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gpspassion
83562 Posts |
 Posted - 04 déc. 2002 : 22:17:13
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IMHO the addition of "Dynamic map loading" puts Mapopolis in another new league! We'll see how well it works on the road but gone is the arduous task of figuring out which county maps you had to load, juggling RAM limitations, etc...
A few problems I've noticed:
1) When I created a route with "find route" and selected "Select Landmark" for the first time it took a long time to load the list and when it was finished, the list was empty. This doesn't occur on further searches and the list is there alright
2) Now that you can have a very long list of cities, it would be nice to be able to search based on more than just the first letter.
3) Now that you can easily calculate long routes, the very conservative ETA (at least 25%) should be fixed
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portus
129 Posts |
Posted - 04 déc. 2002 : 23:14:13
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With "dynamic map loading" and "highway grid maps" in place, seems like Mapopolis will soon be competing for your "Best Highway Navigator" award. When this mechanism becomes stable, "waypoint" will not be far behind ...
Way to go, Mapopolis! |
Edited by - portus on 04 déc. 2002 23:15:11 |
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portus
129 Posts |
Posted - 04 déc. 2002 : 23:24:23
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quote:
Originally posted by gpspassion
A few problems I've noticed:
1) When I created a route with "find route" and selected "Select Landmark" for the first time it took a long time to load the list and when it was finished, the list was empty. This doesn't occur on further searches and the list is there alright
This is a natural delay due to "dynamic map loading". I guess the POIs are part of the dynamically loaded files. Once loaded, it resides in RAM for future access. They may choose to unload the POIs later with some predefined threshold, if they so desire. |
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gpspassion
83562 Posts |
Posted - 04 déc. 2002 : 23:39:55
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yes, this is rather major improvement. Throw in waypoints (as opposed to CoPilot's "stops") and "heading up" and you're getting close ;-)
I haven't quite figured out how memory was managed. It seems it uses more and more RAM until I gets close to the limit (less than 2mb free). If you keep on using maps it "juggles" with that little buffer but if you load POI's then it seems to clear everything out.
Anyway the god news is that this features adds a lot to the program without taking away too much (and none if you've scrolled a few times arouns) of its speed and general fluidity.
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portus
129 Posts |
Posted - 05 déc. 2002 : 07:56:04
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I played around with build 3.09 by storing all California county maps onto my SD card and do the "dynamic map loading" trick. Guess what - "Population limit exceeded! Map XXX is not loaded". I examined the maps loaded and found that Mapopolis started loading maps alphabetically and when it reaches this "population limitation", it prompts you the warning and refuse to load any more maps. Now it's clear what "Limited population" means for the Navigator maps!
This seems to be a big drawback to the wonderful "dynamic map loading" scheme. This means that a well-designed trip-planning utility (which I have been requesting from Mapopolis) is required to offset (avoid) the limitation for this map management scheme to be really useful for long-distance routing.
Another thing with this beta map management scheme (as you observed, gpspassion) is that it seems that maps are incrementally loaded on demand but not dynamically released as the maps in memory becomes unused for the current route. It would be a good idea to unload maps and associated POIs from random access memory when a user starts a new route or performs a "Clear route" operation. There can be obvious slowdown during this unloading operation but that is reasonable. Besides, the one-time slowdown per route-calculation is much better than an overall slowdown in every operation when the maps gradually eat out the precisou RAM ... which defeats the purpose of this map management scheme.
A short-term workaround may be to load only the starting/destination county maps together with the grid maps covering the trip. |
Edited by - portus on 05 déc. 2002 08:09:45 |
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phluc
Canada
44 Posts |
Posted - 05 déc. 2002 : 08:22:53
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Portus,
I have exactly the same problem with Québec and Ontario Maps. I cannot load all counties. In Québec about 6 or 7 areas do not open, and the same message appear:
"Population limit exceeded! Map XXX is not loaded".
The problem is that Québec whole population is around 5 millions people. We are very far from the 20 millions people limit...
I really don't know if it is a bug, or if there is more restrictions for Canada maps, but anyway it is a big drawback.
It is really too bad.
Jeremy, please could you tell me if this problem comes from Navtech Licences, or if it is something else. I am sure many canadian are using your program...
With the new dynamic loading, I would love just to open all Québec maps from my compaq flash card, but unfortunately, I cannot...
Sincerely,
Philippe |
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portus
129 Posts |
Posted - 05 déc. 2002 : 08:37:24
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phluc,
As I pointed out, even if this limitation is not there, you can still run out of memory gradually. I think the whole point of this map management scheme is for Mapopolis to be able to dynamically load and unload maps as required. If this issue (unloading maps as they become unused) is resolved, the population limitation should not be so much a problem. Of course one thing needs to be sorted out first: the population limit warnings as they are prompted now seem to be a bug in this build (3.09). With dynamic loading, it seems like only the one map selected to be loaded "contiguously" is really loaded into memory in the very beginning. The population limit warning should not come up until maps loaded into memory exceed this limitation. This approach should not violate NavTech's license agreement. |
Edited by - portus on 05 déc. 2002 08:38:30 |
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gpspassion
83562 Posts |
Posted - 05 déc. 2002 : 08:57:22
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So you're saying it examines the contents of the memory card and if it sees maps representing more than 20 million people it will pop out this warning? Good observation, I guess I didn't have enough maps on my card to notice that 20 million limitation. I can't really see how they can fix that without going against the "spirit" of the NavTech agreement. If they just measure that theshhold against what's loaded in memory, I suspect NavTech would not be too happy, as in effect this would give you access to unlimited data with the new dynamic loading.
