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msa
Sweden
22 Posts |
 Posted - 24 août 2005 : 14:20:19
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Using version 4.60 (released 31 July 2005) on my Dell Axim X5 (Advanced) with the latest versions of the maps over Germany, France, Denmark and Sweden. Serial GPS (Garmin eTrex Summit) attached. Did not upgrade the software while on the road, thus not the absolutely latest and greatest. This is a post of my findings and hope it will be of interest to somebody (at least the Mapopolis developers...). I have been using Mapopolis for almost three years and this was my first long trip with Mapopolis in Europe with the European maps. We did a similar three-week trip in Florida earlier this year with the US maps.
We started our trip in Stockholm, Sweden and drove through Denmark on a direct route to Bourgogne, France. From there a week-long trip in the country-side of France and finally into Germany before heading north to Stockholm again.
Generally speaking Mapopolis worked extremely for close-range navigation (say with a radius of 100 km at the most). There are no problems with loading the entire Sweden and Denmark region and use for longer navigation, due to the size of the maps. Mapopolis was a valuable tool when finding the right way in France to a certain village and we had great fun using the avoid toll-roads feature. The lack of POI is really noticeable when trying to find hotels and camping places so we had to use the paper map for this. (Compared to our Florida trip, we only had the Hertz-supplied Letter-sized map of the whole Florida combined with Mapopolis containing all hotels etc).
I also noticed that the power-consumption is very good. With the large battery on my Axim I was able to navigate for almost 48 hours without recharging the unit (with the Axim’s serial converter attached). Other software (for example the built-in Jawbreaker game my fiancé is addicted to) is much worse at this - after three hours of Jawbreaker, the battery is consumed with 40%.
Some crashes occurred during the trip, but none acute – like one every two days and I was not able to reproduce them.
Problem we found:
When doing long-range driving in France and Germany, Mapopolis started to act up. Mainly this is due to the amount of minute villages and cities in these countries and the screen is so cluttered that it is impossible to use, even with only the major-road maps loaded. This is not the problem – there are many villages! The problem is the kind of information shown, only the postal codes and not the name of the villages.
Loading the appropriate detailed maps solves this particular problem, but then the application starts getting a bit slow (Germany is around 300 MB and France around 250 MB) and searching for cities or villages takes forever. Routing (and re-routing) when all these maps are loaded is not a walk in the park either. Also all these “Postal Codes” covers the roads and it is very hard to see the road to drive.
Another major problem is the water/land mix-up in Europe that makes it very hard to plan any long-range navigation since you really do not know where you are (what is Denmark and what is Sweden in the screen-shot below):
The third major problem with long-range navigation is to find an answer to such a simple question as the distance between Frankfurt am Main and Stockholm (for planning the trip home for example). Finding this information takes a bit of practice since most of the tools available do not work as expected and you need some work-arounds that drives me crazy. The naïve approach to finding the answer to this question would be to do the following (with the major-road maps loaded):
1) Tools -> Navigation -> Find Route
2) Choose Starting Point -> Select Landmark and enter “Frankfurt” and wait a couple of minutes (on my Axim with only Mapopolis running and 28 MB of RAM free, this takes 2min45sec with the major-road maps for Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France and Italy loaded).
3) The results are shown:
4) Select “Frankfurt Am Main” and click “OK”.
5) No Sir – this approach is not right!
6) I click “OK” and is returned to the Find Route screen. Remember, I have still not found Frankfurt so I hit Cancel. I then try to find Frankfurt the manual way:
7) I enter “Frankfurt” and wait a couple of minutes for the results.
8) Zoom out and find one of the major roads close to the city, for example the A5 Autobahn. Click-and-hold and choose “Set Start”:
9) I repeat the process for Stockholm (which can not either be used directly). I find it and choose “Route To”.
10) I wait for the routing to be completed (takes 35 seconds) and I can now see the result. However the only practical way to get a feeling of the route (what road to take etc) is by using the “Directions” and manually trace the route in a paper-map, zooming out hits the population limit (or some other problem, Italy seems to be loaded correctly):
This is also a problem trying to find the way from Frankfurt to Lübeck where you have to use the same technique as above.
FWIW I tested this in the built-in navigator on my friend’s Peugeot 607 and Skoda Superb (both equipped with maps from NavTech) and the route was calculated in less than a minute (Peugeot got a more powerful computer, took only 30 seconds). Also the overview of the route was very good with only the major cities shown and the name of the major roads. I also tried this on my Garmin VistaC GPS and the “declutter mode” – works great!
When you are driving on this long (+14 hours of driving) route, you are likely to take some stops and leave the suggested route. This will cause Mapopolis to try to re-route the route, which is fine. However, due to memory limitations you are likely to not have loaded the detailed maps which will cause the re-route to crash you PockedPC since there are no maps and roads (Mapopolis shows the current position in the middle of nowhere). Mapopolis will show the spinning wheel and the Axim is locked up until I either press RESET or my current position is back on the road again.
My wish-list for future versions (in order of preference):
1) Better long-range navigation. This must be a tool when driving long distances. Look at the “Declutter” on Garmin’s GPS receivers with maps or at automotive navigators for example of how this should work. When driving for 14 hours, you are not really interested in the name of all tiny villages at the side of Autobahn.
