I am trying to build a Google Maps-driven web application that can display a map of the whole world in one or all of the following configurations:
- A continent-outline map, only differentiating between land and water (like this, but without the country borders/names, and without showing any additional detail as you zoom in)
- A physical geography map of the world, containing absolutely no road, city, or political borders (so the default satellite map is out - if I can't get anything else working, I'm considering just restricting the zoom-level such that you can't get in close enough to see modern features)
- The same kind of old-world maps shown here and here for Google Earth.
A similar effect to what I'm after can be achieved with the old maps from the Rumsey Collection (q.v.), which are excellent but rather bandwidth-intensive and slow down the GMaps performance significantly. Simpler, less detailed images would better suit my purposes.
Is there an efficient way to load those world-spanning KMZ graphical files from bullet 3 as tilesets?
How about the physical or silhouette-based map? If necessary, one could follow the GMaps guideline for carving out .png files to represent each tile if there exists a freely available starting map.