[OSM-talk] footnav: 3D visualisation tool for OSM data: updates

[Nick Whitelegg]

A few updates to "footnav", the 3D OSM visualisation tool aimed at 
countryside (and eventually mobile, in the field) use.

The main development  is that it will now read in OSM data and overlay it 
on the SRTM data, using bilinear interpolation. This mostly works, but 
there are issues to do with ways "tunnelling through" the terrain, so a 
more sophisticated algorithm will be needed to ensure that the rendered 
way always intersects with the edges of the SRTM quadrilaterals.

The sourceforge project page is http://footnav.sourceforge.net. 
Incidentally the sourceforge RSS feed relating to the project seems to be 
broken, the most recent news is revision 5 on Sep 18th, yet I've made 3 
revisions since then, one earlier today.

If you go to the SVN repository:

http://footnav.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/footnav/

you download a .tar.gz file of the source (see bottom of page).

The readme file contains info on how to test. As I mentioned before it 
does need a fast graphics card: performance is reasonably good with a 
whole .hgt file (1 degree x 1 degree) on a Mac Book Pro with Nvidia 9400 
running Ubuntu 9.04. Performance under OS X 10.5 is actually slower than 
under Linux... so much for Apple optimising their OS for the hardware, and 
the Ubuntu wiki saying you have to re-compile the kernel to get the most 
out of the graphics card!

It's not tested under Windows but ought to work.

Incidentally I'm wondering if it would be a good idea to have an "apps" 
OSM mailing list where people can announce updates to apps using OSM data, 
and discuss development of such apps.

Nick