2) Land/water mix-up! Please fix this. I volunteer to check the Swedish maps for the next release of the European maps and report any errors.
3) A “Pause Navigation” option when making a planned detour.
4) POI for Europe. The US maps are very good when it comes to POIs. Having this for Europe would be great.
Anyway, these are my experiences of Mapopolis on a really long trip. Mapopolis is still my choise of navigational software for the PocketPC and with the two first items of my wish-list fixed I will certainly renew my subscription!
Sincerely,
/msa
/msa
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Axim X5 400MHz, CF 256MB, PPC 2003, Mapopolis 4.5 beta, Garmin eTrex Summit |
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lamar@mapopolis.com
USA
2508 Posts |
Posted - 24 août 2005 : 15:59:50
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Hi, msa,
Thank you for this detailed report.
As for "declutter," would you say it would suffice to hide the postal code icons?
Your #3 is already implemented. Press the center button of your 5-way navigator to retract the nav pane, stop the voice prompts, and go to GPS following mode. Press it again to resume.
Lamar
Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.
Daniel 12:4 |
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dcrochet
USA
1044 Posts |
Posted - 24 août 2005 : 16:35:57
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msa,
Very well done. This serves as yet another example of what we’ve been discussing in this forum for three years concerning long-route planning and associated map management. You also brought up some good points about display management with respect to inappropriate clutter. These same conclusions led to the long routing technique (PPC) found in User Community here in the forum, and the tutorial link in my signature block below.
The major conclusions are as follows:
(1) Long range routing requires progressive approach to map data. Open only major roads initially, like a basemap, to enable wide-area searches. This is necessary for adequate performance during searches for towns, cities, etc. near planned endpoints.
(2) Find > Route is wholly inadequate in supporting this basemap concept due to routing limitations (0.6mi/1km road nearness requirement) combined with a lack of map management control/automation throughout the process. Thus, we must use Find > Place or Business, etc. to search for an area, then Open Maps nearby using on-map icons, then Find > Address (as required), then Set Start / Route To as necessary.
(3) Open intermediate detail maps using on-map icons as desired for route customization.
(4) Close these intermediate detail maps before departure because excessive ‘open’ map data hammers re-routing and search performance.
Oh how we need dynamic maps that open in our path, and a smarter re-routing algorithm that utilizes the old route to destination where overlap occurs, thereby speeding re-routing while ensuring full-route optimization.
Your points about map clutter and zoom/detail priorities will take some additional discussion. In some cases, we can manage the detail manually as a workaround. In other cases, even the minimum detail setting is inadequate, causing performance degradation and inappropriate data display prioritization.
Dell Axim X5 400MHz A04, PPC2002 OS, Mapopolis 4.xx (ND/NE) routing technique, Fortuna PocketXTrack CF GPS |
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msa
Sweden
22 Posts |
Posted - 24 août 2005 : 16:49:53
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Hi Lamar,
Thanks for the info on "stop routing", will test this.
Hiding the postal code icons and only show the major roads (as I am not working for the German Bundespost  ) would be a major improvement and a stop on the way to perfection  I would then be able to get an overview of the road to take from Frankfurt to Stockholm.
Having major cities shown with names (how to define the major cities... interesting question) would be a great feature, for example when seeing the whole route Frankfurt - Stockholm, show me the cities Frankfurt - Göttingen - Hamburg - Flensburg - Odense - Köbenhavn - Malmö - Jönköping - Linköping - Norrköping - Stockholm (cities with a population of more than 50000 in my atlas) as dots (maybe of different sizes) and the connecting roads. When zooming in on a city, start adding smaller cities and villages.
The Garmin implementation of declutter is specified as: "Eliminates the display of times on the map than can block out road details when the map is zoomed out" (from the VistaC Users Manual).
Reucing the double display of roadnames (each way) would also be a great way to minimize the information overload (original to the left, modified to the right):
 
Sincerely,
/msa
/msa
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Axim X5 400MHz, CF 256MB, PPC 2003, Mapopolis 4.5 beta, Garmin eTrex Summit |
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msa
Sweden
22 Posts |
Posted - 24 août 2005 : 17:09:43
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dcrochet,
I didn't intend to re-invent the wheel. I read your routing technique desciption a couple of months ago but it faded away (I have now re-read it). Being on the road I was not able to get a hold of it. My post was from the mere frustration navigating my ways around Germany.
Also the problem travelling in Germany I found was the huge amount of small maps with an "interesting" naming convention. France was better as the map segments are larger and it is thus easier to find the correct map (France is made up of 136 maps whereas Germany is 446). Having a smart "auto-open" function would be absolutely fantastic! (Click-and-hold on the majormap and choose "Load Details" from the menu to load the detailed map... wow...)
Decluttering may be harder to implement. A great start would be to remove the double display of major roadnames as I indicated in my previous reply thus reducing the information shown, hiding other information and cluttering the screen.
Also, I was so impressed with the stuff the Peugeot and Skoda navigation units where able to approach the problem (I have only seen the Volvo implementation and was not very impressed with this) with the same map information from NavTech, so this triggered my post.
Sincerely,
/msa
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Axim X5 400MHz, CF 256MB, PPC 2003, Mapopolis 4.6 beta, Garmin eTrex Summit |
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Betatesting on a +4000 km trip through Europe
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