Tobias

Elevate 4 Update, additional license and discontinuation of Elevate 2

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There’s a new Elevate update after a while. With Elevate 4.3 there are new optional overlays: in the city map style small ways like paths and tracks can be switched off, so the map will be more clear and is better usable for motorists. In hiking resp. cycling/MTB it is now possible to mark paths and tracks where the usage by foot/bike is permitted – this is important in countries where usage is forbidden/private in the first place. Also in cycling now ways are marked especially which are allowed for cycling, but are maybe too steep/rough. And as always some smaller changes.

Some time ago an additional license was added, so Elevate can now be used commercially (but then changing it isn’t allowed). As Elevate is now the main mapstyle for OpenAndroMaps and not the Andromaps mapstyles, and not an additional exclusive one.

Elevate 2 is now deprecated and won’t be updated anymore, as it was already announced in the forum. Most apps, like c:geo recently, now support mapsforge rendertheme V4 mapstyles with mapstyle menus, therefore the parallel development doesn’t make much sense anymore.

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ChristianK

Locus: Direct Install Link for Multilanguage V4 Maps

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OpenAndroMaps will switch to Multilanguage “V4” Maps mid of 2019.
Single Language “V3” Maps will be updated till July 2019 – so, dear users AND APP-Developers, please switch to V4 maps.

As a service for the big community of LOCUS users OpenAndroMaps now offers a DirectInstallButton for V4 Maps too on the download-pages.
The ony real disadvantage over V3 maps, as I know, is that Locus does not support automatic map switching with V4 maps.

Locus DirectInstall V4 Maps

 

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ChristianK

2018 – Contourlines, Cycle-Lanes, Peaks, Places, Mapborders….

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Finally its snowing, not that much but more like a real winter than the 20°C we hat here in Austria in October.
So outdoor cycling and season is more or less over and time to look back and report the improvements for OAM Maps in 2018.

Most innovations and improvements are the result of suggestions from the forum.
So I recommend to take a look at the forum area from time to time.
Click here for the forum topic “Elevate News” where @Tobias constantly reports the numerous improvements of the Elevate / Elements rendertheme.

This works without registration. If you want to register please make sure to use a “reputable” email address – the spam filter is strict cause otherwise I have to delete not 5 but 500 fake / spam registrations every day.

So here are the most important improvements for the OpenAndroMaps 2018:

– Mapborders: Skipped / missing Relations (white lakes eg.)

The problem was that rendering of OSM Objects like roads, forrests, lakes, rivers,.. was completely skipped when these objects exeeded the mapborders.
@Steffen, a “C” programmer who supported the OAM Team with his knowledge for several times, compiled a special Version of OSMCONVERT that  now _really_ works on Windows7/64 and preserves these objects. So now lakes are blue even when these exeed the map-coverage. Most important is this for the Great Lakes in Canada an Africa.
And – now its possible to simplify map borders with a better coverage cause map borders now can cut through lakes without loosing details.

– Map-Coverage:

For most of the 280 maps the coverage / mapborders have been simplfied.
This looks much better, the problems for rendering objects at the borders are reduced – lots of work but for 90% done now.

– Priority for rendering places and data-cleanup for peaks:

@Michael has finished a monster-project. He worked through all “places” in the OSM database and assigned kategories to places depending on the population of these places. This means assignement of places to zoom-levels now is much more accurate than before – this a huge improvement.
Second @Michael has worked through all “peaks” and cleared all foulty ele-tags like elevations set in “feet” cleared to “meter”, eliminated wired chars… – so now the algorithms from @MaxBe work on a clean databbase resulting in accurate rendering of peaks and saddles.

– Cycle Lanes / Oneway

Improved rendering of several more variants of cycle-lanes in conjunction with “oneway”

– Contourlines

@Sonny has firther improves the integration of free LIDAR (Laser) elevation data.
For detail maps of Great Britain we spipped from Viwefinder3 elevation data to the improved NASA SRTMV3 1″ Dataset with 10m contourlines:

  • UK_Scotland
  • UK_Wales (new)
  • UK_LakeDistrict (new)
  • Ireland

– Lots of minor improvements

Like rendering of house_numbers assigned to Relations,
Map of Pyrenees now covers whole Northern Spain from Atlantic to Mediterranean Sea so hikers on the Jakonsweg need only one, small map for Northern Spain,
….

 

The OAM-Team wish you a pleasant a Winter!

