Traveling Salesman / News: Recent posts

The SVN-version is switched to use OpenStreetMap API 0.6 now.
It can still load API 0.5 xml-files.
This is a major step to the planned Version 1.0
of Traveling Salesman to be released on 2009-03-23.
Consequences:
* your local map needs to be re-imported.
There is no support to load use old osmbin or
xml-FileTile maps that do not contain the new
version-feature.
* downloading maps may not work until the API 0.6
is public on 03.23.2009 .

The latest SVN-version contains an important bugfix
for osmbin 0.9 and 1.0 -support.
Writing more then a few hundret relations caused an
java.nio.OverflowException and reading other then the first relation may have resulted in garbage.
(The calculation for the record-size was counting integers for references as 1 byte instead of 4.)

The "edit in JOSM"-button to download JOSM
and open the currently visible area for editing
now uses josm-tested instead of josm-latest.

Running a second time te LODDataSet saves all 4 Levels of Detail into the sate directory.
This can lead to file-corruption!.
This bug is fixed in SVN and is currently undergoing testing for a bugfix-release v8.1!

https://sourceforge.net/tracker2/?func=detail&aid=2466700&group_id=203597&atid=986231

The unsigned jar-files of the new release 0.8 are now published.
Signed jar-files and a new java-webstart -version
will follow in a matter of days.

Improvements in the SVN-version:
Not all ways are drawn with a name or with the same font-settings in all zoom-levels now.
Also the ODRPaintVisitor became the new default-renderer and the usage of LevelOfDetail-DataSets was improved.

An important bug in the OdrPaintVisitor
has been fixed.
Also a number of bugs in the OsmBin-implementation
are fixed.

Both will undergo some more testing but may
be nearly ready to become the new default
in the upcomming 0.8-release.

...V0.8 is ready when it's ready.

I cleaned up the task-list and moved all important tasks into tracker->feature-requests before disabling the task-list.
It just confused people where to add they should add a wish.

I added a lsit of the bugs that need fixing before we can (finally) relase the version 0.8 to the new wiki:
http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/travelingsales/index.php?title=Main_Page

The new relase will contain:
* An LODDataSet with 4 OsmBinDataSets as the new default-database, replacing the slow and unindexed plain-xml -storage of the FileTileDataSet.
* The ODRPaintVisitor as the new default-renderer

The move to the new wiki is complete.
Please update all links to link here:
http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/travelingsales/index.php?title=Main_Page

The new Wiki is growing nicely.
Please link to it using the HTTP:// -protocoll
as any link with HTTPS:// will ask the user
for his/her Sourceforge-password.

Preparing the new release and since now MediaWiki is possible on SourceForge, we are moving the old
and pretty crappy wiki in the wiki-tab to a new
Mediawiki at
http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/travelingsales/index.php?title=Main_Page

It has more options to categorize articles, use templates and inter-wiki-links. This simplifies
linking between plugin-interfaces and plugins implementing them and avoids lots of dublication in linking to the javadoc and sourcecode of classes from the wiki.

I was frustrated to not find a GPSD for Windows.
So I added a feature to Traveling Salesman to make
it act as a minimal GPSD-Server for JOSM.

The feature part of the SVN-Version. A new release
will follow soon.

https://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=203597

Usage:
* Checkout and compile libosm, osmnavigation and traveling salesman.
* start Traveling Salesman (the traveling_salesman.jar is executable)
* open "preferences"->"navigation"
* make sure "Port for gpsd-emulatio" is set to 2947
* set "get position from" to JGPSProvider (o GPXFileProvider for testing)
* for JGPSProvider set "JGPS com-port description" to
"COM5,19200,8,1,N" or similar.
* start JOSM and let LiveGPS connect.... read more

The SVN-version now contains an internal gpsd-server,
so that Traveling Salesman can offer a current
location for the LiveGPS-plugin and thus
Surveyor of JOSM.

It has NOT been fully tested yet
and only provides the required code to handle
what liveGPS wants.

Some libraries where missing in SVN.
I cleaned that up, so a checkout will compile
and run out of the box.
(wrong version of hsqldb and the RXTX.jar for Linux)

I jsut added pages for the most important IDataSets we have to the project-Wiki.
DataSets are where we store and retrieve the map.

We managed to get the scalability-issues out
of the HsqlDB-Dataset and switch back to using
this one as the default.
It scales better to large maps, has better memory-management and offers more features.
A benchmark using 2d-indexing with Z-curves
shows the surprising result that our index
on lat+lon is faster then a z-curve-index.
The TileFileDataSet has memory-management issues
and is currently no longer used.

TS has seen a few smaller improvements.
* the isometric view follows the car and is nearly complete (turning it is missing)
* the download-menu is loaded asynchronously to speed up the application-start if there is no network
* the CenterOnGPS-button may no longer throw an exception if we have GPS but no location-fix yet.
* we are currently trying to improve the time to import a map but this takes a while. (it's way too slow at the moment)

Today we added the choice between an isometric and
the conventional planar map-display.
The isometric view is however not yet turned in the direction of travel. The code must still be written to get that direction from the IGPSProvider.

We added a mailing-list that gets all the SVN-submissions.
This is much easier then for the SVN-Admin (me) to add everyone who is interested into their own svn-notify-script.

On a side-node: Some bugs with the Bounds-Code have been fixed and regression-tests added for them.

The last SVN-version now returns only
the suburbs of a city if the user is not
looking for a specific street.
This speeds up searches quite a bit.

Also checks against downloading tiles
with illegal coordinates are now in place.
This may happen if the user can see all of
the earth and it does not fit the aspect-ratio
of the screen.

Today some important bugfixes made it into the SVN-version.
They both affect the LOD-DataSet and it's rendering.
The first one was a typo that made the LOD1 and LOD2 save the unsimplified ways instead of the simplified ones. (Still less information then LOD0 sine not all types of ways are saved)
The second was a bug we have been looking into for some time deep in the TileCalculator. It now correctly selects the tiles that are within some given bounds on LOD1 and LOD2-levels.

* Fixed 3 important bugs in Bounds
* Debugged Polygon-Simplification in WayHelper
* Added LevelOfDetail-DataSet
* Added DebugLog-Frame and made PlaceFinder asynchronous
* Improved Renderers to use LODDataSet

Witht the LODDataSet we can now render maps
of low zoom-levels (multiple cities visible)
offline. It still needs tuning and a second
LOD-step.

You can now directly download maps of european counties and german states from a new menu in TS to fill your local map.
Also the map-import has been enhanced to use less memory and allow importing maps of any size. (Even the planet.osm .)

Thanks to Sven we now have a new ODRPaintVisitor that renderes nicer graphics then the SimplePaintVisitor.
It is now used in the SmoothTilePainter to render cached tile-images if they cannot be found on disk or downloaded from OpenStreetMap.