Have you considered to create (European) areas, like Benelux, British Isles, Iberian Peninsula, The Alps and Scandinavia. You already have linked the tiles to countries, so creating areas could be a combination of those existing countries. Switzerland and Austria would cover the Alps, Spain and Portugal for the Iberian Peninsula. You’ll get the point
Obviously the next question will be the various regions in the US, like New England and the Midwest, but the locals over there will be able to tell which states form those regions. Once the mechanism is setup correctly adding more areas should not be too difficult.
You can probably see how often manual selections are requested and which tiles that are. That would give an impression of the need for these areas.
I’ve been thinking about some sort of permalink function before. I don’t think that adding more pull-down menu’s with many random cryptic descriptions would be very helpful, so perhaps a wiki page that lists these permalinks with a description and e.g. screenshot would be nice? Users could be providing the content…
Besides permalinks, you are aware that you can now use the mouse-drag method in manual tile selection mode to quickly select regions like the Alps without any effort?
I don’t really have an overview of which tiles or areas are selected most as I don’t keep records of which tile number was associated with which coordinates and, on top of that, the tile-coordinates drift around. Though I know that the usual suspects are the well mapped and holiday countries like Germany, Netherlands, UK, Italy etc.
Permalinks could definitely be a solution. But when you say that tile-coordinates drift, one can expect problems with permalinks as well. Linking areas to the predefined countries/states could solve that.
I had noticed the mouse drag, works really great!
But the advantage of predefined areas would be that there is a greater change that the download is already available.
You are absolutely right about adding areas to the combos. I don’t have a solution for that right now
A permalink would be a set of coordinates (a.k.a. a polygon or linestring in geo-lingo) which would be matched against the available tiles and would -for a given version- always result in the same tile selection and thus the same MD5-sum and thus the same directory on the server and thus allow caching.
It would work identical to the mouse-drag select action: you draw a square (a set of coordinates) and OpenLayers determines which tiles fall (partially) within the area covered by the square. But a permalink would additionally allow not only squares but polygons as well.
It took me a few days to get back, and I read through the replies. However as of this post, I am still not seeing a map, predefined country selections, or what ever is supposed to be in the “Request your map or download it directly:” section.
There are no spinning wheels, but there is also nothing I can do except click the radio buttons or the check box, and click the links.
The Paris ‘hole’ is at least much neater than it was before the 29 June 2012 when it covered parts of five tiles despite some people saying there were only two tile errors.
I just added these in from an earlier time when all was well back in March when I had previously downloaded France.
The following are the older map tiles that are missing now.
OSM Generic Routable (63242738) Overview Map 3.91 MB
OSM Generic Routable (63242739) Overview Map 4.09 MB
More then 1500 unique people per day have no problem selecting maps and downloading them. I’m pretty sure this a problem on your side.
Can you install the Firebug plugin in Firefox, enable the firebug plugin for the website (open the website, click on the ‘bug’ in the right-hand corner of your browser and refresh the webpage) and check for errors in the Firebug console? And can you check if your browser downloads the ‘deprecated.js’ file using Firebug?
Thanks.
Sorry, I still haven’t found the source of this problem.
To follow up aimamo, the maps viewed fine in IE, but not in Firefox.
Firebug reported this error:
Script is deprecated:
BUT then, I left the page and returned to it, and the maps showed fine in Firefox as well. And Firebug reported no error. Did it just get fixed? Local time is 5:39PM Mountain (UTC-7).
Thanks Seldom, but I didn’t change anything yesterday.
I cannot find the code snippet (version = countries.version;) from your error in the current code, but it was in the previous version of the code which got replaced on June 26th…
Apparently the browser still had the old code in it’s cache.
Great I wonder if some ISP’s or corporate networks using proxies are the main cause of the problem with browsers not loading the latest versions of the website scripts…
Yes, the server is working flat-out to keep up (and work on a new map version at the same time).
Last night, at it’s peak, there were nearly 300 requests waiting in the queue and the server is processing over 600 unique maps and bout 2000 unique users are downloading one or more maps every 24h. These are some serious numbers I think
I expected this for the bicycle map too but there is no hole in Paris there…Any idea why this is different? Do you use different splitting tiles for the bike map?
hi, I download the map of the Republic of Mongolia, the western tile of the three is completly blue, as if it was a part of the sea. Is it possible to correct it? thanks
Both maps use the same coarse basesplit, but from there on they do their own subsplitting depending on individual rendering results. I’m really at a loss to the cause. I can’t seem to find the problem unless my whole idea about how to create the tiles is wrong (I don’t believe that yet).
It’s probably a lake that is not mapped correctly, but finding the problem can be a timeconsuming task.
The main problem is that during this subsplitting a tile ID is given that is already in use (Paris tile 63242546.img lies east of Phoenix, Arizona).
So it means there is a bug in your script, but its far too complicated for me to see where.
Correct, I think. But I haven’t found the bug yet. Perhaps it has something to do with buffering and the OS because I’m using filesystem functions to determine things like the current maximum tilenumber. The server is tremendously busy when generating a new map, so it is possible that e.g. some changes to the filesystem haven’t propagated yet when I check for the current status.
Just to let you all know:
I’ve updated the Mkgmap version that is used to combine the individual maps from a very old one to the latest. Now I’m seeing a lot of maps that fail to generate (only the tiles.zip is present). I’m investigating the cause.
Several folks have alerted me to a problem with email handling: it appears that the system doesn’t send emails anymore. The problem is being investigated.
Edit:
The email daemon has been restarted and is functioning again.
Emailing stopped around 19:20 CET on the 18th. Everyone who’s request finished between then and 10:50 CET today (19th) will not receive the ‘map ready’ email. If you suspect that this concerns you then it’s best to request your map again. Sorry for any inconvenience.
I wonder if some ISP’s or corporate networks using proxies are the main cause of the problem with browsers not loading the latest versions of the website scripts…
