Different colours for uphill-descent parts of track

Hello Tomek,

did you tried advanced coloring options for tracks? If not, try to display track screen (tap on track popup on a map or on a track in list of tracks) and here tap on draw line that symbolize how track will be drawn on a map. Here you may define various options ... and also what you posted in your idea. Works?

Hi. I went through all these various options thoroughly and I can't find there anything like colouring the track depending on if it's up or downhill. But maybe I see it wrong. Or you see my idea incorrectly ;) I think it'd be very useful to be able to see (not on a altitude graph, but on the map), symbolized by different colours, which parts of it were up and which were down. Don't you think?

Tomasz - for your interest also have a look at my much related issue - Improve Change of Altitude track style/ mode. The advanced coloring options for tracks do not work very well at present.

@ Menion & Andrew - OK, I have finally found what you mean. This is very nice option and I'd like to have all the track being displayed this way - is there any option to have it turned on by default or I need to do it manually with each track?

I've attached the file with what I got.

However, it's not the way of displaying track I was writing and thinking about - there is no distinction between going down or up if you're on the similar altitude and you cannot see clearly which parts were up or down. That would be quite useful for the MTB and skitouring as well.

Tomasz, unfortunately I'm still quite unsure, what exactly you miss in app. From what you wrote, it looks like you search for a way, how to colorize track based on it's gradient right? If so, then it is exactly "change of altitude" parameter.

Andrew already forwarded you on a topic, where this is discuss (improvements). If you want something different, please describe it more precisely.

Menion, the feature Andrew made is the answer for my second thought ("Moreover - you could even show the gradient by intensifying it's colour.") But my main idea was a bit different - to have only two colour track, with one colour showing uphill and the second - downhill. In this way it would be very clear where the terrain changes.

Menion - at present +5% and-5% both map to the same color, +10% and -10% both map to another color. I think Tomasz is asking for uphill and downhill to be treated differently. I can appreciate this view too - really as cyclist I would be more interested in seeing red for uphill, and default color for downhill, but it would be hard to please "everyone" on this subject.

Oki, understand. Currently it is colored (if we talk about coloring "Change of altitude") as relative value. So Locus compute highest value of gradient and lowest and between them compute colors from blue, over green to red. But I have to agree, that it is probably not the best solution. In case you will ride 20 km long track just from hill down, even here parts will be blue on places, where gradient will be "low" (even still from hill down).

Oki, I'll keep this in mind and will try to do something with it. Not a simple task to satisfy all users ... :)

EDIT: hour later ... oki, some improvements made. Now '0' altitude change will be always green. Downhill change will be always colored closer to blue, uphill always closer to red

Great to see that we found a common ground and even greater that you made an effort to deal with it so quickly :) I guess that this change will be visible in next update - I'll be looking forward to try it. Dzięki! :)

I'm still not fully satisfied because some small problems with measured altitude may move whole scale to one direction (small filtering of higher values is already included). Anyway as you wrote - you and other will see in next update if this smaller change help.

Menion - am curious how do you can satisfy the desires of potentially widely differerents - MTB/ touring cyclists, walkers, skiers? Each of these groups would I imagine have a different measure of "steep". For me +4 degrees is getting steep, for a skier maybe 30 degrees (I don't really know), for MTB maybe 10. The way I interpret your comment "Locus compute highest value of gradient and lowest and between them compute colors from blue, over green to red" I tend to think this could be "good enough" because it doesn't require a numeric threshold to be set - keep it automatic/ simple. The alternative would be to provide a setting that the user would alter - all gradients above this value are red (say); that would be better from my point of view but more programming/ translations/ work, so I appreciate not attractive for a minor feature.

Tomasz - note there is another related topic to yours - http://help.locusmap.eu/topic/slope-shading-in-different-colours-30-35-40 with 18 votes.

Current system is really simple and still based on relative values (unfortunately for some groups).

So generally

1. Locus compute gradients for all segments (between two trackpoints)

2. then compute maximum and minimum values

3. green value (average) is set now to exactly '0'

4. value minimum gradient is set to fully blue and values between are interpolated

5. value maximum gradient is set to fully red and values between are interpolated

So in this case, you won't be able to say absolute values on first look on a map, but you still be able to say where is biggest (positive or negative) gradient.

Thanks Menion. Excellent to see and understand the steps involved. I know from our extensive discussion in topic Improve Change of Altitude the coloring wasn't working for my example - the last ~20km were displayed as green/ blue but are actually quite steep (>5 degrees) should IMHO be red. I am hoping your new changes will make this more realistic.

One part I am not sure about - your step #1 - if the track points are very close together, or far apart, the gradients may be unrealistic. From the topic I mentioned above, having one trackpoint every 200m gave a reasonable compromise for calculating the gradient. Is that possible and/or useful to consider?

BTW I never know whether it better to use http://help.locusmap.eu or http://forum.locusmap.eu for these discussions. They seem to me to serve the same purpose. Maybe some people only view the "help" URL, other people may only view the "forum" URL.

Will report back here after next version. Thanks for all the work, as always tremendous.

I've left comments in this related topic.