Vector graphics format

It would be very very nice if it would be possible to use a vector graphics format or the maps as well. Vector graphics are much smaller and it would be possible to save bigger areas offline as well. Navit or Osmand are using vector graphics (both are OpenSource), google maps fpr Android also supports a verctor graphics format. This would be a really important und needy improvement. What do you think about it?

hansdamp wrote:It would be very very nice if it would be possible to use a vector graphics format or the maps as well. Vector graphics are much smaller and it would be possible to save bigger areas offline as well. Navit or Osmand are using vector graphics (both are OpenSource), google maps fpr Android also supports a verctor graphics format. This would be a really important und needy improvement. What do you think about it?

You are right;

I will work with vector maps in next versions.

orux

That's a really good news, I am looking forward! Thanks a lot! By the way: You are doing a great job! ORUX is BEST

Hello Orux,

do you know this project?

MapsForge

The overall goal of mapsforge is to provide a free and open toolbox that enables the community to easily create new OpenStreetMap based applications. Provided tools and APIs include solutions for map rendering, route planning and navigation, POI indexing and search, map overlays and more.

bye, daaho

daaho wrote:Hello Orux,

do you know this project?

mapsforge

The overall goal of mapsforge is to provide a free and open toolbox that enables the community to easily create new OpenStreetMap based applications. Provided tools and APIs include solutions for map rendering, route planning and navigation, POI indexing and search, map overlays and more.

bye, daaho

Just for interest I did have a look at this project. It seems like they still use tiles (no vector maps, as far as I could see in there AdvancedMapViewer-APK which I installed on my Android, but I might be wrong). Nevertheless: The map data are surprisingly small! Wou! I tried out Berlin: 12MB in size and very very detailed. I don't know how they do it.

Another interesting approach would be the rendering engine the use in the NAVIT project, which is also available for android. You can get maps in a binary format, extracted from OSM. And they can also render Garmin maps as well. And the rendering is pretty fast.

Hello hansdampf,

It seems like they still use tiles (no vector maps, as far as I could see in there AdvancedMapViewer

From the MapsForge Web page:

The overall goal of mapsforge is to provide a free and open toolbox that enables the community to easily create new OpenStreetMap based applications.
Provided tools and APIs include solutions for map rendering, route planning and navigation, POI indexing and search, map overlays and more.

Features

Fast on-device rendering of OpenStreetMap data
Powerful and flexible overlay API
Compact file format for map data storage
Support for multi-touch gestures (e.g. pinch-to-zoom)
Runs on all devices with Android 1.5 and higher
Small library (~ 400 KB, including sources and images)
100% free and open source (LGPL license)

And here is an article which describes the map rendering

bye, daaho

daaho wrote:Hello hansdampf,

It seems like they still use tiles (no vector maps, as far as I could see in there AdvancedMapViewer

From the MapsForge Web page:

The overall goal of mapsforge is to provide a free and open toolbox that enables the community to easily create new OpenStreetMap based applications.
Provided tools and APIs include solutions for map rendering, route planning and navigation, POI indexing and search, map overlays and more.

Features

Fast on-device rendering of OpenStreetMap data
Powerful and flexible overlay API
Compact file format for map data storage
Support for multi-touch gestures (e.g. pinch-to-zoom)
Runs on all devices with Android 1.5 and higher
Small library (~ 400 KB, including sources and images)
100% free and open source (LGPL license)

And here is an article which describes the map rendering

bye, daaho

Hi, thanks;

You are right; still not vector support.

I am investigating about garmin format. Therea are some libraries.

orux

orux wrote:

It seems like they still use tiles (no vector maps, as far as I could see in there AdvancedMapViewer

From the MapsForge Web page:

The overall goal of mapsforge is to provide a free and open toolbox that enables the community to easily create new OpenStreetMap based applications.
Provided tools and APIs include solutions for map rendering, route planning and navigation, POI indexing and search, map overlays and more.

Features

Fast on-device rendering of OpenStreetMap data
Powerful and flexible overlay API
Compact file format for map data storage
Support for multi-touch gestures (e.g. pinch-to-zoom)
Runs on all devices with Android 1.5 and higher
Small library (~ 400 KB, including sources and images)
100% free and open source (LGPL license)



And here is an article which describes the map rendering

bye, daaho

Hi, thanks;

You are right; still not vector support.

I am investigating about garmin format. Therea are some libraries.

orux

Hello Orux,

the data are vector data, they are only rendered to tile maps on the fly on the android device (instead of prerendering the data with MOBAC).

