Wednesday, February 26th, 2014 at 10:52 pm by ba3 — Category: News

The new Altus Mapping Engine Android Release is now available. Get it here. Here are some of the highlights of this new version:

• The Android version is now 20% faster when rendering tiles, etc. This is made possible by streamlining the internal resource management system so that it consumes less CPU time.
• The virtual vector map system has been exposed.  You can use this system with your own custom vector data sources. It provides a way for you to have vector data in any format, and to pass it into the Mapping Engine for rendering.Think about it this way: if you have a database or file full of custom vector data describing a map, the Altus Mapping Engine will ask you specifically for the pieces it needs to display right now. You can pass the data in as vector tiles that you fill on the fly.
• We also have a demo of the virtual vector map system to show you how to use it. The demo takes data from a vector server provided by Mike Migurski. He set up a Mapnik tile server that delivers data in the GeoJSON vector format instead of raster tiles. The demo takes vectors from Mike’s server and feeds them into Altus. [Note that the demo is a bit sluggish. Why? The GeoJSON format adds overhead because the vector data is in human readable form. Plus this is a feed rich in data. Thus it is gigantic (on the order of 1 megabyte per vector tile). It takes time to parse a data stream this large.] You can learn more about this demo here:
  • PDF file that describes BA3′s virtual vector map system
  • Mike Migurski’s description of his Mapnik Vector Tiles
  • Michal Migurski’s blog post entitled “Tiled Vectors in Mapnik”
• All third party dependencies have been removed to improve portability. We can build cleanly on every platform. This means it is now possible to do x86 Android builds of Altus.
• An important bug fix for markers has been installed, along with several other stability improvements.
• We included an MBTiles addition to give you finer grain control of MBtiles raster maps on device.

Here are two screenshots showing Michal Migurski’s data in Altus using the virtual vector map system:

If you try out this demo, please understand that it is a bit slow, and that slowness comes from the very large size of the GeoJSON stream. If you are interested in a high performance solution for your vector data, contact us - we can show you much faster ways to handle vectors in Altus.