[Announce] modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system - Page 67 - maemo.org

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	jd4200	2011-05-25 , 18:32
	Posts: 451 \| Thanked: 424 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ England	#661

Originally Posted by mscion

Ah. Yes, I had made a mistake. Thanks for straightening me out. The only thing now is the loading time seems much longer. I waited for over 3 minutes and it still hadn't loaded. The usual yahoo map seemed to load up very quickly and was very responsive. Perhaps there is something wrong with the google data. I will check again later.

You're not doing it over 3G are you?
Doing so would eat through your data plan tariff in no time.

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	woody14619	2011-05-25 , 18:58
	Posts: 1,455 \| Thanked: 3,309 times \| Joined on Dec 2009 @ Rochester, NY	#662

Originally Posted by slender

I have never ever understood people who are able to listen that robotic voice anywhere. IIRC conversation about pre-recorded voices have been discussed in Nokia maps thread where people hacked default navigation app. There people posted some recorded voice files.

I prefer the robotic voice to a mixture. And frankly, "Turn left in 700 yards" is a lot less useful than "Turn left on Filmore Ave", even if it mispronounces the name. (And mixing the two, the way the nav app patch does is worse.)

If there is an addition of solid playback files for simple directions, please make it optional!

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mscion	2011-05-25 , 20:30
Posts: 1,873 \| Thanked: 4,529 times \| Joined on Mar 2010 @ North Potomac MD	#663

Originally Posted by jd4200

You're not doing it over 3G are you?
Doing so would eat through your data plan tariff in no time.

I do not think the tarrif is an issue here. I was trying to use up my at&t pay as you go plan which is normally a slug (edge (2G?)). I had previously noticed that ModRana did fairly well with Google maps when using this at&t plan and was checking to see if the recent upgrade improved the process of tiling of the Google Maps as well. Anyways, I checked what was left on my plan before and after I had done the test. There was 13mb before I did the test and 13mb after so I think nothing, or very little data was transfered. Google maps would probably have eaten up a noticeable amount. So I will try again later. Regardless, thanks for your help.

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	jd4200	2011-05-25 , 21:11
	Posts: 451 \| Thanked: 424 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ England	#664

Originally Posted by mscion

I do not think the tarrif is an issue here. I was trying to use up my at&t pay as you go plan which is normally a slug (edge (2G?)). I had previously noticed that ModRana did fairly well with Google maps when using this at&t plan and was checking to see if the recent upgrade improved the process of tiling of the Google Maps as well. Anyways, I checked what was left on my plan before and after I had done the test. There was 13mb before I did the test and 13mb after so I think nothing, or very little data was transfered. Google maps would probably have eaten up a noticeable amount. So I will try again later. Regardless, thanks for your help.

I wasn't implying that the problem was down to having no tariff left, it was just a warning, because it uses so much data to transfer the images you could be hit with a nasty bill.
Normally, well over here at least, it can take a day or two for your statement to update with your recent data transfers.

If it isn't an issue with your data provider, then I don't know what it could be; maybe you could try deleteing your Google Satellite cache in /home/user/MyDocs/.maps/Google Satellite, to see if it downloads a fresh map tile.

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mscion	2011-05-25 , 21:47
Posts: 1,873 \| Thanked: 4,529 times \| Joined on Mar 2010 @ North Potomac MD	#665

Originally Posted by jd4200

I wasn't implying that the problem was down to having no tariff left, it was just a warning, because it uses so much data to transfer the images you could be hit with a nasty bill.
Normally, well over here at least, it can take a day or two for your statement to update with your recent data transfers.

If it isn't an issue with your data provider, then I don't know what it could be; maybe you could try deleteing your Google Satellite cache in /home/user/MyDocs/.maps/Google Satellite, to see if it downloads a fresh map tile.

I think I might have made a mistake in that the Satellite image I used to use was actually the Yahoo one. My bad here! But the good news is that the Yahoo version is working great! A big kudos to martinK here. I also tried the suggestion with Google Satellite but I still could not get anything besides "loading" on the screen", even using wifi, so something is amiss here.

By the way, I ate up 2MB testiing yahoo. It costs $15 per 100MB.
Thanks for the warning!

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MartinK	2011-05-26 , 23:13
Posts: 1,548 \| Thanked: 7,510 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic	#666

Originally Posted by jd4200

One question: I think we all agree that espeak is not great (though there is no real alternative), so would it be possible to use pre-recorded sounds for certain actions?

Yep, why not.

But modRana currently doesn't know the turn type during navigation. It just gets a list of points with associated routing messages from Google - there is no turn type (left, right, 3. exit, etc.) metadata currently. But It is quite probable that turn metadata will be available in the (near) future - IMO Monav supplies it as do some online OSM based routing services.

Then It would actually make sense to add.

BTW, If I remember correctly there was some talk about providing voice samples for Mappero but I don't know how it worked out in the end.

Originally Posted by jd4200

Being able to use advanced TTS such as AT&T Natural Voices would be great.
Though there licence would prohibit distribution.

ModRana uses Espeak through the CLI - it could use any other TTS with CLI interface with very little modification - or even without modification provided you just switch to manual mode and modify the CLI parameters yourself (this is possible since 0.25).

Originally Posted by woody14619

If there is an addition of solid playback files for simple directions, please make it optional!

No problem there - the users should be the ones that choose what to use, not the developers choosing in their place.

Originally Posted by Netweaver

when following the progress of the batch download, it takes sometimes lots of seconds for one tile, very variable speed.