 

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ChristianK

The evolution of the world overview maps

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For two years after the Nov 2016 edition of the world overview maps I have worked on the curation of additional content to be put on top of the variouis background maps for the different zoom levels. Why ? I am a curious traveler to places where “always on” is (still) a lie. In the case of interest in something about a country or region or province, too much jumping back and forth from offline Wikipedia (like Aard2 or Kiwix) is annoyance. So, I put a number of information directly into the world overview maps:
– The capitals of countries, states and provinces of many countries are shown in 3 different colours, in English and local language (if significantly different).
– Islands and archipelagos, in particular the remote ones, are hard to spot on maps – here is remedy by highlighting them, from zoom level 3 up.
– Triggered by an OAM forum discussion about visibility of peaks, and with the help of Max’ algorithm to select, 100s of important peaks are highlighted.
– Also the major ocean deeps are shown.

Some insights into the process: the current MOBAC rendering tool with the Mapsforge library embedded does not provide a proper visibility of labels like settlement names. Even big cities may not show up at all. Using Maperitive in addition allows to take control of the label renditions in a predictable way. Unfortunately, Maperitive has a bug omitting the leftmost or rightmost of a label for a fraction of a label. Playing with scope and zoom around the affected place the missing parts can be added in a manual patch step (at least for the most visible cases like highlighted capitals – I hope I caught those all). Once you go this route, this opens an additional option: make larger settlements dominate the label display in a much more accurate way than the simple city-town-village-… attributes in OSM would allow. Hence now also the size of the settlement labels increases by population (in 11 catagories), if provided in the OSM data set (hopefully correctly!), otherwise a minimum assumption is made for the OSM categories city, town and village. As Maperitive is an OSM tool, this is achieved by amending the original data with categories of population sizes. Those “PopCat” tags are now also embedded in Christian’s OAM maps. They can be used by themes to select (restrict) the settlement names to be displayed. The adaption of the latest Elevate theme is on my list for 2018, but maybe somebody else is faster :-)

Bottom line: the intent behind all that is to have essential geo information at a finger tip, fully OFFLINE. A sort of companion for Offline Wikipedia. Enjoy!

Michael Bechtold

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Tobias

Changes in Elevate map style in last few months

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Elevate updates don’t bring huge changes anymore, but smaller ones, that, when added up, make a big difference altogether. Therefore once again the hint here that only with current map styles and maps all improvements get visible. Recently those were important changes in Elevate, and some smaller ones as well. Look at the legend for further information.

  • a new overlay for extended road surface information
  • new via ferrata rendering
  • solid/dashed borders for cycleways
  • changed visibility information for paths without sac_scale
  • prominent peaks are now shown earlier and, if the app supports it, are prioritized
  • hiking waycolor is displayed along waymarks
  • the overlay contents have been rearranged a bit
  • access limits are much more accurate to the mode of transportation the map style is made for

The newest downloads and the changelog can be found as always on the Elevate page, and for e-mail notifications for further updates of Elevate just subscribe to this thread in the forum.

Best regards,
Tobias

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ChristianK

Yet another year is drawing to a close…

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Dear members of the OpenAndroMaps community,

another year is drawing to a close, already the sixth year for OAM.

Time to say “thanks” to all the people contibuting new, better Data for OAM like
@Sonny constantly integrates new LIDAR (LaserScan) elevation data, wherever available for free, into the existing viewfinder/nasa dataset – resulting in the most reliable contourlines available on free maps.
@MaxBe who found a way to sort mountain peaks by “importance” so we could render the important ones in lower zoom-levels – an improvement that is included in the december map update.

I also like to thank all users who made the effort to register in our forum and give hints, suggestions and error reports. This is very important for us as we can be routine-blinded or just lack the time to test every map update for errors. Although our standard is and can only be absolutely professional, we do all this in our rare spare time and with only a tiny budget.

Our goal is to sustain and enhance this project and ask you kindly to further support us.

The OAM team wishes you all a merry christmas!

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ChristianK

Was have happened at OAM till Nov 2017?

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Yes, I know..

Kommunikation from my side to the OpenAndroMaps community could – and should – be better (by far) ;-)

A lot of improvements happened during 2017  – OAM is’nt on idle at all, we are working hard to improve, add new Features, include external Data, aso..

