On Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:40:54 +0000 (UTC), Chris Miller wrote:
L> This sound like a lot of work for you and for algorithms while humans L> can perform this task with ease. So perhaps the current crude (I L> don't mean in an insulting way!) method might just be fine for the L> time being and people can fix these kind of problems easily by hand. L> Especially when working on areas.list files can be simplified through L> a (webbased perhaps) tool.
I agree with everything you say here, and a user tool will definitely give the best and most flexible results. I'd still like to try and improve the
automated split though for a couple of reasons. I think plenty of people (based on a sample size of one - myself ;)) aren't too concerned about where the borders are, but would appreciate tiles that hold as much information
as possible without breaking mkgmap or introducing other problems. Currently the tiles vary a lot in what they contain, plus figuring out the right --max-nodes threshold involves a bit of trial and error. The better the automated split, the less post-processing that is required. Plus, it's an interesting challenge to work on :)
Agreed, it would be totally awesome to have a density map thing and 1st time correct tile size determination.
How about splitting those red areas in half again (taking care with the
alignment), rather than just getting rid of the areas completely?
L> Or do you mean to have splitter split those problem areas again by L> feeding *only* that problem area and a very low --max-nodes L> parameter? Because that is a solution that I did not think about L> before. I just run splitter once a week on 2 halves of the planet and L> if tiles fail then that's it...
That would certainly do what you want - it would give you a more balanced
split than Excel because it takes node distribution into account, plus it
would handle the alignment problem for you. It would even be possible to automate this though I'm not sure it's worth the extra complexity of the splitter in terms of both code and command line parameters.
I'm building the maps using a CLI php script so I can use that to call splitter again to redo the failed areas. Shouldn't be a big deal, it's just something that I never though about.