I'm using SQLite storage and I'm on Wifi. What should be a normal download rate ?

It takes me now more than 2 minutes for 50 tiles. Verrrrry slow.
over a sample period of 150 tiles, it took on average 2.5 s for one tile ...

For the rest, very nice program, coming along strong in features and greatdeveloper responsiveness. Keep up the good wo rk!

There are quite a few variables concerning tile download speed:

* bug in my code - this is always a possibility
network issues - congestion, packetloss
overloaded tileserver - most tileservers don't actually store tiles from the lower, most detailed zoom levels, to save storage space - they generate them on demand - downloading such tiles might take longer than stored ones - and the tile server might actually start throttling your requests if you download too much at once

Originally Posted by petur

No worries... but did you see (reproduce) anything?

I've done this:
1. removed the OpenStreetMap I folder
2. selected the OSM Mapnik layer
3. selected sqlite for tile storage
4. switched options->network->Network usage to only for important data to simulate offline mode (this disables automatic tile download but not manual batch download)
5. started a 2 km download around "here" with all layers up & down - about 500 tiles
6. it was surprisingly fast in the begging but than slowed to a crawl - might be due to the tile generation for lower zl's, as described above
7. no tiles seem to be missing on lower zl's

This of course does not mean there is no bug - I have tested on only a small sample (2 km vs 20 km). The batch download currently doesn't handle failed tile downloads in any way - it does not re-download them, failed downloads don't even show up in the log. There might have been some network or tileserver issue during your long download that caused some of the tiles to be skipped.

So, what to do about this ?

I'll add a counter of failed downloads to the batch download dialog
make the batch retry failed downloads a fixed number of times

As a workaround (id like to push an update before saturday, but just to be sure

), you can just try to run a long batch twice - it should download any missing tiles. And you can check if you actually have the tiles by going to the semi-offline mode described above, before actually going into the middle of the Siberia and finding that you have no maps.

But I did spot an issue during this test after all - the radius is interpreted as a diameter.

So if you set 2 km radius, modRana downloads a 2 km diameter -> 1 km radius.

This is of course a bug and it will be fixed it (by adding *2 somewhere).

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modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
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Last edited by MartinK; 2011-05-26 at 23:20.

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	jd4200	2011-05-27 , 00:11
	Posts: 451 \| Thanked: 424 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ England	#667

Originally Posted by MartinK

ModRana uses Espeak through the CLI - it could use any other TTS with CLI interface with very little modification - or even without modification provided you just switch to manual mode and modify the CLI parameters yourself (this is possible since 0.25).

I don't know what I am missing, but if I modify the string to use an alternative program, it just doesn't seem to work.
I've tried calling a simple bash script which takes in the %qmessage% argument and just writes it out to another file, but nothing.

BTW, I have just sent a donation your way, albeit it is only a small one.
Student eh?

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petur	2011-05-27 , 09:25
Posts: 650 \| Thanked: 497 times \| Joined on Oct 2008 @ Ghent, Belgium	#668

Originally Posted by MartinK

I've done this:
1. removed the OpenStreetMap I folder
2. selected the OSM Mapnik layer
3. selected sqlite for tile storage
4. switched options->network->Network usage to only for important data to simulate offline mode (this disables automatic tile download but not manual batch download)
5. started a 2 km download around "here" with all layers up & down - about 500 tiles
6. it was surprisingly fast in the begging but than slowed to a crawl - might be due to the tile generation for lower zl's, as described above
7. no tiles seem to be missing on lower zl's

This of course does not mean there is no bug - I have tested on only a small sample (2 km vs 20 km). The batch download currently doesn't handle failed tile downloads in any way - it does not re-download them, failed downloads don't even show up in the log. There might have been some network or tileserver issue during your long download that caused some of the tiles to be skipped.

I just tried again at the location I'm going to, and after it downloaded 5445 tiles of the same zoomlevel, I couldn't scroll past the location I started at, the tiles just said 'loading'

Now switched to sqlite and re-downloading to see if that will work :/

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jj0	2011-05-27 , 09:30
Posts: 73 \| Thanked: 33 times \| Joined on Nov 2010	#669

Originally Posted by petur

I couldn't scroll past the location I started at, the tiles just said 'loading'

These are the same problems I'm experiencing often, i.e. the tile loading slows down considerably, and sometimes just gets stuck, i.e. it just says loading...

A restart of modRana usually gets the tiles loaded...

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MartinK	2011-05-27 , 09:41
Posts: 1,548 \| Thanked: 7,510 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic	#670

Originally Posted by jd4200

I don't know what I am missing, but if I modify the string to use an alternative program, it just doesn't seem to work.
I've tried calling a simple bash script which takes in the %qmessage% argument and just writes it out to another file, but nothing.

I'll check it out - maybe it's working dirctory related ? I'd guess it runs the string in the /opt/modrana directory.

Originally Posted by jd4200

BTW, I have just sent a donation your way, albeit it is only a small one.

Thanks a lot !

Originally Posted by jd4200

Student eh?

Yep

I originally started to work on modRana for my Bachelors thesis - which I successfully defended about a year ago.

Originally Posted by petur

I just tried again at the location I'm going to, and after it downloaded 5445 tiles of the same zoomlevel, I couldn't scroll past the location I started at, the tiles just said 'loading'

Now switched to sqlite and re-downloading to see if that will work :/

OK, I'll try to test with a larger download.

BTW which location & layer are you trying to download ? Maybe its somehow location or layer specific. Also does the same are show up normally with automatic tile download ?