LoMaps: Display of climbing sites, via ferrata, security measures on hiking trails etc intended?

Petr Voldan ●

Hi,

you're right the via_ferrata paths are missing at all. It's rather a bug than intention and I think we can improve it.

>At initial look, https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1335866051 was displayed - I am sure because I found it quite funny the icon "guy on a horizontal treadmill"

I'm sorry but I don't think the internal themes contain a "guy on a horizontal treadmill" icon. Maybe was it a different map, online POI. Please try to display it and please send me the screenshot.

>Also, if shelters like https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/941873799 were not only in the POI database but also displayed, I could use it as orientation landmark and I would learn the positions "by the way" when using the map, so I can go there even when battery is over and bad weather is approaching.

I'm sorry but I don't understand. This POI should be displayed.

Thanks, Petr

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Georg D ●

Hi Petr,

After trying for 2 months, today, I was able to reproduce the "guy on a horizontal treadmill" when I completely revised my rendering themes in the course of Locus 3.56.x theme support changes. See https://ibb.co/HnhP4c8. It is an icon of Elevate theme, namely s_gym.svg – I have no clue why sometimes Elevate is used instead of default, Locus' built-in themes to render a LoMaps map... Anyhow, the symptom is seldom (2 times in 2 months despite trying to reproduce) and it's not really negative, so IMHO not worth any further investigation.

LoMaps do not display that shelter, neither online nor offline, while OpenAndroMaps & Elevate do display shelters. See https://ibb.co/4TvjPtB. Please notice I do mean theme based rendering of an object from vector map file, not displaying a layer with data from POI DB, because in Locus 3.56.5 objects from POI DB are only rendered after I do explicitly go to POI DB and trigger the display, but when scrolling the map, the objects around the new map center are not displayed but only around the old scroll position. So it is way too tedious to always display POI DB objects around current map center – hence, I was looking for rendered map objects.

Cheers, Georg

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Petr Voldan ●

Hi Georg,

"guy on a horizontal treadmill" - I'm sorry but what map and theme is used on the picture https://ibb.co/HnhP4c8 It doesn't seem to be a default Locus V5 theme. It looks like Element or Elevate. Anyway, is it possible to describe the steps how to simulate it?

Shelter - I'm sorry but I don't know what you want to achieve. The shelter is visible on online and offline LoMaps (in standard mode). The POI DB is part of LoMaps and by default are displayed with the maps. I can see on your screenshot that you "Hide points" feature is enabled. So I'm not sure why you hide the points and after that you go to the POI DB to display them. In case you want to see the map point please disable "Hide points".

Thanks, Petr

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Georg D ●

Hi Petr,

one straightforward way to reproduce the display is: Choose a LoMap and remove all but Elevate v2.5 (compatible with mapsforge v3 maps) from _themes folder and in Locus, activate that theme in map themes selector. Now the "guy on treadmill" appears. Other steps/actions can produce the same display. For example, switch to other map, e.g. mapsforge v5 map, imagine some time & actions passes by. You wonder why you still have the old Elevate 2.5 and remove it from _themes folder, later you switch back to a LoMap and the guy on treadmill appears – but as Elevate is neither visible in file system nor in Locus' map themes selector, and Elevate for mapsforge v5 maps looks quite different (in screenshot area, icon "guy scrambling a mountain" instead "guy on treadmill", rock is grey area with blocks instead plain grey, path in south west is blue instead grey, path in north east is brown dotted instead invisible,...) since years, one can easily assume LoMap's internal theme is used for rendering.

Concerning the shelter:

First of all, what I want to achive? I just want to see shelters but I do not want a cluttered map – yea, a quite difficult ridge walk 😀To give you a rought idea: For my taste + activities, OAM & Elevate are well balanced with minor "flaws" (e.g. benches a IMHO too dominant).

