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Posts: 1,414 | Thanked: 7,547 times | Joined on Aug 2016 @ Estonia
#3
Originally Posted by otsaloma View Post
I expect to ship the provider files in Poor Maps, so that if you have OSM Scout Server installed, it'll be listed in Poor Maps along rest of the providers. It just needs a bit of testing, so that release is maybe a week or so away.



Wouldn't it be easiest to just put the generated database files on a server for users to download? Bandwidth shouldn't be that expensive these days. It would mean writing conversion and upload scripts (preferrably in a separate repository) and having your app list what's on the server and download what the user chooses. Karry already has some kind of a download server.

Or are you looking to be able to import arbitrary smaller regions? Are full countries/states too large or slow?
Karry is working on it, indeed. He wrote some scripts that he uses to generate maps that are available on his server. Good news is that these maps are compatible with the server as well. From his server you could see the sizes of the files. Its a very important work that he does on it and I am looking forward to see where it would lead.

Unfortunately, I think that he used a bit older format of the map database, so right now you would still have to make the database yourself. Later, it would be possible to build the server using Karry's version of the library, so this problem would go away.

The second problem with pre-build maps is the cross-country routing. At present, libosmscout supports routing only within a map database. Whether the database covers 2, 3, or 1 countries does not matter. So, if you want to get from Sweden to Denmark, you would need a map covering the both countries. Since I'd like to get routing working as well, I see the need for letting user to decide the map region.

Rendering bigger maps are slower, sure. Fortunately, caching by Poor Maps and other applications would offset it a lot. There maybe parts in the library that would need to be optimized. But with the increased number of users, it should be easier to tackle the corner cases and fix them.

Your idea on getting lists of maps and downloading them is probably the way it is the easiest for the users and, as far as I know, Karry is planning to implement it for his application. I haven't thought about it too much yet and looked for bandwidth providers. My hope was that having a simple Import tool would at least postpone the need for a full-blown maps service. However, if someone wants to help Karry with the scripts and setting up the infrastructure, I am sure he will be very happy for all the help he can get!

rinigus
 

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