Here a small overview about improvements so far in 2017:

Maps:

  • Abbreviations for Street / Place names in many languages for more reliable rendering (eg Street / Strasse > St.)
  • Better rendering of cycletracks and lanes along roads
  • Put_in / regress / portage_ways for paddlers included in map_data
  • @Sonny constantly integrates new LIDAR (LaserScan) elevation data, wherever available for free, into the existing viewfinder/nasa dataset – resulting in the most reliable contourlines available on free maps.
  • @Tobias constantly improves the Elevate / Elements rendertheme.
  • Constant evolution of the multilanguage maps > now (eg) PidginChines works reliable
  • Better redering of access rights and road surfaces
  • Difficult scale (sac_scale) for mountain paths without restrictions
  • Names for Islands / Archipelagos now render much better and at lower zoom levels – appearence is driven by calculated size of area covered
  • @Michael works for a better set of GeneralMaps
  • …

Website:

  • Server moved to new, more reliable provider with up to date infrastructure
  • Protokoll moved to HTTPS
  • New version of WordPress theme with much better apperance and faster rendering on mobile devices
  • aso..

 

However the best of all is about to come.
December update will bring a real great improvement for hikers and alpinists.

 

Best regards
Team of OAM

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ChristianK

[done] OpenAndroMaps website switches to HTTPS/SSL this week

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The OpenAndroMaps website will switch to secure transfer protocoll  according HTTPS / SSL this week.

This step is required by the Google guidlines to provide the HTTPS / SSL for all sites that require user inputs such as comments, user accounts, or forums.
This is an important step ahead in data security, which has been supported on the side of OpenAndroMaps since long by flanking, server-side actions like Intruderdedection, protection against BruteForce attacks and integration into various blacklists.

 

UPDATE 2017-08-22 18:00h MEZ: Done, the Website is running on fine on SSL, no mixed contend any more – we have a green lock-symbol on all pages. I  have tested all functions and have’nt found any bug. However, if you experience problems please post here as comment or in the forum.

Best regards, Christian

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ChristianK

Please update your Renderthemes !

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With the update of the maps next week there are critical changes in the structure of the maps. The difficulties of the mountain paths are rendererd slightly different (the sac_scale).
The renderthemes are now prepared for this change, please install these updated themes.

Link to Tiramisu Theme

Elevate/Elements Theme install

Openandromaps_HC theme

Please update your themes, otherwise the sac_scale of the mountain paths will be rendered wrong !!

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ChristianK

IMPORTANT CHANGES for Themes (tag-mapping)

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Hi,

This is an information for Theme-Composers.
There will be an important change in tag-mapping for the OpenAndroMaps.

Until today sac_scale was preprocessed to carry only 4 levels:
T1,T2,T3 and T4, while T4 included T5+T6 too.

Now sac_scale will be extended for all levels = T1 – T6 (August update), so seperate levels for T1,T2,T3,T4,T5,T6

This includes some minor changes:
DAV_SCALE “black” is transformed to SAC_SCALE=T5 (was T4 so far)
If a way includes any “via_ferrata” tag/value SAC_SCALE is set to “T6” (was T4 so far)

_and_
in a second step (October) raw_sac_scale will be no longer supported = removed from Tag-Mapping!

SO: sac_scale T4 will NO LONGER INCLUDE T5+T6 > T5 AND T6 are seperate values from August update on.
THIS MEANS: You have to extend existing rules for sac_scale=T4 to “sac_scale”=”T4|T5|T6”
AND existing rules for “raw_sac_scale” have to be extended to “sac_scale|raw_sac_scale”

Please prepare your themes.

This have to be made in a 2-step process:

Extend your rules so that sac_scale prozesses T5 and T6 too.
So if you have a rule :

extend it to:

from October on you can create additional, seperate rules for T5/T6

If you use a raw_sac_scale, extend the rules:

So everyone making themes for OpenAndroMaps have to ensure that everything renders fine when expanding the sac_scale and finally deleting raw_sac_scale. I know its annoying – however there is no other way to ensure that the maps render fine in future.

Additional TAGS that will be removed from tag-mapping by end of October:

  • raw_sac_scale (as mentioned above)
  • incline_dir
  • class_bicycle_mtb, class_bicycle_road (maybe we find a solution to transform _mtb to existing tags)
  • noexit

I’m terribly sorry about this, however recently I discovered that there is a limit of max. 15 Tags in the MapsforgeWriter per OSM_Object so I have to reduce the amount of tags – otherwise we end up in white tiles rendering the maps at is was the case with parts of upper Austria last weeks.

See discussion of this issue at MapsforgeDevGroup:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/mapsforge-dev/kQKfCMGk2Ec

Best regards
Christian

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