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May update: Release notes 202501-V6
- OAM background for Europe now from Christian's new (May) maps
- motorway labels horizontal again

April update: Release notes 202501-V4
- OAM background for Europe now from Christian's new (April) maps
- Restricted areas are now visible from ZL 8 for Europe, too

March update: Release notes 202501-V2
- The complete OAM background for ZL 8 and above is now based on Christian's March 2025 OAM vector maps release.
- Restricted areas (shoot first, ask later - they can be bigger than small states in some places) are now included from ZL 8 onwards (in Europe from ZL 10 for now, waiting for next round of vector map generation).

Happy to announce that the new set of maps is available on the OAM web site https://www.openandromaps.org/en/downloads/general-maps.

These are the major news:
- The complete OAM background for ZL 8 and above is now based on Christian's January 2025 OAM vector maps release.
- Ferry lines and curated energy sources (wind, solar etc.) are now based on January 2025 OSM data, too.
  As the solar boom in residential areas has flooded the maps in some places with "S" signs, I heavily restricted that display to larger solar installations.
  A look behind the scenes:
   - from early 2024 the OSM solar entries rose from a bit more than 2m to nearly 3.5m, i.e. nearly doubling in less than a year.
   - the newly introduced clip level (no points at all, larger panel areas only) took out nearly 2.5m entities from display.
- MBTiles maps have a map center set (again); for the world maps this is near Antarctica to keep them out of "nearest map" lists. The map center for regional maps is (about) central to the respective region.
- Also peaks with high isolation are computed based on the January OSM data.
  Doing some QA by comparing to results from August 2024 I found quite a number of peaks that sit on places of earlier "virtual" peaks (based on Copernicus data). Not claiming influence by the world maps here; it's just nice to see.

Enjoy!

Release notes 202406-1.0

The OAM background from ZL 8 and up now is rendered from May/June 2024 edition of Christian's OAM vector maps (incl. Near East, for which the OSM vandalism repair seems completed).

In less densely populated areas, not every – even significant – peak has a name, and even if it does, such a peak is far from being in OSM. Based on the 30m Copernicus DEM, I have identified peaks with a dominance of 100km or 200km for all continents except Antarctica. If one of these peaks does not have a known peak in its vicinity in OSM, it is displayed in these new world maps as 'Loc.HP' (for 200 km isolation) or as 'loc.HP' (for 100 km isolation), in each case with the coordinate (2 decimals) and its altitude. There are a bit more than 1000 of these.

So if a user knows a name for such a 'local high point', please enter it in the OSM database so that I can replace the (virtual) auxiliary summit with the real OSM summit in the next release of the maps. I expect that in the vastness of northern Canada, Alaska and Siberia as well as the tropical rainforests, many of them will remain nameless. But they are still relatively high and isolated 🙂

Those are the changes:
- The OAM background from ZL 8 up now is rendered from the July 2023 edition of Christian's OAM vector maps (YES, OAM goes on - thank you, Christian!).
- Increased and earlier visibility of offshore energy and power sources for ZL 4 to 8, while reducing visibility of the land based installations for those low zoom levels.
Have a good time
Michael

Those are the changes since summer:
- The OAM background from ZL 8 up now is rendered from the Oct edition of the OAM vector maps.
- Wind turbines could overcrowd and hide streets and other useful information in ZL 9 - 11. Now a grid based grouping into "WP" is used, substituting all turbines in the respective tile (~4km for ZL 9-10, ~2km for ZL 11). Offshore farms show all turbines as available in OSM.
Enjoy - maybe only couch surfing this time of the year :-)
Cheers
Michael

https://www.openandromaps.org/en/downloads/general-maps

Release notes 202207-1.3
- The OAM background from ZL 8 up now is rendered from the July edition of the OAM vector maps.
- Locus download script for ZL 11 World map corrected.

Release notes 202207-1.2
- Explanation of map categories and download options added before the download table.
Release notes 202207-1.1
- Multiple identical labels for some solar and wind farms are combined to one for each. Corrected label multiple instances to one. Only 6 maps that contain Europe ZL 11 are affected.

