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This has been one our most requested features so far, and we are hard at work on it. Doing great topo maps is no easy task though, it involves importing several new and rather large data sets from NASA’s SRTM projects, and vectorizing them into contour lines. Then relief shading is done by producing and combining separate hill shading and slope shading raster layers. But PocketEarth achieves its very small map sizes by avoiding raster data and using extremely compact vector encodings. Thus we have to come up with some more magik 😉
We hope to include Contour lines in the near future with Relief Shading to follow.Contour lines would be fantastic, shaded relief would be magikly brilliant! I’d gladly pay five dollars for such a Feature as an add-on, if that helps. (Sorry to others if I’m too enthusiastic.)
I’ve seen that OpenStreetMap does not include such data and assumed it was a lost cause. Glad I read this post.
Any way to add marine maps in too?
I’ve been wanting to have feature of displaying garmin maps for years
One year later and would still love to use Pocket Earth with contour lines/shaded relief! Will pay additional money for this feature.
That would be a tremendous feature for trekkers! (my main use of Pocket Earth)
For information: OpenCycleMap already uses NASA’s SRTM.Thank you.OlivierOK, but the Open Cycle Map shows only topographic/contour lines, correct? Just tying to stay on top of developments!
@BuckyE: I believe open cycle map does show both contour lines and relief shading. Doing it all server side is pretty easy actually. But the data is ridiculously large and so it doesn’t work very well for offline mobile use.
Myself I will be trekking in Nepal very soon (as I do every year) and would also love to have topo maps onboard. We did make some good progress early on, but the data was ridiculously large and we have had to defer it as we work out issues and feature requests which we receive emails for every day.After our next major release, we do plan to re-focus on this feature and the tracking/waypoint nav features. Though it will likely still take some months of development to do it well (and by some, I mean it could be up to 6 months from the next major release, hopefully not more).There are some apps available that provide offline topo, but they are all raster image based. In this form the data is huge meaning you can fill your entire device just downloading a tiny map area. We are hoping to do it differently, by re-packaging the source height map data from the NASA SRTM project in a unique format that allows us to keep it extremely small, and then to dynamically shade it in our app’s rendering engine. This should allow a data size reduction by maybe a factor of 5,000x as compared to raster image based approaches. Then the next step would be adding the contour lines on top of this relief shaded layer and this is another story entirely: One option is to try to dynamically generate the contours on the device, though this is a very computationally difficult task and at this point we don’t know if it is even feasible on a mobile device. We suspect it can at least work on the newer (faster) devices. The alternative is to package the contours as vector data. This much we have actually been able to do and get working in PE already, though again the data is quite large. Not as large as raster image data but still about 5x larger then the current map data available in PE. It also has the limitation of requiring separate datasets for US and Metric units.Okay, so there is the status update I’ve been meaning to post for a while. I will keep this thread updated with our developments after the next major update is out.Hey there Pocket Earth, just wanted to check in about how the topo/terrain development and implementation is going! Nice to see all the recent updates, I keep looking for THE BIG ONE with topo maps and the “small-roads-dissapear-when-zoomed-out” issue fixed. Really though, I am SUPER EXCITED FOR TOPO MAPS. I WILL GIVE YOU MY MONEY!!! GIVE ME TOPO MAPS AND YOU CAN HAVE MY MONEY!!!
In all seriousness though, people want topo maps in Pocket Earth and are willing to pay MONEY for it, you need to get on it.Take care—Dear Geomagik,
Hmmm, interesting. I would have to think more about the design/user attractive issues involved to say whether shaded relief is important to future development. As an old timer interested in landscapes, I have always valued maps which visually present relief. Walking Rome and being able to “see” the seven (plus) Hills in relief is valuable to me. But I wonder how many other potential customers would feel the same!
Similarly, there are obviously at least a few folks who would value topo lines. Trekkers/cyclists who are accustomed to using topo lines would want them, of course. I also would want them. But the use of topo lines would probably be very limited in the general potential customer population.
Dear Abe,
Just saw this:Looks fantastic. Maybe something possible to take over?nounoursAny progress on the contour lines?
It is implemented in OsmAnd (GPL open source) as a separate plugin. The size of the data is reasonable. Check out my pdf to install the plugin and download relief and contour lines (dropbox link)
Good news, 10 meter worldwide offline contours are coming very soon, in Pocket Earth 3.0! And if you are interested in helping us beta test, you can try it out now. Just send us an email at beta@geomagik.com and let us know the following info:
• Which iOS devices do you have and what version of iOS is each one running.
• Your username on the Forum.
• Your primary location and language.
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