Cant imagine what you mean - as in fly over charts???.
if you can post up some diagrams it may help to explain what you think is possible
By navigate through charts, I'm just thinking of a way to get a better overview of many charts at the same time.
Okay, in details:
I'm a DBA and one of my task is to follow database resources consumption. One of them is the CPU consumed by processes/sessions - which gives a good overview of the database health. Now 2D charts are not really simple to analyze since there can be hundreds of sessions => hundreds of curves of different colors at the same time
(x axis: time, y axis: cpu consumption) ?!?
Now I imagine a sessions overview with bar-charts (2D) :
- x axis: sesions
- y axis: cpu consumption
[pre]
^
| | |
| | | |
||||__>
1 2 3
[/pre]
legend:
session 1 consumed 2 units of cpu at max
sessions 2 and 3 consumed 2 units of cpu at max
a bar is as high as the maximum cpu consumptin in a window of say 1 hour, and a dot (or color change) denotes the current cpu consumption.
Now with a key or the mouse: I can make the camera move around the chart to discover my third dimension: z axis = time
In the previous bar-chart, the time axis is not visible, but in fact "it goes inside the screen".
The rotation of the camera will allow me to have something like that:
[pre]
sessions
/
Cpu /
^ / x
| / xxxx x
sessi|n 2/xxxx xxxxx
| / . …
| / … … …
session 1|/.____________> time
[/pre]
Hope it's clearer now
In that case, why dont you play with terrain data and texture splatting on the terrain. The texture splatting could be use to put thick lines down the terrain to separate the legends, even to colour in traffic light warnings
In fact, if you wanted to do it over time, you could use LLama's terra continous terrain … This could allow you to continously fly over the terrain in real time
Haha, that would be the most awesome application of my terrain code ever… tracking CPU usage for DBAers…
Seriously though… if you just need flat graphs put them on a texture… don't worry too much about memory consumption and such.
If you convert the graphs to real object though, you could do some 3D effect (have the bars and lines etc. stick out of the chart a bit) wich could actually be good for the interface (when you'll look at them from an angle you'll get a better impression that way I think).