Second, to my big surprise, you were absolutely right that I did hide POI DB content. Why surprise? For the screenshot, I wanted to hide my personal points for sake of clarity, i.e. they are irrelevant for the issue, they could be misunderstood as produced by the render theme or POI DB, and they do litter the map. I assumed this setting to be independent from the display of POI DB, because a long tap on "Daten" (icon at top right in screenshot) tells "Punkte ausblenden" – and when Locus is used in DE/German, in most contexts, personal points are referred to as "Punkte" (e.g. inside "Daten" as tab title besides of "Tracks" or in sidebar entry title "Neuen Punkt auf der Karte hinzufügen") and few times also as "POIs" (e.g. within "Einstellungen > Punkte und Tracks > Prüfung auf doppelte POI's während des Imports"). In contrast, the points that are not personal but same for all users are usually referred to as "POIs" or "LoMaps-POIs", only at few places as "LoPoints" and "LoPunkte", but IIRC never as "Punkte". But "Punkte" in "Punkte ausblenden" refers to both types, not only personal points as usual.

→ Using exactly one term for each of the 3 point types – personal points, LoMaps-POIs, any kinds of point – across whole Locus would have helped to better understand the effect of "Punkte ausblenden".

Third, for the issue, it was not relevant that I activated "Punkte ausblenden" – shelters were also not shown as desired after deactivating "Punkte ausblenden", i.e. I still only had what LoMaps displays with internal hiking theme with all optional displays checked. Because of your explicit mention of "standard mode", "hide points" etc, I did play around more deeply and discovered how our two displays differ, so I can now explain what I saw 😀 As written in my last post, until now, I found the POI DB of no big help for what I want to achive: Assume you plan a hike. Center the map at "Stöckalp" (north east of "Abgeschütz") where you will leave car/bus, open "LoPoints" menu, click "POI in der Umgebung" (in EN probably "POIs nearby"), toggle visibility by clicking at the top onto the map icon with "99" written as an overlay. Now POIs become visible but only around current map center thus not near "Abgeschütz", see https://ibb.co/Yc5sd5M. So, I'd have to manually move the map and trigger POI display over and over again. Tedious 🙄 I do not want to do that, neither when planning a tour, nor while being on tour. Only due to you triggering me, I found out "LoPoints" menu > 3 dot menu > "Auf Karte anzeigen" (in EN probably "Show on map") was unchecked...ah, understood! 💡 When I checked it, the POIs appeared also automatically after moving the map. That is most likely what you saw and you are right, shelters do appear – if LoPoints are shown.

→ Maybe it's easy to make the LoPoints menu icon appearance change dependant on the "Show on map" state – similar to GPS icon switches between orange and green. That would make state more clear.

I reflected on why I did not have "Show on map" activated and knew after short try out: In overview zoom levels (somewhere around 13), for areas like beautiful Lake Lucerne which is the example we used for the shelter and which is a mix of smaller cities and rural stretches in short distance, too many POI icons & pop-ups appear (https://ibb.co/py4hJKG) and most of these POIs are most of the time of no benefit for me at that zoom level:

It's too many displayed POIs because their icons hide several or even all characters of many location names, the popup hides a significant part of the map, considerable stretches streets are hidden (e.g. around 2.3km of the bigger, orange street). So the POIs massively limit the map usefullness.
It's too many displayed POIs because many POI icons are so close they overlap each other, so I can not really recognize the single icon's shape. For instance, I cannot see where I can get food; I need to either zoom in till level 18 (tedious, see below) or manually search for these POIs (tedious, see above). So displaying the POIs limits it's own usefullness.
Nearly every small city has several guideposts, 2-3 churches, few museums, a station, a fortification,... So the pure existence of many POI types does not need to be transported by showing POI icons, but can be sufficiently safe be assumed for a city whose name is rendered with certain font size.
Switching to "City" render theme would hide most POIs in overview zoom levels, but at overview zoom levels, it does not display paths, so I cannot see where I could walk down from the mountain to the city.
Zooming in to e.g. level 17 in "City" theme makes paths & landcape feature's names visible, and in "Hike & bike" theme reduces density of POIs so they become useful. But that zoom level shows a very narrow area, so it becomes tedious & difficult to plan a longer hike because of contant scrolling the map.

Hence, I again unchecked "Show on map". What would make me use the feature?

