I abandoned the approach of continuing working on the cannibalized code from Mini 3D Terrain Viewer simply because there were too many problems which I didn’t know how to solve easily. Anyway, I think the skipping over basic stuff like 3D maths and DirectX is not very wise - sooner or later the things you neglected come to haunt you.

I started posting current results of my effort on flickr - this will be a sort of a snapshot history of Kosmos WorldFlier from the day one, step by step. Not much to see yet - I managed to render all OSM ways as 3D lines, you can see the Isle of Wight there. This is just a temporary solution - road should be rendered as mashes, but that will come later. Right now I’m working on the camera navigation stuff.

I’m still using DirectX managed SDK for this. I decided to implement the inital version with this SDK simply because I already have some limited experience with it - I didn’t want to make this harder by introducing some other SDK which I haven’t worked with yet. Later, I’ll probably migrate the code to use some other library (there are several options: OpenTK, Irrlicht or something else).

The screenshots show WorldFlier and Kosmos GUI - what you set in Kosmos GUI to be visible will be displayed in the 3D. So first I generated a elevation coloring map and then I used Landsat’s satellite images.

No OpenStreetMap data this time - there were some changes in OSMXAPI that prevented me from downloading the latest data.

This is the second article about Kosmos on golem.de. The first one was published in January.

Now I go to bed

You can download the 2.1 version from the standard place: http://downloads.igorbrejc.net/osm/kosmos/

UPDATE (July 19th): I discovered a small bug in the new release - generated contours were not shown on the map. This has been fixed now, please download a new package.

So what has been improved?

Relations

Kosmos can now render relations. I’ve added a sample rule in general purpose rules Wiki page for rendering cycle routes:

Rule Name	Targets	Selector	Template	Options	Comment
RouteCycle		type=route route=bicycle	Polyline (MinZoom=7, Color=#50FF0718, Width=7:1;17:18, Curved=true)

will produce a pinkish half-transparent cycle route:

Note that rules ignore roles of members in a relation - currently I don’t see how the roles could be incorporated into the rendering rules.

Text Rendering

There is a new TextMode called WayCenter which draws the text (roughly) in the center of a way:

There are also two new parameters which enable rendering of outlined text: OutlineColor and OutlineWidth, example (sorry for the odd formatting):

PlaceTown place=town Text (MinZoom=10, MaxZoom=15, Color=black, TagToUse=name, FontName=Trebuchet MS, FontStyle=bold, FontSize=10:10;17:25, OutlineColor=white, OutlineWidth=20%)

will produce something like this:

Kosmos now knows how to wrap labels:

The wrapping is done using the "Text label wrap factor" preferences setting. It is a ratio of (roughly) maximum line length compared to the line height. Normal values are somewhere from 4 to 10, I guess.

Map Scale Indicator

… is now shown on the map:

You can turn it off. You can also switch from metric to U.S. Customary units in Preferences dialog ("Use metric units").

Rendering Engine Speed-Up

I’ve refactored quite a large piece of rendering engine code to increase the rendering speed and lower the memory consumption. Basically, in previous versions each rendered map element had all its settings (color name, width, …) stored by itself. Now the settings shared by multiple elements are stored in one place (a "style"). This also allows caching of GDI+ objects for each style without the need to recreate them for each map element.

There are also a number of bugfixes in this release (basically every bug that was reported has been fixed).

Source Code

I’ve also published the sources here: http://downloads.igorbrejc.net/osm/kosmos/source/ . I’ll prepare a special Wiki page with some information about the source code and what one can and what one cannot expect from it. So please be patient before starting to send me hate notes about not being able to compile the source code

A long time ago I mentioned I’ve been dreaming about drawing OpenStreetMap maps in 3D. Well for past few days I’ve been playing around with DirectX. Basically I took Mini 3D Terrain Viewer tool kindly provided by Patrick Murris and did some cannibalising of the code to make it draw a SRTM3 generated relief with an Kosmos-exported map of my home town Maribor (OSM map).

Here are some screenshots of the results so far (you can download somewhat larger versions of images from here).

The images are reduced from 1680×1000 resolution due to bandwidth constraints. The Kosmos-exported map which was used as a texture has a resolution of around 8000×8000 pixels (elevation contours are a part of that image and not rendered as 3D objects themselves). The whole thing was rendered on a GeForce 7600 GS.