I did notice one occurrence of "unloading" when I created a new route, maybe it determined it couldn't "pull it off" with the 0.5mb of available RAM ;-)
__________________________
www.gpspassion.com
It's all about sharing the info
Support the site - http://www.gpspassion.com/fr/smileys.asp
email: info@gpspassion.com |
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portus
129 Posts |
Posted - 05 déc. 2002 : 11:50:43
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quote:
Originally posted by gpspassion
If they just measure that theshhold against what's loaded in memory, I suspect NavTech would not be too happy, as in effect this would give you access to unlimited data with the new dynamic loading.
Not really. The current implementation of the limitation is strickly restricting the number of maps you can load onto your storage device if you choose to use dynamic map loading. You can spread the maps apart in different folders as of build 3.09 but still, you have limited access to certain amount of data at one time because if you use the "All Folders" option in "Choose maps" dialog together with dynamic loading ("load contiguous"), you end up hitting the restriction again.
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portus
129 Posts |
Posted - 07 déc. 2002 : 13:25:38
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quote:
Originally posted by gpspassion
I did notice one occurrence of "unloading" when I created a new route, maybe it determined it couldn't "pull it off" with the 0.5mb of available RAM ;-)
How did you determine an occurence of "unloading"? Did you observe obvious increase in available memory? Your description seems to be a behavior of the memory management of the OS rather than that of Mapopolis.
With a quick experiment showed the memory inefficiency of the current dynamic loading scheme.
Starting clean with no processes (running applications) loaded in memory in each of the following scenarios (which have 41.46MB total available memory on my device):
(1) Loading Mapopolis, CA grid map, 4 L.A., CA county maps, plus Santa Clara county map (no POI), no contiguous loading. Then route from San Jose to L.A. At this point, 34.82MB total memory is left unused. That comes up to 6.66MB consumed.
(2) Using dynamic loading (with only CA grid map selected and "load contiguous" checked), then do the same routing. At this point, 29.43MB is left unused. That comes up to 12.03MB consumed.
You can see that with dynamic loading, memory consumption is sacrificed for the sake of convenience. Almost twice as much memory is used with the same route with dynamic map loading scheme.
That said, I have yet to test how Mapopolis responds to the scenario of going "off route" under map loading schemes in (1) vs. in (2).
I'll do just that this weekend. |
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portus
129 Posts |
Posted - 08 déc. 2002 : 21:04:25
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OK. Going off-route is a terrible thing to happen when you load only the grid map(s), starting point and destination maps. Auomated map loading/stitiching does not happen this way. All you have left is a confused, troubled routing algorithm that seems to keep telling you to make a U-turn to where the map does exist (in RAM). Nice fallback, but don't know what would happen if I continue to go into the "unknown" ...
When using dynamic map loading mechanism, rerouting does occur as expected. But this does not help with the population limitation. As a simple example, I can't load every county map on the way from SF Bay area to Southern California because of the population limitation. So either I leave out some maps in between and do the routing with the help of the grid map and risk going off-route in the middel of "no maps", or I have to load the county maps into separate folders and cut the trip into segments to be able to visit every town on the road.
Hmm... |
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gpspassion
83562 Posts |
Posted - 08 déc. 2002 : 21:17:34
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Interesting findings. Looks like there are still some limitations here. I wonder how much it would cost to remove that "20 million limit", if it's possible. It will probably be needed if Mapopolis wants to compete with CoPilot for long distance routing.
Concerning the unloading I described previously it occurred afte I'd been scrolling around and the memory was almost full. At that point I proceeded to look up a place and looking at the "memory pannel" noticed that the memory was down to about 10mb. You're right, could have been the OS.
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portus
129 Posts |
Posted - 09 déc. 2002 : 08:28:38
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quote:
Originally posted by gpspassion
Interesting findings. Looks like there are still some limitations here. I wonder how much it would cost to remove that "20 million limit", if it's possible. It will probably be needed if Mapopolis wants to compete with CoPilot for long distance routing.
I believe it's gonna be "prohibitively" high such that they will not do it. From various correspondences with Jeremey and others at Mapopolis, it has obviously shown that negotiating with NavTech regarding the map data license is very difficult. They deem their "human" collected data to be highly valuable. This could be the very reason that other products that utilizes NavTech map data have to either sell the map/software for an "obscenely" high price or sell the map/software/GPS hardware bundle to offset the license fee they pay to NacTech. |
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phluc
Canada
44 Posts |
Posted - 11 déc. 2002 : 05:53:18
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May be there is another solution. Why not create a new set of Navigator maps, based on teleatlas maps. By what I read on many forums, these maps are almost as good as the Navtech one. In addition, they cover the whole Québec (which is not the case for Navtech)...
What do you think?
Sincerely,
Philippe |
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delder
USA
4 Posts |
Posted - 14 déc. 2002 : 16:37:39
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Any idea when this new version will be released?
I suppose that updating versions on handheld would be to just delete old version and download/install new version. Is that correct? |
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gpspassion
83562 Posts |
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Thoughts on version 3.09 beta (dynamic loading)
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