ChristianK

Excel becomes LibreOffice-Calc at OAM

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Many people might ask themselves: “Why Excel for an OSM map project?
Well, with OAM there is a stock of around 270 maps to manage with the most diverse settings.

For example, map symbols for petrol stations and drinking water sources in urban areas appear only at much higher zoom levels than in Scandinavia – for this, there is also the ELEMENTS theme by Tobias, which takes this into account. This means that different tag mappings have to be created and assigned to individual maps.
But also such trivial things as map centres, languages, fineness of elevation data, allocation to render queues (load balancing) have to be managed. Corresponding start-up programmes for each individual production step such as conversion of file formats, creation of boundary polys, elevation data, sea areas, inheritance of bike/MTB/hike routes etc,etc. – belong to !automated! production.

Last but not least, the web pages must be regenerated after each update.

This is impossible to do manually, so far Excel-VBA programmes in combination with PERL scripts have done most of the hard work.

 

For about 10 days now, I have been sitting in front of the computer every free minute and porting VBA to Starbasic. Porting means cleaning up 9 years of organically grown programmes and simply rewriting them, leaving out my beloved PERL for pure administration jobs.
In addition, a flexible folder structure was implemented to allow porting to other machines and effective load balancing/caching.

 

With the switch to a free office package and the cleaning up of the programmes, it is now much easier for my co-authors to familiarise themselves with map production in OpenAndroMaps. 

 

The first maps rolled out today from the LibreCalc generated start scripts, the automated creation of the download pages will be addressed next week.

 

New rendering machine: Thank you very much for your donations – most of the parts for the PC have arrived and are awaiting assembly, which will be started after the next map update if there are no unexpected problems with the software port.
For me this is a great reassurance as it means that the test computer will go to @Michael and thus 10 years of accumulated knowledge about vector maps will be preserved.

 

There will be more detailed information about the new render machine.
Here in a nutshell: AMD Ryzen 5600G, 128GB RAM, ASUS MB, 2TB 970evo Plus as standard drive, 1TB Toshiba SSD for the planet extracts and height data, NOCTUA fans, new semi-passive power supply, as well as various used parts from the spare and new fans for the old case.
Should my time run out, this computer will also go to @Michael.

best wishes and stay healthy
Christian

 

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ChristianK

New System für Test and Development

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Dear OAM community,

Summer is slowly giving way to a colorful autumn and I have a new test system on my desk.
The old “system”, an ancient Lenovo T410 from the stone age has really become too small, even for testing purposes, and often goes into thermal emergency shutdown.
So I bought a used ASrock Deskmini which was used as a game server.
With a super-efficient Intel i3-8100T and 64gb of (new) RAM as well as some older spare parts plus a few new parts, a quite performant system was created, which is also quite environmentally friendly and quiet.
The 500€ that this system cost (260€ only the RAM) came mostly from reserves of your donations.

What is currently happening is the conversion of all scripts to Windows10 and here to a large extent to WSL, the integrated Linux environment of WIN10 which, believe it or not, is actually quite mature. Now finally the, often buggy and specially adapted, Windows versions of Phyghtmap, osmconvert, osmfilter and especially everything based on GDAL/Python – can run native and always UpToDate in the Linux shell of Win10.
The effort for the conversion is unfortunately considerable, Python2 scripts e.g. do not run any more and must be rewritten, Windows has also naturally again some new bugs.

A word to the users in the forum: I have made myself a bit rare in the forum, unfortunately my resources are limited due to my health. To say it clearly: My arteries are unfortunately quite dense.

Therefore, as soon as the conversion to Win10/WSL is completed, the production system will be updated to a new motherboard + an AMD RYZEN + 128gb RAM and the development system will be transferred to the production machine.
Unfortunately we still need about 1200€ – so if you have some money left over from your christmas bonus it would help us a lot ;-) .

The development computer will be handed over to @Michael who has been developing the OAM world maps for years and as an old IT-professional has the best prerequisites.
Michael will familiarize himself with the (by no means trivial) creation of the OAM maps and, in the long run, will also take over this task.