→ It would be a big step if users could configure which POI types are displayed/hidden (for me, the related feature in OsmAnd proved easy to use and still helpful) or could adapt the prio of each POI group (e.g. by changing the sequence via drag & drop in LoPoints menu). I doubt many users are willing to configure for each zoom level which POI types to display, because it's many combinations and high effort, but you need to change it relatively due to changing information need (now looking for food, later for a bench, then for transport,...).

→ A smarter logic for when which POI icon is shown. Especiylly a dynamic / context aware logic could make POI display much more useful for "mixed density" areas as Lake Lucerne. For example, in the screenshot, the 3 icons for the hospital are extremely close to each other, so they could be condensed into one and users still knew where medical help could be found. For example, near the center of the screenshot, the rendering could recognize the POI icons do heavily overlap with each other (and they also overlap the city name but that is probably not recognizable by POI display) and thus, only in this part of the display, rendering rules of zoom level 14 or even 13 could be applied so that less POIs are shown but with recognizable icon.

→ Vector maps rendering themes already allow configuration which object types shall be visible (relates to 1st idea), and the map render engine can not only shift several icons slightly apart but also names & icons, so they do not overlap (relating to 2nd idea). So shifting some display tasks from POI DB to render theme might prove as more easy to implement. This closes the loop to the initial question: What features shall be rendered by LoMap & LoPoints? As written in initial question, for mountain activities, I do miss quite some feature types, and as written in https://help.locusmap.eu/ticket/26890, it is maybe more valuable for Asamm & users & whole ecosystem to let OpenAndroMap provide map+theme for mountain activities and invest Asamm's resources into something that does not yet exist in Locus' or whole OpenStreetMap-App universe 😀

Best regards, Georg

Hi Petr,

one straightforward way to reproduce the display is: Choose a LoMap and remove all but Elevate v2.5 (compatible with mapsforge v3 maps) from _themes folder and in Locus, activate that theme in map themes selector. Now the "guy on treadmill" appears. Other steps/actions can produce the same display. For example, switch to other map, e.g. mapsforge v5 map, imagine some time & actions passes by. You wonder why you still have the old Elevate 2.5 and remove it from _themes folder, later you switch back to a LoMap and the guy on treadmill appears – but as Elevate is neither visible in file system nor in Locus' map themes selector, and Elevate for mapsforge v5 maps looks quite different (in screenshot area, icon "guy scrambling a mountain" instead "guy on treadmill", rock is grey area with blocks instead plain grey, path in south west is blue instead grey, path in north east is brown dotted instead invisible,...) since years, one can easily assume LoMap's internal theme is used for rendering.

Concerning the shelter:

First of all, what I want to achive? I just want to see shelters but I do not want a cluttered map – yea, a quite difficult ridge walk 😀To give you a rought idea: For my taste + activities, OAM & Elevate are well balanced with minor "flaws" (e.g. benches a IMHO too dominant).

Second, to my big surprise, you were absolutely right that I did hide POI DB content. Why surprise? For the screenshot, I wanted to hide my personal points for sake of clarity, i.e. they are irrelevant for the issue, they could be misunderstood as produced by the render theme or POI DB, and they do litter the map. I assumed this setting to be independent from the display of POI DB, because a long tap on "Daten" (icon at top right in screenshot) tells "Punkte ausblenden" – and when Locus is used in DE/German, in most contexts, personal points are referred to as "Punkte" (e.g. inside "Daten" as tab title besides of "Tracks" or in sidebar entry title "Neuen Punkt auf der Karte hinzufügen") and few times also as "POIs" (e.g. within "Einstellungen > Punkte und Tracks > Prüfung auf doppelte POI's während des Imports"). In contrast, the points that are not personal but same for all users are usually referred to as "POIs" or "LoMaps-POIs", only at few places as "LoPoints" and "LoPunkte", but IIRC never as "Punkte". But "Punkte" in "Punkte ausblenden" refers to both types, not only personal points as usual.

→ Using exactly one term for each of the 3 point types – personal points, LoMaps-POIs, any kinds of point – across whole Locus would have helped to better understand the effect of "Punkte ausblenden".

