Version: 0.7.1 (using 4.2.2 (KDE 4.2.2), Kubuntu packages) Compiler: cc OS: Linux (i686) release 2.6.28-11-generic I'm using Marble on Ubuntu 9.04 with installed KDE. As I mostly use the OpenStreetMap in Marble and I'm not always connected to the internet when using Marble I would really like to have a feature that fills the drive cache of Marble (/home/hgro/.marble/data/maps/earth/openstreetmap) with the whole earth's map data without exploring every point of the world in Marble. If for example there would be a feature that opens a planet.osm.gz/.bz2 file of OSM (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm) and extracts the data as png-pictures into Marble's drive cache, I would be able to use the OSM when I am travelling and do have my notebook but not an internet connection. The german website www.geofabrik.de offers .osm files which don't contain the whole earth but just a country/continent (http://download.geofabrik.de/osm/). Thank you for reading, I hope it was possible to understand my wish as I don't speak English as my first language. Helmut Grokenberger
Planet.osm file is like 150GiB, bzipped - 5.4GiB. But i also want this feature to be implemented. There are several renderers for that .osm data (for example, you should check http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmarender (creates .svg, this is the best one imo, http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmarender/orp - implementation in perl), http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Mapnik - creates 256x256 pngs. It should be at least checked if it is possible to minimize internet and disk space usage by getting .osm data of the region instead of .png files and processing it locally. Maybe it is a good idea, starting from some zoom level?
IMHO, on-demand rendering will be heavy. And storing OSM data takes, as you said, also some disk space. In Marble 0.10.1, you can download in cache all tiles of a region in several zooms defined in a range. I think it is a suitable solution for an offline usage. Don't you think?
Imho, it is. So the offline usage is now possible and solved very nicely for general use. But on the other hand, offline osm renderer plugin might still be useful for various reasons, for example: 1) For truly offline use, updating .osm data is much simplier (there is a patch released everyday, that weights about 100M packed). Updating the whole (or half) planet's cache everyday (or once a week) would be awful. This is in the case if one wants an up to date map for the whole (or a large part of the) planet. 2) It is possible that one might not want to depend on the server and wants to have a standalone set of data (in editable, original format), that is rendered on his computer. Just because. 3) I am not sure if rendering will be much slower than downloading. The rendering time should be checked. This is low priority, though, and the main question was about general offline use, i suppose.
I understand your opinion. I'm not part of the project staff, but it seems to me that it isn't in the purpose of marble to integrate a renderer for OSM data … but maybe I'm wrong.
Hi, we have plans for supporting OSM live rendering in the future. However we plan to do this as part of the Marble framework (without reusing other libraries).
Wow! I'm eager to see these features :-) If your ambition are realistic, marble is an amazing project. Thank you.
Well, using the osmannotate plugin (which you need to compile yourself) you can load osm files as a wireframe model already. And yes, Marble is an amazing project ;-)