Health and nice autumn tours
Christian and the small team of OpenAndroMaps

/1 Comment/by
ChristianK

The summer is here = Traveling time for Admins

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Dear OAM community,

In a nutshell:
I had been struggling with health problems for quite a while this year. I would like to say  THANK’s to my comrades-in-arms Tobias and Michael who have kept up the support here.

I am now looking forward to a long overdue holiday trip which I will start next week and which will – hopefully – take me to the far north.

Which means that the next map update, any bug fixes and improvements will continue in August (at the moment the computer is runnig full speed and every map rendered until Friday will be uploaded). I hope for your understanding.

BTW:
Looking back on the first half of the year, a lot of improvements have been made to the maps – and Sonny has been busy adding the LIDAR elevation contours.
The Scandinavia_North map will be replaced by a Scandinavia_NorthEast map. From now on the maps Scandinavia_SouthWest + Scandinavia_NorthEast cover Scandinavia completely.

Until autumn, stay healthy and
(again) nice tours with the OAM
Christian

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Tobias

Elevate 4.5 adds improved mapstyle options and symbols

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Elevate 4.5With the new Elevate 4.5, there are lots of changes to the displayed POI symbols and captions. There are now more colors which depend on categories that are identical to the POI options. The categories have been resorted and all symbols have a more unified look. Also the mapstyle options now have category letters (R=Route, W=Ways, P=POIs, A=Areas). That all those changed symbols can be displayed at all I’ve renamed the symbol folder from ele_res to ele-res – the old one can be safely deleted.

You can download it here: https://www.openandromaps.org/kartenlegende/elevation-hike-theme

/3 Comments/by
ChristianK

Yet another bussy 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 9th year for OAM !
Nine years are a long time in an era in which continous and accelerating change is the only constant.

Without my ally Tobias and Michal and the Members of the OAM Developer-Community OpenAndroMaps wouldn’t be what it is today – probably the best vector maps for all outdoor fanatics and travellers.

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.

A short summary of the innovations that have been incorporated into the OAM in 2020:

  • offline POIs for Locus
  • 10m contourlines for most maps
  • better representation and resolving of country and state borders
  • name-labels adapted to curved ways, an essential inovation
  • the overview/general maps by Michael have been completely reworked, he also created the new map coverage pictures in the download area
  • webservers moved to a cloud-server at Hetzner.de

Investments were also made in the equipment of the rendering machine:

  • The system SSD was changed after 9 years
    At the beginning of the year 2 SSD’s were purchased just for file caching,
    1* Samsung 970PRO 1TB PCI,
    1* Samsung 850PRO 500GB
  • An own graphics card to free another 2GB of RAM for rendering

 

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!
Tobias, Michael, Christian

/3 Comments/by
ChristianK

More maps with 10m Contourlines

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The elevation data for Europe are now very accurate in many areas thanks to flight laser scanning.
Wherever these data are freely available, @Sonny collects them, checks them and interweaves them with Jonathan de Ferranti‘s Viewfinder panoramic elevation data in the areas not yet scanned.

The result is a constantly growing set of elevation data, the best that could be achieved without paying licence fees at the moment.
The accuracy is good enough to make sense for contour lines at 10 meters vertical distance. (which was definitely not the case so far).

To make a long story short:
The following maps are now available with 10m contour lines (more will follow):

Alps, Alps_East, Alps_West, Pyrenees, Austria, CanaryIslands, Corse, Czech_Republic, Great_Britain, UK_Scotland, Ireland, Madeira, Mallorca_Ibiza, Malta, Sardegna, Sicilia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Luxembourg, UK_Wales, UK_LakeDistrict, UK_IsleOfMan, UK_Shetlands

Baden-Wuerttemberg, Bavaria

 

 

New and updated Maps:

The Alps-West now also includes the neighbouring Rhone Valley.
New map: BalticStates (Estonia, Latvi, Lithuania as complete map)

/1 Comment/by
ChristianK

New Country and State-Borders

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More and more boundaries are grouped in relations and thus cannot be reliably processed by the MapsForgeWriter. In the meantime this is like a TikTokChallenge = who manages to create as many completely unnecessary relations as possible. At the islands of the Canary Islands and Madeira, every beach on even the smalest islands is occupied by countless border relations – these have to be filtered out with great effort.
That’s why I have now written this relation resolution from scratch for

boundary=administrative and Admin_Level=1 to 4
Means: national borders and federal states.
…and try to filter out the nonsense relations…

Extreme improvements were made for maps of South America, here even national borders were missing.