Those are the news from version 202207-1.0:
- OAM base maps updated to May 2022 for Europe and to April 2022 version for the rest of the world.
- After a longer break the ferry connections for ZL 6 and 7 are updated as well as the energy productions (following respective lists from Wikipedia).
- The regional addon and overlay maps are unified: OAM-W1-7-EP8-12-J80.mbtiles (as an example) contains the world up to +/- 85 latitude and ZL 7 as well as a large chunk of Europe from ZL 8 to 12 consecutively. Hence those maps can be used independantly as well as an overlay. Also, now it's only 21 maps and 70 GBs (instead of 110 GB).
- Up to ZL 12 all maps consist of tiles in JPG 80% quality, a real progress compared to the former 60% of the addon maps and somewhat better than the 70% of the earlier world maps. File sizes increase reasonably, wich in over-compensated by the storage capacity increases of recent years. For ZL 13 a quality of 70% is used.
- The maps can be grouped as:
     - world maps ZL 8 to 11; JPG 80%; MBTiles
     - world maps ZL 10 and 11; PNG format; sqlitedb (for apps that cannot handle MBTiles)
     - regional maps up to ZL 11 (all continents), 12 (large parts of Europe) and 13 (smaller segments of Europe); JPG 80% resp. 70%; MBTiles
     The MBTiles world maps are available as direct downloads for Locus and Orux apps; all groups can be downloaded manually, too.
   
Enjoy - and feel free to comment.

Michael

https://www.openandromaps.org/en/downloads/general-maps

These are the major changes in version 202202-1.0:
- The OAM base maps are from Feb. 2022 for Europe and from Jan. 2022 for the rest of the planet.
- In the high North hill shading showed extreme distortions from earlier data sources. Current elevation data provides a much better representation. In the end, hill are the only relevant thing of notice in those regions ...
- Missing tiles around the date line (+/-180 degrees) are available now. Many TXs to Emux (Mapsforge) and Robert (MOBAC) for amending their toolsets.
- The old naming scheme for world maps is no longer offered.

As always, feedback is very welcome.

Michael

Updated with Christian's OAM Sept. release for the backgrounds for ZL8+

https://www.openandromaps.org/en/downloads/general-maps

Here are the most relevant news – feedback welcome:

Release notes 202108-1.0

The density of settlement names has been reduced considerably for areas with names in two alphabets (latin plus cyrillic, arabic, chinese), hindi, etc.) and higher settlement density.

The names of places (not in the sense of settlements) now appear (*) in areas that are settlement-free, with a brownish border. With this edition, farms are also shown this way (hardly in Eastern China, Central Europe, etc., but in Australia and the US Midwest, e.g.).

The regional addons to the ZL-10 world map with a transparent top zoom level for Locus are dropped. In Locus 4 there is the max. re-scale mechanism which makes this overhead unnecessary. In Locus 3 the top level is zoomed in for 2 zoom steps before the vector map becomes visible as well.

At the suggestion of Sonny (specialist for DTM) the world maps get a prefix that makes the names less cryptic. For example, W1-10-J70.mbtiles becomes OAM-World-1-10-J70.mbtiles. However, for a few releases I will provide both naming schemes to give users more time to adjust the settings in their apps (with the discontinued model being marked as such).

Correction of the nationality of Agaléga Islands (SC -> MU).

(*) well, since April in fact, but undocumented  ;-)

PS: As I saw from my torrent feeding for offline Wikipedias (AARD2: https://github.com/itkach/slob/wiki/Dictionaries and Kiwix: https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages/en), there can be downloads from parts of the world that take even a week. Hence I'd like to do a test and offer the overview maps via torrents, too. Not to be used as the standard way for downloads, but rather as a last resort if bandwidth and/or stability of the connection are not sufficient for a direct download.
Before you start the Torrent (see attached), make sure you ONLY select the maps you want in your Torrent App, from the embedded folder (which contains dozens of maps and GBs)!

To those who are interested, here are the release notes 2020-08/09:

- When generating the new coverage images I noticed a line between the Balkans and Patagonia - the consequence of a script error since 2018, that only got apparent with the OSM data from July. While cleaning up I also included oil wells into the maps (from ZL 10 on, as for Solar etc.).

- Some maps are offered in SQLiteDB format, in addition to MBTiles, for apps that cannot work with MBTiles.

- The melting in the Ant-/Arctic makes the research there ever more important. Their list is updated according to current Wikipedia information, now with the Arctic stations, too.

- In doing so, I extended the map coverage for ZL 7 to 10 - see here. The collapse of memory card prices more than compensates for the increase in map sizes :-)
   
- Settlements, Ferries and Power Plants are based on the 5th of July 2020 OSM database information (unfortunately only with this release 1.1).

- From this data base, hundreds of province capitals have also been added.

- For the first time a world map in PNG format is offered; i.e. all information of all zoom levels is rendered in loss free PNG format. That quality comes at a price: nearly 6 GB for ZL 1 to 10. That makes sense (only) for exports or screenshots from high res. devices.

- All other world maps up to ZL 10 are compressed to JPEG quality 70 for their highest zoom levels. The regional maps with ZL 11+ are coded with JPEG quality 60.

And the link for convenience:

https://www.openandromaps.org/en/downloads/general-maps