Release date: 13th May 2015

Changeset: 4926 (efa659079cbf)

Previous release: 3.2, 26th January 2015

Major changes since the previous release

Makemap can import postcodes from geonames

You can use /input=XX.txt on the makemap command line, where XX is the country code, to import postcodes from geonames.org. For the UK, change the extension of the CSV file to TXT.

Route instructions in English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish

Set the locale using the framework's SetLocale or setLocale function depending on platform. The route instructions, in the language of the selected locale if available, or English if not, are available in two forms: (i) route segment instructions in each route segment apart from those which are trivial continuations of the previous segment, and (ii) turn by turn instructions in the Turn objects returned when navigating.

Large file support

The makemap tool can now create .CTM1 files larger than 2Gb. To allow files larger than 4Gb (up to 1Tb), use the command line option /largefile=yes. CartoType detects and reads large files automatically, without any need to tell it whether a file is large or not. Limitation: files larger than 4Gb cannot yet be read on Android devices.

One consequence of this is that object IDs used to identify map objects, which are, in the case of CTM1 files, offsets in the file, are now 64-bit integers.

Toll roads

You can now add a weighting to a route profile to disfavour toll roads. The total length of the part of the route that is over toll roads can be obtained from the Route object.

New import rules and style sheets make map drawing much faster

The new import rules and style sheets speed up map drawing by ensuring that most layers are intended or use either at small scales, medium scales and large scales. These layers take the suffixes /major, /mid and /minor respectively. The system avoids searching through large numbers of items that will not actually be drawn, when loading objects at small scales (zoomed out).

Lower run-time RAM footprint

Only one level of the full-text index is now loaded into memory by default (this is configurable). This lowers run-time RAM use by typically tens or hundreds of Mb, and results in almost no loss of speed when searching.

Height data can be used for very large maps

You can now create a map of a large area such as China with shaded relief created from USGS SRTM height data. Formerly that wasn't possible on some platforms, including Windows, because makemap tried to open all the files at once and ran up against limits on the number of file handles. Now makemap opens the files one by one and there is no limit.

Create routes without starting navigation

Route objects can be created independently of navigation; that is, without either starting navigation or displaying the route on the map. These routes can be exported as XML if required.

Traffic data

Traffic information consisting of speed restrictions or complete prohibitions of traffic, for polygons, circles, areas defined by roads, or specific roads, can now be added or removed at run-time, and is taken into account in routing.

The new .makemap import rules system

There is a new mini-language to control the way OpenStreetMap and ESRI shapefile data is imported by makemap. It is an XML format, as before, and uses the file extension .makemap. It is more powerful and easier to understand than the previous systems, and is the same for both OSM data and shapefiles. You can write out a copy of the new standard OSM rules using makemap /writerules=3.