Plot zoom and double buffering

Hi,
I have a plot program that displaces nodes and connecting lines. The nodes represent WayPoints in a region of the globe.
I initially scale the plot so that all of the nodes will show. Normally all the nodes are in a region, say the Caribbean Sea.
The Lat/Long of the WPs are converted to pixels and mapped into the display.
When I ZoomIn by X2, I change the number of pixels per degree of Lat/Long by X2 and then redraw the plot. I also allow the plot to be repositioned by click and drag with the mouse. The zooming works up to about 16X, which is adequate.


The problem is there is a small amount of flickering because I don't double buffer the image.
When I tried double buffering, I ran into problems with the createImage() method call trying to create TOO large an image after zooming in several times, The JVM runs out of space!

My question: How do I draw the WP and connecting lines when zooming?

Am I misusing the createImage() method? I'm having it create an image the size of the total zoomed area. This fails when the size of the area becomes too large!

Is there a way to use translate() or the clip area?

Why does the original Graphics context allow me to draw a plot up to about 16X with no problems?

Thanks,
Norm

PS. This has posted on another site. Its sort of related to another topic on this site.

I'm not sure about the zooming method you use. If I was to implement this
I would have vectorized all the elements in the map and mapped those
elements to a big internal matrix. I would have done this to avoid java
image zooming, and instead used a fixed size display image that I could
draw upon. The drawing would be of a selected subsection of this matrix,
depending on the zoming scale and positioning of the view. I would need
to get hold of the math for transposing matrix positions to a different scale
though.
As I see it, this would facilitate implementation of huge maps and extreme
zooming, probably only limited by the amount of work that is put into the
loading/creating of the maps.

But doing this means a complete rehash of your application :(
-----------------------

You say you use createImage(), so I assume you are not using
BufferedImage but plain Image ?.

Have you tried:

BufferedImage bufImg=new BufferedImage(w,h);
Graphics bufG=bufImg.getGraphics();

A BufferedImage can be typecast to Image. I'm not sure if this will fix your
memory problem but I would have given it a try.