I’m not familiar with the technical aspect of WMS services, but it looks like Wikipedia might be a good place to start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Map_Service

There’s a handful of links there, I bet at least one will be helpful.

This is how I think WMS should be used in WED:

Use of WMS services in WED should be optional, because there isn’t one good source with high resolution images for everywhere, user would have the ability to add services in layers by referring to known wms services by URLs. Most countries or GIS data providers offers some sort of wms services, and even NASA offers high res satellite images of the world using WMS. The usefullness of wms depends on the available services, therefore one can not depend on high res orthophotos being available everywhere. It will be the end user who has to locate the source he/she wants to use. Since wms can be slow at times, it might me a good idea to cache the images fetched, but you probably already know that 🙂

I’m not sure if the projection used in WMS services will work with WED and vice versa, but the sources I have used are WGS 84…

That’s about what I know, unfortunately… I don’t expect this anytime soon, but if its possible to do in the next 6-12 months that would be a nice surprise!

– Doesn’t require too much proprietary goo to use and
– Supports a reasonably large area of geo-encoded images (from one or multiple sources) I will definitely investigate! Please send em a link to a service spec off blog.

I know of a few sources that allow you to download orthophotos to be used as layers in geo-software. It would make life so much easier and give better and more accurate layouts…

It’s a pain in the you know what, to stitch and line up orthophotos in WED, and because there are services available that is more accurate and freely available, it would make things that much simpler if this could be implemented!

Anyway, glad to see new features added to WED, thanks!

Not in WED 1.1…WED 1.1 is an OVERLAY editor, so it will show you overlay polygons. But it is not a base mesh editor.

Someday, I do hope to make WED a front-end for Mesh tool so you can create new orthophoto sceneries with it.

I do not intend to EVER make WED a base mesh EDITOR – see my previous posts…a base mesh is like a finished cake – once it is baked, you can’t un-bake it and turn it into a pie. You need to start from raw ingredients.