Openmtbmap.org - Mountainbike and Hiking Maps based on Openstreetmap

News 1. June 2012

Well, I'm still having quite a busy time, so I didn't manage to write about changes during the last few weeks. Finally now a short overview about what is happening.

First of all, well the licence change at OSM seems to be taking its time, and is still not happening. I as many others can only expect it to happen soon...

Otherwise, except for the edge 800, all newer generation outdoor devices from Garmin have now gotten (sometimes beta) firmware updates, that solve the "memory full" bug that occured with garmin osm maps (only for maps that address search / index included). So except for edge 800, no more need to hard reset the unit to get rid of the problem.

There is a bug in mkgmap, that prevented the address search from working if gmapsupp got generated by mkgmap and both contourlines and maps were put into 1 gmapsupp (essentially it popped up the old dreaded "choose country" or "choose state".... I now temporarily changed the create_gmapsupp_with_mkgmap script to not write address index for option 0. Option 3 or 4 work however without probs. The new create_gmapsupp_with_mkgmap.bat will be included in todays/tomorrows maps.

Also on some devices there was no name popup for important buildings, I changed this, so now unimportant/unnamed buildings have no name popup instead.

More sincere as the above bugs, was a problem, that in some cases routing over bridges that had several cycleroutes running over them was broken, this is fixed since last weeks map updates (was several days work to rewrite it properly) and in general the autorouting over longer distances should have profited from theese changes.

Also on last weeks map updates, I put in a lot of work to try to render contourlines less obstructive. So now in Garmin Basecamp using the desktop/mapsource/basecamp/qlandkarte_Gt layout contourlines are much nicer to look at, and don't obstruct the underlying map data as much. Also some lakes looked awfull when zoomed out far, I corrected that too.

For everyone who got an account last year and wants to extend the time, I'll implement a button for extension today or tomorrow, sorry for the delay, but it wasn't easy at all to code it (and I hope it will be working flawlessy, but it should).....

As for access to the member only sections, I will from tomorrow increase the prices a little. Not on the first year, but for subsequent years. Everyone having a subscription of 10€ yearly, is unaffected, new members or people who want to extend their membership will be able to do so (new price will be 13€ yearly on subscription, and 15€ for non subscription (the more years you get/extend, the less expensive). This is mainly due to me needing to pay VAT on your donations since this fiscal year. I'll also declare VAT on the invoices.

First year price stays at 20€ (or €16.66 without VAT).

So if you want to profit from the older prices, be quick and get an account before I increase the prices...

13. April 2012 — Updates and new Countries and Contourlines

Well after last weeks mission to provide the best maps possible on CCBYSA 2.0 data which will still be good to use for several weeks, I continued my efforts. As currently no bots have been deleting data AFAIK and the data still got updated, I will again use the newest map data. Probably for the last time, as the bots should start cleaning the data very soon.

So what got updated?

New Maps of Asia

Well first of all, I worked a lot on Asia. Asia as a continent was likely the worst to use map, often not possible to send it to GPS due to various OSM data bugs. Hence I decided to provide maps for all Asian countries instead (well all except the Asian part of Russia). The larger part than rendering those maps, was of course creating contourlines for all these maps, which took a lot of time.

So from tomorrow - Friday you can download the following countries including integrated contourlines (contourlines are a premium download - find them at the bottom of the download page):

Azerbaijan, China, GCC_states, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel_and_Palestine, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia_Singapore_Brunei, Mongolia, Pakistan, Philippines, Taiwan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam.

As there is probably no more update to the Asian maps under CCBYSA 2.0, I made sure that such things like heavy flooding don't occur. China and Iraq therefore are without ocean. Also contourlines for all of asia are online and linked now, as well as a separate extract (20m interval) for the Himalaya region.

New Maps of Russia and Belarus and further Improvements to Contourlines in Europe

Besides In Europe the last missing country were Russia and Belarus, which I added too now - of course also including contourlines (premium download), and added contourlines to Turkey. Also as promised Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina contourlines are now integrated. As well as Tanzania and Libya in Africa. (Somalia I have not boundary file for, hence cannot create them right now). Also for the Canary Islands the contourlines got updated. So effectively, excluding Canada above 60° North and the Asian continent map, all maps now have integrated contourlines available.

Over the next week I will still update the contourlines, of Alps, Austria and Germany to close some data holes and start working on contourlines for Canada (Canada only if I find time, I expect this will take 100-200hours work as the data is in not easily to convert formats).

Please Support Openmtbmap and Velomap by Donating some coins…

As it's a lot of work to run Openmtbmap and Velomap, and keep everything up to date and up to best possible technology, I ask you to donate some coins toward it if you haven't done so yet. Simply donate a bit after your next install of openmtbmap/velomap when you see the donation page. For people who already donated money, and want to prolong their account I'll soon set up a separate page for them. Also you will be reminded to stock up by email before your account expires and instructions on how to prolong it (7-14 days before it runs out).