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ChristianK

Locus POIs finally released

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The Locus version of the POIs is now finally relesased and included in the map downloads

A separate download of the POIs is not necessary

The result exceeds all my expectations – I use this feature on most of my trips. Never before it was so easy to find the nearest drinking water source on long bike-trips (eg)

As always, I strongly recommend – especially for Locus – to download the map via quick installation. The POIs and the latest version of the render theme are installed in one go.
Even I do it this way – it couldn’t be more comfortable and safe.

The naming convention remains as described in the previous post:

  • [name]_oam.osm.map (= the map file itself, appears in the Locus Map Manager as [name oam])
  • [name]_oam.osm.db (= the POI file for Locus, ORUX users can delete it)
  • [name]_oam.osm.poi (= the POI file for Oruxmaps, Locus users can delete it)

If you participated in the BETA test of the locus-pois, please delete all poi files, empty the cache and then install the new maps+pois. Reason: The BETA-pois were partly buggy and the fragments in the cache disturbs the operation of Locus.

How all this works, incl adding the POI button to the right function-panel + cache_delete you will find

Here on a dedicated page in the manual >>> (click)

/2 Comments/by
ChristianK

ORUXMAPS: Missing path-text for contourlines

Why does this happen:

The current Elevate version 4.4.0 is optimized for Mapsforge 0.12 and higher, which now supports curved path texts. E.g. contourline captions, street names and route refs use this. But this kind of rendering doesn’t work so well in older Mapsforge versions, e.g. all current non-beta releases of OruxMaps. OruxMaps Beta uses Mapsforge 0.12 since 6 months, but it’s a really long beta period, so still no final release. I wanted to release Elevate 4.4.0 after the beta phase is finished, so there was a long time only a release candidate for Elevate 4.4.0. But now there were too many changes in the maps that it was time to release it. Especially the data in the maps for protected areas changed, so users complained that Elevate 4.3.3.1 wouldn’t show those anymore.

But there is still no end in sight for the OruxMaps beta phase (and maybe other apps still use an older Mapsforge version). So I decided to update Elevate 4.3.3.1 to 4.3.3.2 and release it as a legacy version. The only change is compatibility for protected areas with maps from 03/2020 or newer.

[Edit: this has been solved since OruxMaps 7.5.10 (only available via Playstore)]

 

You can download it here (click)

Please Click here for Quick install in OruxMaps (Android)

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Here you find the announcement from Tobias in our Forum:

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ChristianK

The naming of MAP’s and POI’s are changing

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Dear OpenAndroMaps community.

The naming of the OAM maps changes as follows:

1.) From:

  • [name]_ML.map (= the map file itself)
  • [name]_ML.poi (= the POI file for Oruxmaps)

Please delete these files !

2.) To:

  • [name]_oam.osm.map (= the map file itself, appears in the Locus MapManager as [Name Oam])
  • [name]_oam.osm.db (= the POI file for Locus)
  • [name]_oam.osm.poi (= the POI file for Oruxmaps)

As you can see, the long awaited POI files for Locus are now added.
This feature is currently in BETA Test.
If you want to partizipate in the BETA-Test please sign up for the forum (please, use a_real_ EMail Address):
https://www.openandromaps.org/oam-forums/topic/poi-nutzbarkeit-der-dateien-mit-locus/page/7
(mixed German/English)

Please install the maps as before, the POI files will be copied automatically to your mobile device.

If you want to try out the new POIs for Locus you should have a look here,
LOCUS Manual

A clear word: The quality of the original locus poi database is not reached, e.g. the offline location search is missing. If you need this feature you have to purchase the corresponding map in the LocusShop (its cheap) and use the included POI database with the OAM maps (as many users did this in the past)

A video tutorial will follow as soon as the bugs are eliminated.

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