Lol
No biggie 
Problem identified , that’s the most important thing …
Just let use know when the maps are available again , don’t stress yourself too much 
Cheers,
Claude
The old version of 31-12-2010 was still available because there were still requests in the queue for that version number so I’m pointing to that version again. Next update is scheduled for this weekend.
Thank you very much for your time. I will wait for the next version to release.
Hi Lambertus,
whoever you are and where you are, YOU are doing a FANTASTIC Job. The development of your website and the usage of the maps is just amazing. It is admireable how much time you invest into this project and your level of dedication is just outstanding. I am not much of an IT/internet wizz but I certainly can imagine how much work goes into this.
I have been in plenty of countries in Europe and in the US and thanks to your maps I have been really getting everywhere. Allthough not everything works perfectly yet, all users should be very happy with your output. Remember folks: this is a free service!!!
CHAPEAU !!!
Keep up this fantastic job !!!
Skubiduhh
Heh, well, thank you! 
Actually, the website is a bit of a hack. It looks ugly and I don’t have the skills (or interest) to make it more polished. But it works, which is what counts I guess. Most of the hours have gone in creating the scripts that automate the map pre-processing, building and other miscellaneous things. There are also a lot of people (mostly the really non-experienced computer users ofcourse) who have difficulties moving the maps to the GPS and ask questions by email which sometimes takes a lot of time.
I must also note that a significant portion comes from Greencaps who provided the transliteration application and the first version of the country vs tile matching application. And, ofcourse, last but certainly not least: this website would not be possible without the work of the Mkgmap developers (actually, “Mkgmap community” might be a better description), they deserve the most credit.
Hi!
I have two questions:
- Is it possible to compile a TYP file into gmapsupp files by default? I requested a map and it uses internal garmin styles which look quite ugly (and don’t render sea areas for example).
- Maybe this idea was mentioned before but I missed it - how about pre-generating most popular countries maps and upload them to file sharing service like hotfile or rapidshare? It would certainly free a lot of bandwidth, disk and CPU usage from your server.
Good questions 
Yes, it’s possible but there are no good public generic TYP files (afaik, although one is mentioned/developed on this forum, but I haven’t looked at it yet). The sea is not rendered because Mkgmap could not produce a good quality sea, at least not until shortly ago. It has become better but, again, I haven’t really looked at it yet.
Good idea, but I want things to be fully automated, because otherwise it costs me way too much time. So I’ll check it out and see if things can be scripted.
Maybe you could make torrents for the popular country maps, so other people could help sharing them?
That has been mentioned before, but I don’t think torrents will be very helpful for two reasons (correct me if I see this wrong):
- The maps are updated frequently, so older ones are outdated quickly which doesn’t make it likely that there will be many seeders.
- The server will have to be a seeder which doesn’t alleviate it from it’s biggest burden: disk space.
I think secondary hosts which run this website (or part of it) for map generation, of download servers for predefined maps are a better solution then torrents.
mkgmap has MASTER.TYP style which is quite good, maybe compiling TYP should be optional when requesting a map?
File sharing portals are better than torrent in many cases - don’t depend on firewall/router issues, you can quickly download a map on a borrowed computer, etc. Hotfile has (as I remember) partnership program in which you earn money for downloads - nice way to gather $$$ for better server :).
Scripting upload is possible for 100% - I’ve used some ebook sharing portal which automatically distributed files across all services. 4shared.com and adrive.com have some advanced options for upload.
If you need any help, please let me know on private message - I can make a research on that and write appropriate scripts.
I have never heard of this Master.typ, can you tell more about it?
There is also a Mapnik.typ, I posted it on http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=10032
I’ve posted it too on the mkgmap mailing list but with zero feedback.
Would be great if anyone wants to work this out.
I found Create-IMG script which uses wget and mkgmap to create country maps. There I’ve seen the MASTER.TYP file. I supposed it was one of the default mkgmap TYP’s
There has to be some serious money involved when using a commercial server. Lots of money to be earned and donated. A dedicated server with 1 or 2 cores, 2gb ram, >200GB disk space and ~5TB monthly bandwidth is surely not going to be cheap (i.e. well over 300 Euro per month). I also would prefer not to have money involved, a donate button and adds on the site. The current server and bandwidth is sponsored which is worth a lot!
Thanks for the tip on the filehosting services. I’ll check them out.
Ligfietser, I’ll use the Mapnik stylesheet for one of my next updates. Perhaps it could be moved to a trac/svn repository so that others can collaborate on it, for maintenance and improvements?
Thats great Lambertus, hope somebody can put some time in it to improve the typ files.
If you have questions you can always contact me.
The problem with any TYP file that is distributed with mkgmap is that it needs to be compatible with all GPS units. As I mentioned a few weeks ago when you posted here, any TYP file that uses borders along roads will look horrible in older GPS units like the GPSMap series.
I understand your point, its better to have two TYP files, one for the older units, one for the newer.
In my own Openfietsmap I offer two TYP files, one for older GPS units with light border, one with darker borders. In Mapsource it’s easy to switch between those TYP files.
See http://sites.google.com/site/openfietsmap/news/12-12-2010
The main problem is the gmapsupp file. If I don’t want to offer two different sets of gmapsupps, is there a tool where the user can change the TYP file within the gmapsupp (without needing Basecamp or Mapsource)?
Hmm, I apparently missed that comment. Thanks.
I would really love to be able to customise requests (allow different TYP files, user definable series id’s so that you can install multiple maps in MapSource very easilly, add contour lines, etc), but it would make many more requests unique and therefore would likely kill any caching that is currently helping to keep this service running.
I’m thinking about offloading some of the bigger standard countries to RapidShare (or equivalent), but that’s not optimal. I’m sure it will confuse people. Besides, I could also point towards the OSM wiki Garmin maps dowload list (actually, I’m already doing that).
The other option I’m thinking about, which is radically different and actually one of my older ideas, is to have the server host only the tiles (zipped) and meta information and an Java application that runs on the user’ computer that builds, maintains and installs custom maps.
Pretty sure one of these tools can do that but I’m not running Windows, so can’t check it.
If you offer country maps, it’s not gonna be 5TB per month. I’m at around 500GB per day on average. During summer it spiked at around 1.5TB a day on my download servers (meaning bout 700-800 map downloads for Germany, 200-300 Italy, 200 Austria and so on – not even offering Europe for download).
@ Lambertus:
Isn’t it possible to build your program (generating Garmin maps) into an already available Mapping program such as QlandkarteGT or KDE’s Marble?
They have a program in which you can view an OSM map, and you already have a program on your website that turns the OSM tiles into a Garmin map. To me that sounds like 1+1=2, but I’m not a programmer…
Then you could just host the popular country maps on your site, and let users make their own special maps.
Thanks for the statistics. I guess you (and other well established country map providers) are catching the bulk of the downloads then, which limits the downloads here. The available disk space is also limiting the number of possible downloads per day.
May I ask how much you pay for your bandwidth, or is your hosting sponsored as well?
I have around 500 unique visitors on the download server (many more on the website itself) and use about 50-120 GB/day bandwidth.
Possibly, I haven’t really looked at it yet. But thanks for the tip!
(Edit: I’ve also found uDig, jMapViewer, MapPanel, Java GeoTools)
The point of my service is: I want people to be able to make their own map (e.g. cross-country) and to make this as user friendly as possible. “Simple” country extracts in various flavours can be (and, ofcourse, are) hosted by others, like extremecarver and ligfietser.