Question

Is there a way to incrementally draw a line in the Google Earth Plug-in using the JavaScript API?

If that’s not possible, is there a round about method to achieve the same effect?

What I want to achieve is similar to this: http://www.wolfpil.de/v3/animated-poly_v3.html

Answer 1

Yes this is entirely possible, and to be fair it would be trivial to convert the code in the example to use the earth, rather than maps, api. All you would need to do is to find any references to maps objects and simply use the equivalent earth api objects. The math and timing is all done for you…

If you wanted to convert it take a look at the following links, they should give you everything you need to know.

Information on Geometries and Overlays

https://developers.google.com/earth/documentation/geometries

Example of Drawing line strings

http://earth-api-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/examples/linestring.html

Example of Smooth Animation with frameend

http://earth-api-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/examples/event-frameend.html

Finally, you could also just add the earth plugin to the maps implementation, take a look at the following example of Maps/Earth Integration. This would just mean adding the a few lines of code to the example you posted allowing the ‘earth’ mode to be activated from the maps api. If set up correctly things like polylines are available across the map/earth displays.

Earth Maps integration

http://earth-api-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/examples/maps-integration.html

Beefy integration example

http://earth-api-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/demos/mapsapi/beefy.html