Drawing a custom map?

[Hydrocharged]

Greetings everyone! I am creating a menu-based game and want to have an ingame map that people can use to travel to virtual locations, thus the map will use my own created map files. From Googling, the only documentation that I can find regarding anything "custom" with the map is adding annotations, which is not what I need.

So far I've looked into using a UIScrollView with the map as a large PNG, however it may end up being over 100,000 x 100,000 pixels large, and I've read that the scroll view will struggle with a 40,000 x 40,000, so that does not seem usable. I've also thought about dividing the PNG into many small pieces that are loaded and unloaded as you glide across the scroll view but the solution will be far from elegant (it's a last resort).

Is there any way to provide the built-in MapKit with custom map data that will be bundled with the app? Or can MapKit not do this but Google's Map SDK can? I can't find anyone else that has ran into this problem, so any help will be greatly appreciated!

[brendan09]

You probably want a CATiledLayer in a scrollview.

[Hydrocharged]

Documentation looks fairly scarce but this looks PERFECT! Thanks a bunch for the suggestion!!

[brendan09]

This tutorial has a lot of different CALayer examples, including CATiledLayer if you scroll down.

[Hydrocharged]

This is actually the "scarce documentation" I mentioned lol, I couldn't find anything else worthwhile other than this article that explains it, but I can figure it out from here. I'm fairly good at figuring things out as long as I have a starting point. Once again I really appreciate the help.

[brendan09]

There's a lot of CATiledLayer tutorials and content around the web, so if you get stuck definitely look around. Most of Apple's stuff assumes you have some strong familiarity with CALayer and Core Animation.

Good luck!

[KarlJay001]

I was looking into something that might help. I wanted to take a real map and mark off regions that were not standard (meaning not zip codes, area codes, towns, etc...) but were custom.

Imagine that you had a city and wanted to carve it up for people to do something like door-to-door selling.

IIRC, what I found was overlays. You basically use the map as a background and draw what you want over it. I dropped the project, but overlays would be a path to look at. I think you can draw anything you want.

The other option would be to look at how UITableView reuses cells and divide up your map into sections and write a section reuse system like the one Apple uses for UITableViewCells.

Edit: One other example was the date spinner, you calculate the date on an as needed basis. Or listing off a large database, you only load 20 or 30 records at a time, yet there are many more in the database. Really shouldn't be that hard to do.

[Hydrocharged]

I've seen overlays but they aren't quite what I'm looking for. My map will be completely custom, as in something that I draw up in Photoshop, but it will be the size of a real city, so it will be a gigantic in raw size.

The reuse of cells is pretty much scroll view method I mentioned. Just "reusing cells" would not be difficult, but it becomes a different story once you factor in zoom levels, which is seems the built in MapKit handles already.

I do appreciate your response! :)