gnomecanvas question

[Joe Van Dyk <joevandyk gmail com>]

Say I have a 2D space that's potentially very large.  I need to be
able to display various player icons on this world (they rotate and
move around in this space) and draw a grid on it.

Players shouldn't really be limited to a certain area of movement,
they should be able to move pretty darned far.  So if I initialize a
gnomecanvas that's 1000000x1000000, they could probably move off of
that and I'd have to resize the viewable area.

And if I initialize a huge world up front and draw grids all over it,
the application takes a long time to start.

So, what I really need to do is make the world big enough to contain
all the players, even when the players move around (the world should
expand as the players move away from the center).

Ideas on how to properly implement something like this?  Another
problem I've run in to is that when the world / viewable area is very
large, the scroll bars don't provide very good movement (think
scrolling in a million page document or something).

Thanks,
Joe