A while ago I posted about extracting large portions of street data for a game I’m working on. Now I need a 2D overlay of the map, and it’s a little more confusing to do I think.
I can do the 2D aspects by making various renderings of the data I have from XAPI or the planet dumps, but it takes a long time it’s a pain in the ass to do since I obviously can’t load that much stuff very easily for it, so I’m wondering if it’s possible to download images like .jpg, only at various levels (like from close up so you can see all of the streets, then a further one back where it’s just highways and interstates, etc) somewhat quickly (like downloading the large portions of the map through XAPI). I just really need to be able to take it from the street level is the biggest thing. Preferably without the text and stuff, just the street layouts (don’t know if that’s remotely possible though).
You should be aware that when you need the renderes tiles a large area without the names of streets and places and without all the POIs, these tiles have to be rendered by SOMEONE before!
AFAIK there is no web service where you can describe a certain map stile and after a rendereing process you can download your desired tiles.
So you have to deal with rendering the map of your desired area at your zoomlevel with your special map-style.
Or is it also possible that you display your map data not in bitmap tiles but in vector data? Look at Gosmore, Navit, Navipowm, gpsMid how they display the map … and Gosmore e.g. is really fast!
I might be able to, I’m downloading a few different files to see if I can get them to work.
Alternately I COULD use the standard bitmap files and run it through some programs to trace out the streets, but that would require me to, again, export large areas at varying levels of detail at a fairly large resolution (i.e. like full size), which again I don’t really know how to do. Would it be possible to zoom in to whatever level and extract all of the tiles? Or a method like XAPI to do so other than doing it in small bits each time?
Plus rendering them yourself means you can customise them, to only show the things you want.
Using bitmap tiles then tracing them is a much more complicated way of doing this!
Or you could look at Cloudmade Maps http://maps.cloudmade.com
They have an online style editor, so you could customise that, then use their tiles. Though check their terms, as to what they allow for downloading large areas.
I just have to load them into 3DS Max or AutoCAD and use one of my scripts to trace out what I want. I developed it a while for this purpose, it just takes a while to do.
But I have never heard of Cloudmade, thank you for the information!
I DO have planet dumps from not too long ago as well. Is there a plugin or something for me to convert those to .dwg or something so that I can import them into AutoCAD?