Ruby Now Has an Animated Map Engine (Alpha Preview)

#news #programming #ruby #software

Ruby Now Has an Animated Map Engine

January 15, 2026

Building real-time, animated maps in pure Ruby — no JavaScript required.

A new class of maps for Ruby

Over the past weeks, we’ve been extending ruby-libgd and libgd-gis far beyond static image rendering. What started as a raster + GIS toolkit is now evolving into something much bigger:

An animated map engine, written entirely in Ruby.

This new engine allows Ruby applications to render basemaps, draw vector layers, place dynamic sprites, and generate frame-by-frame animations — all from the backend.

No browser. No WebGL. No JavaScript.

Just Ruby.