash in this case.

SVG can do most things Flash graphics can do, and since it's actually an
XML
document, you can easily store the stars' coordinates in database and
render
the graphics out through XSLT. That makes maintainance of data more handy
and elegent.

"jasonkester" <ja*********@gmail.com> ???
news:11**********************@o13g2000cwo.googlegr oups.com ???...

JohnH. wrote:

> Is this practical as an ASP.NET
> application?

No.

At least not ASP.NET by itself.

Flash is probably your best bet, and you can certainly use ASP.NET and
Javascript to feed data to the .swf. But I think DHTML is pretty much
out.

Something of this scale would actually have been possible back in the
days of IE4, because that generation of browsers had very simple and
fast rendering engines. The latest crop of browsers will max out the
cpu of a 2GHZ machine with just a few hundred images being moved
simultaneously.

So anyway, the short answer is that you'll need to embed something to
do the rendering for you. Flash, Java, whatever.

Good luck!

Jason Kester
Expat Software Consulting Services
http://www.expatsoftware.com/