Third, for the issue, it was not relevant that I activated "Punkte ausblenden" – shelters were also not shown as desired after deactivating "Punkte ausblenden", i.e. I still only had what LoMaps displays with internal hiking theme with all optional displays checked. Because of your explicit mention of "standard mode", "hide points" etc, I did play around more deeply and discovered how our two displays differ, so I can now explain what I saw 😀 As written in my last post, until now, I found the POI DB of no big help for what I want to achive: Assume you plan a hike. Center the map at "Stöckalp" (north east of "Abgeschütz") where you will leave car/bus, open "LoPoints" menu, click "POI in der Umgebung" (in EN probably "POIs nearby"), toggle visibility by clicking at the top onto the map icon with "99" written as an overlay. Now POIs become visible but only around current map center thus not near "Abgeschütz", see https://ibb.co/Yc5sd5M. So, I'd have to manually move the map and trigger POI display over and over again. Tedious 🙄 I do not want to do that, neither when planning a tour, nor while being on tour. Only due to you triggering me, I found out "LoPoints" menu > 3 dot menu > "Auf Karte anzeigen" (in EN probably "Show on map") was unchecked...ah, understood! 💡 When I checked it, the POIs appeared also automatically after moving the map. That is most likely what you saw and you are right, shelters do appear – if LoPoints are shown.

→ Maybe it's easy to make the LoPoints menu icon appearance change dependant on the "Show on map" state – similar to GPS icon switches between orange and green. That would make state more clear.

I reflected on why I did not have "Show on map" activated and knew after short try out: In overview zoom levels (somewhere around 13), for areas like beautiful Lake Lucerne which is the example we used for the shelter and which is a mix of smaller cities and rural stretches in short distance, too many POI icons & pop-ups appear (https://ibb.co/py4hJKG) and most of these POIs are most of the time of no benefit for me at that zoom level:

It's too many displayed POIs because their icons hide several or even all characters of many location names, the popup hides a significant part of the map, considerable stretches streets are hidden (e.g. around 2.3km of the bigger, orange street). So the POIs massively limit the map usefullness.
It's too many displayed POIs because many POI icons are so close they overlap each other, so I can not really recognize the single icon's shape. For instance, I cannot see where I can get food; I need to either zoom in till level 18 (tedious, see below) or manually search for these POIs (tedious, see above). So displaying the POIs limits it's own usefullness.
Nearly every small city has several guideposts, 2-3 churches, few museums, a station, a fortification,... So the pure existence of many POI types does not need to be transported by showing POI icons, but can be sufficiently safe be assumed for a city whose name is rendered with certain font size.
Switching to "City" render theme would hide most POIs in overview zoom levels, but at overview zoom levels, it does not display paths, so I cannot see where I could walk down from the mountain to the city.
Zooming in to e.g. level 17 in "City" theme makes paths & landcape feature's names visible, and in "Hike & bike" theme reduces density of POIs so they become useful. But that zoom level shows a very narrow area, so it becomes tedious & difficult to plan a longer hike because of contant scrolling the map.

Hence, I again unchecked "Show on map". What would make me use the feature?

→ It would be a big step if users could configure which POI types are displayed/hidden (for me, the related feature in OsmAnd proved easy to use and still helpful) or could adapt the prio of each POI group (e.g. by changing the sequence via drag & drop in LoPoints menu). I doubt many users are willing to configure for each zoom level which POI types to display, because it's many combinations and high effort, but you need to change it relatively due to changing information need (now looking for food, later for a bench, then for transport,...).

→ A smarter logic for when which POI icon is shown. Especiylly a dynamic / context aware logic could make POI display much more useful for "mixed density" areas as Lake Lucerne. For example, in the screenshot, the 3 icons for the hospital are extremely close to each other, so they could be condensed into one and users still knew where medical help could be found. For example, near the center of the screenshot, the rendering could recognize the POI icons do heavily overlap with each other (and they also overlap the city name but that is probably not recognizable by POI display) and thus, only in this part of the display, rendering rules of zoom level 14 or even 13 could be applied so that less POIs are shown but with recognizable icon.

