Using MOBAC to Create my map of China on Orux

Hey Guys,

I'm planning a bicycle trip around China and we will be going all over the country for 2 years. We are pretty close to leaving, except we are having so much trouble getting offline maps.

I've spent almost every second of every day trying to download maps on Mobile Atlas Creator so I can put it on Orux Maps. I have no idea how to use selection coordinates. The Map Source I'm using is Google Maps China. I want to download all the zoom levels. If that isn't possible, I can settle for whatever is legible enough. For Layer settings, I have no idea what to use. I read somewhere that I should use 512 by 512 and the tile format should be JPEG - quality 85. The Atlas Content Section is probably very important, but I really don't know how to set it up. I couldn't find any step by step process how to use it. The atlas settings format I'm using is Orux Maps Sqlite. From what I've read, if you are an orux map user, its best to use orux map sqlite so that it reads more clearly on the android phone. And the last section, tile store coverage, I have no idea what that is or how to use it.

When I click create map, it says that i selected way too many tiles. Then I deselect a lot of zoom levels and even if I'm downloading 19 tiles, the same message still pops up. On my other friend's computer, it doesn't say that message. It says an error has occurred.

I have to admit that I'm not very good with using computers so if someone can give me instructions, you would have to explain like you were talking to a 5 year old, haha. I know that MOBAC and Orux maps works from what people said. Its not working for me and its stressing me out like crazy. Can someone out there please explain to me what to do in an organized step by step process. I would greatly appreciate it.

Sorry for complaining. I'm just dying to get this thing to work.

Hi

Making an offline map needs a bit of work.
You will need to make some choices on how you want your map, it is not 100% automated.
So try to be zen , have 2 hours of free time in front of you for sorting this out.

Ready ? Okay, here we go.

Some basics first:
don't touch "Selection coordinates"
don't touch "Layer Settings" (leave it uncheck and grayed out)
don't touch "Map Source Tile storeCoverage"
don't touch "Saved Profiles"
close GPX Panel (menu Panels->Show/hide GPX)
Current zoomlevel is displayed at the top-left.

-Make sure you have plenty of space available on the hard drive, where you installed MOBAC. more than 5 or 10 Gb free. China is big .

-select Googmaps China in Map source
-navigate with right-click&drag, until you see the whole area you want (whole china). zoom in/out with the mouse wheel. (It will probably be zoom 5 or 6)
-Check that the tiles are correctly displayed. no red cross error. If it fails, stop right here.
-uncheck all zoomlevels
-uncheck Layer settings / Recreate map tiles (never check this one)

-This step is the most important.
by zooming with the mouse wheel and navigating with right-click, select the zoomlevels that you need. Don't check all !
China is not the primary country for the american Google Maps You should see that zoom levels above 12 or 13 are totally irrelevant.
You should also see that you can skip zoomlevels. for example, the zoomlevels 8 and 9 contains basically the same information, no new cities, no new roads. so pick the 8 and not the 9.
zoomlevel 11 should be enough. the 12 doesn't add anything new, you decide which to keep and which to discard. The more you discard the better !
At the end of this phase, you should have a list of zoomlevels that are important for you, something like 2,4,6,8,11 or whatever.
( If you want better precision for big cities, you can make other maps later, one precise map for each big city )
-check thoses zoomlevels in Zoom Levels

-press New in Atlas Content and select Oruxmaps Sqlite, or Rmaps SQLite, both format should work with oruxmaps.
-Zoom-out until you see the whole area, China , don't look at thezoomlevel you're in, that's does not matter. only the checked zoomlevels does.
-Select an area with left-click&drag. Be very careful to select just what you need! it's directly related to the size of your map. I recommend using the standard Rectangle Selection (Menu Maps->Selection Mode)
-In Atlas Content, enter a Name, like ChinaMap or anything, then click Add Selection

-click Create Atlas. uncheck "Ignore errors".
Follow closely the progress ! If it is so important for you , don't do anything else with the computer, close every programs running... and check every now and then.
It should not be too fast. It can takes hours depending on your connection speed.
If you encounter an error, there is some workarounds but let's not get confused with it now.

May the force be with you... If you still get some errors, please post a screenshot, or be more precise about it.

Some time in the future, I'll be planning a bicycle tour in china too (but much shorter), You will stay 2 years there ? will you visit Mongolia or SE asia too ?

