drawing a dynamic fake tube map

[timtom]

I'm starting a personal project (a photography portfolio) and want a flash movie to show a kind of map that looks something like the london underground map but is in fact based on my photo collection. For example, there'd be a 'line' for my landscapes category, another 'line' for my portraits category and different stops along each line representing each photograph. I'd want the user to click on each 'stop' and see their little train moving along the line (ideally 'arriving' once that picture was loaded at the side).

The problem is that it would have to be dynamic because I'd want to add new categories, and new pictures and maybe delete categories. I have no problem administering all this in ASP, keeping all the information in an SQL database. I've also had a bit of success getting variables from ASP into my Flash movies and displaying pictures based on variables - but this is something much bigger.

What I really need is some advice on how to go about this - a theoretical approach. Which bits of Action-script do I need to learn? Is it even possible to draw a dynamic set of lines based on variables from outside flash?
I know this probably sounds incredibly stupid to you, but I really, really want to do it and I think it'd look sort of cool.

If anyone has any ideas on where to start I'd love to hear them.
Thanks in advance,
Sarah

 

[wangbar]

If you're using Flash MX you can draw lines dynamically using the new drawing API. There are functions to allow you to draw lines, curves and fills purely in code and you could load the values needed for your map from an external file in the same way as you do to load in the names of the pictures you're loading already.