This is just a crude prototype of 3D rendering which I want to introduce into Kosmos in the future. My wish is to draw OSM elements directly in 3D and not as part of a texture, but since I’m not an expert on DirectX, this could take a while (any helpful suggestions from 3D experts will be appreciated). But even in this crude state I think it looks quite nice, don’t you think?

Anyway, now that I have finished most of the work on the GUI redesign, I can concentrate on improving the rendering engine, which I mostly neglected during the past months. A few days ago I implemented support for rendering relations (yes, you can now render cycle ways similarly to the CycleMap). I also added the ability to render outlined text - this has been lying on my todo list for a long time.

While implementing these features I accidentally had a “bright” idea on how to reduce the memory footprint of rendering objects in Kosmos and also (hopefully) increase the speed of rendering.  Right now I’m about half-done, I’ll probably need a few days more to finish it. So Kosmos 2.1 is coming soon…

I decided to fix this by implementing my own parsing logic for hotkeys. Again, I could not test if this now works for non-English Windows. So please download the latest package (2.0.508.0) and let me know if this problem is solved.

NOTE: before proceeding I should warn you that I consider this release to be in beta stage. I spent the last month killing bugs in Kosmos, but since a lot of new functionality was added there are bound to be quite a few bugs still lurking around. If/when you encounter them, please report them on the Kosmos OSM Wiki talk page.

Download

You can download the latest version from here. I’ll be also publishing the source code in the next few days.

So what’s new?

Tabbed Document Interface

First of all, the GUI interface has been completely rewritten. Kosmos GUI now uses an tabbed document interface (TDI):

As you can see from the screenshot, the user interface is somewhat reminiscent of Visual Studio. You have a Project Explorer through which you can edit the project file. There is the Properties window which displays properties of the currently selected project or data file. There is also the Activity Logger window which shows the activity Kosmos is performing.

Of course, there is the Map window with the familiar Kosmos-rendered OSM map. You can also look for new maps using the Web Map window which is able to display most common Web maps (OSM, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft).

Downloading OSM Data

Kosmos can now download the OSM map data from the OSMXAPI server. So in theory you can now generate a map without any additional tools. Be warned though: OSMXAPI can be quite slow sometimes, especially if you choose to download large map areas.

GPX Support

Kosmos now has the ability to download GPS data from a GPS unit and display it on the map. You just need to have gpsbabel software downloaded and saved somewhere on the disk.

Relief Contours

I integrated the Srtm2Osm tool into Kosmos GUI so that users can generate relief contours for any map area:

Imagery From Landsat And openaerialmap.org

Another nice feature in Kosmos 2.0 is the ability to download free satellite imagery from Landsat and openaerialmap.org sites:

Tile Server

The tile server (launched from the Kosmos Console) is now able to render all of the data specified in the project file. This means that you can now render tiles which contain shaded reliefs, satellite imagery, GPX tracks, elevation contours.

Other Stuff

There are lot of other improvements which I will describe on the Kosmos OSM Wiki pages in the next days.

What’s Missing

This is not the end of Kosmos development, far from it. I still have quite a few ideas I want to introduce into Kosmos. I realize that a lot of things are still missing - I have a “to do” list that is growing day by day. Hopefully future releases will have even more cool features. So be patient… And do send me some feedback, critiques and ideas

I’m happy to announce that the development is in its final stages. Most of the new features that I’ve planned for Kosmos 2.0 have been finished, now I’m mainly working on bugfixing and final touches. I expect the first release to be sometime this month (June).

Since I haven’t released any new stuff in months, today I decided to at least publish the first screenshot of the new user interface:

As you can see, Kosmos 2.0 uses the tabbed document interface (TDI). On the left you can see the Project Explorer window, which can now be used to edit the project - no more manual text-editing of XML files. Notice the project tree view now supports showing of GPX files (which can now be downloaded directly form the GPS unit) and elevation contours (which can be generated inside the Kosmos GUI). On the bottom is the logging window, which can be used to track what Kosmos is doing. TDI itself if fully configurable, so you can move, resize or hide windows any way you like.

You can track the progress of the development on the Kosmos OSM wiki page.