→ Vector maps rendering themes already allow configuration which object types shall be visible (relates to 1st idea), and the map render engine can not only shift several icons slightly apart but also names & icons, so they do not overlap (relating to 2nd idea). So shifting some display tasks from POI DB to render theme might prove as more easy to implement. This closes the loop to the initial question: What features shall be rendered by LoMap & LoPoints? As written in initial question, for mountain activities, I do miss quite some feature types, and as written in https://help.locusmap.eu/ticket/26890, it is maybe more valuable for Asamm & users & whole ecosystem to let OpenAndroMap provide map+theme for mountain activities and invest Asamm's resources into something that does not yet exist in Locus' or whole OpenStreetMap-App universe 😀

Best regards, Georg

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Petr Voldan ●

Hi Georg,

"guy on a horizontal treadmill" - I'm not sure I was able to simulate. But I can see that "guy on a horizontal treadmill" is rendered in the map very likely because the rock is marked as leisure=sportscentre nad as sport=climbing. When DB POIs are loaded the combination of Sportcentre and climbing is used and the icon for climbing is used. Maybe I miss something but it seems to be ok for me...

Hide pois - you're right it's quite strange that also POIs are also affected by this feature. As I know this feature is waiting for improving (about last 5 years :)) and we'll change the behaviour when we focus on it.

Thank you for detailed description of complications. I think I can agree almost with everything. I hope that there will be time to finally focus on offline LoMaps and LoPoints this year. No doubt POI grouping and better map visibility has to be key part of planned LoMaps improving. We already took in mind it during the implementation of online LoMaps and online LoPoints - see the map in Web planner https://web.locusmap.app/cs/?lat=46.883396&lng=8.651154&z=15

I hope we'll be able use similar system also for offline LoPoints

> I doubt many users are willing to configure for each zoom level which POI types to display

I'm not personally convinced if it's a good idea. We're planning a little bit different approach - to offer better search when user can search for category (e.q. restaurants) > Category "Restaurants" will appears in search results and when user select the "Restaurants" category he can browse the map with highlighted restaurants. No zoom limits, no limit on number of displayed points. I know it's not exactly what you ask for but I should be more usable for majority of users. We're actually working on it for web planner.

I am not sure I have answered all the points, but I agree that there are many things that need to be improved. However, please feel free to contact me if there are other deficiencies that need to be pointed out.

Thanks, Petr

Hi Georg,

"guy on a horizontal treadmill" - I'm not sure I was able to simulate. But I can see that "guy on a horizontal treadmill" is rendered in the map very likely because the rock is marked as leisure=sportscentre nad as sport=climbing. When DB POIs are loaded the combination of Sportcentre and climbing is used and the icon for climbing is used. Maybe I miss something but it seems to be ok for me...

Hide pois - you're right it's quite strange that also POIs are also affected by this feature. As I know this feature is waiting for improving (about last 5 years :)) and we'll change the behaviour when we focus on it.

Thank you for detailed description of complications. I think I can agree almost with everything. I hope that there will be time to finally focus on offline LoMaps and LoPoints this year. No doubt POI grouping and better map visibility has to be key part of planned LoMaps improving. We already took in mind it during the implementation of online LoMaps and online LoPoints - see the map in Web planner https://web.locusmap.app/cs/?lat=46.883396&lng=8.651154&z=15

I hope we'll be able use similar system also for offline LoPoints

> I doubt many users are willing to configure for each zoom level which POI types to display

I'm not personally convinced if it's a good idea. We're planning a little bit different approach - to offer better search when user can search for category (e.q. restaurants) > Category "Restaurants" will appears in search results and when user select the "Restaurants" category he can browse the map with highlighted restaurants. No zoom limits, no limit on number of displayed points. I know it's not exactly what you ask for but I should be more usable for majority of users. We're actually working on it for web planner.

I am not sure I have answered all the points, but I agree that there are many things that need to be improved. However, please feel free to contact me if there are other deficiencies that need to be pointed out.

Thanks, Petr

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LoMaps: Display of climbing sites, via ferrata, security measures on hiking trails etc intended?

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