One big advantage of this approach is the small size of the map data. E.g. Germany has only 1 GByte.

How the data is display relays only on the rendering engine (Canvas, Mapnik or OpenCycleMap).Maybe you can adjust the style of the rendering engine, so that only streets are displayed.

bye, daaho

PS To use Garmin maps would be fantastic

of course mapsforge uses vector maps, thats the whole point of offline osm rendering isnt it? they just render it into tiles before sending them to the display engine. mapsforge is by far oruxmaps best bet for direct osm support. everything is basically served on a silver platter .

joeuser wrote:of course mapsforge uses vector maps, thats the whole point of offline osm rendering isnt it? they just render it into tiles before sending them to the display engine. mapsforge is by far oruxmaps best bet for direct osm support. everything is basically served on a silver platter .

Well, let's see it relaxed. If you look at mapsforge presentation layer the maps are not in a vector graphics format. If you have a look at Garmin you can see that they really use a vector graphic format, which gives you different results e.g. if you rotate your map: In this case labels stay horizontal.
Nevertheless: The main goal about mapsforge is that they bring the data in a binary data format and do some live rendering. This is a very interesting and promising approach and has the big advantage that the row data are very small. I like it! It seems to be a brillant choice to use in oruxmaps (small libray optimized for android, small data, nice maps). As it is optimized for Android maybe it is not to much effort to use in Oruxmaps? What do you think about it, Orux?

On the other hand it would be very nice to have garmin maps in oruxmaps as well, which also has a lot of advantages (plenty of nice topo maps etc.). And of course, thousands of Garmin users would be very happy.

The best would be to have both. I know this is a lot of work to do. I am just dreaming... :-)

the .map source file format for mapsforge is still osm vector data. it's just arranged/sorted/packed in a way that makes it very quick to access, contrary to the original osm source files (.osm/.pbf). for example, regions are broken down into tiles, features are sorted from top to bottom, coordinates are stored in decimal microdegrees, etcpp.

the specification is in
https://code.google.com/p/mapsforge/wiki/SpecificationBinaryMapFile

and the description of how to assemble raw osm data into .map file with osmosis is in
https://code.google.com/p/mapsforge/wiki/MapFileWriterOsmosis

no rendering is taking place while .map files are created, the data is still pure vector data afterwards. it is simply better suited for offline realtime rendering by the mapsforge android library.

joeuser wrote:the .map source file format for mapsforge is still osm vector data. it's just arranged/sorted/packed in a way that makes it very quick to access, contrary to the original osm source files (.osm/.pbf). for example, regions are broken down into tiles, features are sorted from top to bottom, coordinates are stored in decimal microdegrees, etcpp.

the specification is in
https://code.google.com/p/mapsforge/wiki/SpecificationBinaryMapFile

and the description of how to assemble raw osm data into .map file with osmosis is in
https://code.google.com/p/mapsforge/wiki/MapFileWriterOsmosis

no rendering is taking place while .map files are created, the data is still pure vector data afterwards. it is simply better suited for offline realtime rendering by the mapsforge android library.

Hi;

thanks;

I will take a look,

orux

There is a thread in the mapsforge development google group that deals with a local tile server:

http://groups.google.com/group/mapsforge-dev/browse_thread/thread/b7c3aa36c882e31e

Maybe something good will come out of it.

In my opinion, this kind of separation (tileserver app that does the osm rendering) would be preferable to stuffing the code into oruxmaps directly. Oruxmaps would hardly need to be changed at all. Depending on what the tileserver does, caching for localhost tiles might need to be handled differently. But thats about it.

The slight overhead of transfering tiles through a http pipe shouldnt really matter a lot.

joeuser wrote:There is a thread in the mapsforge development google group that deals with a local tile server:

http://groups.google.com/group/mapsforge-dev/browse_thread/thread/b7c3aa36c882e31e

Maybe something good will come out of it.

In my opinion, this kind of separation (tileserver app that does the osm rendering) would be preferable to stuffing the code into oruxmaps directly. Oruxmaps would hardly need to be changed at all. Depending on what the tileserver does, caching for localhost tiles might need to be handled differently. But thats about it.

The slight overhead of transfering tiles through a http pipe shouldnt really matter a lot.

Hi;

Meanwhile, OruxMaps is ready for reading offline .map files





With minor changes in mapsforge library.

I will have a beta soon.

orux

I am surprised