Yip ("customer service" of MOBAC in oruxmaps forums ?!?! )

If you don't know what exactly is a zoomlevel, this might help:

++ Google ZoomLevel - Map Scale (very approximative)
++ 9 - 1:600,000
++ 10 - 1:300,000
++ 11 - 1:150,000
++ 12 - 1:75,000
++ 13 - 1:40,000
++ 14 - 1:20,000
++ 15 - 1:10,000
++ 16 - 1:5,000
++ 17 - 1:2,500

If you do some road cycling, you know that a paper map with a scale of 1:200,000 is precise enough.
For mountain trekking, 1:40,000 is a classic.
Small village tourist maps on the streets can be up to 1:5,000
a zoomlevel 17 is like having a paper map of 1:2,500. It doesn't even exists in real life. unless maybe for architects plans ?
It's very approximative but it gives a idea.

Hello Yip,

Thanks so much for the help. I'm now able to download the maps. Regarding the trip, I will be doing a documentary with two friends, riding bicycles around china, surviving on 20RMB ($3 equivalent). We want to be on the road for two years, but we are 100% committed to the first year. We will see about the 2nd. We've been planning this trip over the last 9 months and we leave in the next couple weeks. Its going to be legendary. I would love to get your contact information to keep you posted with the trip. It would be great if you could come visit and join us for some of the trip and then I can introduce you as the person who got our whole map figured out. We are trying to get as many visitors as we can during our adventure.

For MOBAC, the process we've been using is start downloading with China zoomed at 4. Then as we zoom more we are downloading maps for each province. We want to make sure we can zoom in as close as possible, so that when we are in mountainous areas, we can see the hidden roads and stuff. Do you have any further suggestions for me? What is your recommendation for keeping my folders organized and what not?

Hello again,

Wow what a challenge! What kind of documentary will it be ? about the journey itself or about another subject ? It is said that life is cheap there but still. I'm planning a russian cycling trip once again this year, but it's too cold for now so I was thinking about beginning the trip on the coastal China, moving north towards Russia as the spring and summer sets in. nothing near your performance: 3 months max
I definately would like to hear from your trip, check your PM

Glad to know that you managed to harness the software !

About zoomlevels
for each map you make, my advice is to always check levels 2-3-4-5-6(-7), it weights next to nothing in terms of size, and can be useful to quickly go back to china on the world map.
They will be redondant on every map but it is easier this way. Especially if your touchscreen goes amok in the rain and point you in Antarctica.

Again, if you want to zoom in as much as possible, you should really rule-out some zoomlevels in-between. If you're going down to zoom 15, it contains obviously more info than zoom 14. so you don't need zoom 14, it's redundant. and so on.
Outside of cities, Some zoomlevels are only there for a smooth zoom user experience. who cares ? we care about data, not smoothness!
Only keep a few, milestone, zoomlevels. The ones that really add something.
If you do that, you can shrink your maps size in half, which means bring more maps, or more precise, at no loss of information.

About organizing
If I were you, I would organize as following
two kind of maps:
-Area map (for cycling in the countryside) up to zoomlevel 12 or 13 (maybe more)
-Cities map (for navigating in the cities) up to zoomlevel 16 or 17 (maybe more)

Area may or may not be Provinces. It may be "ChinaSE" "ChinaSW" ... In the map world, everything is rectangular. so it may be more relevant to have big rectangular areas instead of curved provinces. I'm pretty sure 3 or 4 big rectangular maps can provides everything. avoid having dozens of area maps.

in total, If you have more than 10 maps or so, when you upload your maps, put them in folders on the sdcard of OruxMaps, like:
-oruxmap/mapfiles/Cities/
-oruxmaps/mapfiles/areas/
So its access is easier in Oruxmaps menu.

If size of maps is not a concern, (you have a big SDcard), you can make maps up to 2gb per map (may be possible for bigger size, check the oruxmaps manual).
Make a first map of an area, with the zoomlevels you have chosen, if it is 200Mb, add one useful zoomlevel ... and re-create the map...
Note that oruxmaps take the same time for loading a 10Mb map or a 2Gb one.
Note that MOBAC keeps on your computer all the tiles already fetched, so re-create a map is a quick thing. (Menu Settings->tile store->enable tile store and Tile Update-> never/never/never)

About Map Providers:
I hope for you Google Map coverage in China is more reliable than it is in Russia.
One thing that helped me when I was cycling there was to have different providers of maps for the same area.
For example, I use Navitel, Yandex, and Google.
About Russia, Google is way behind and contains unbelievable errors. Yandex have medium quality, Navitel is the best reliable source.
By using multiple providers, I could cross check the info. It is most true for remote areas.
Some maps providers relentlessly includes old soviet-era roads that have disappeared long ago as if they were paved highways, other included bridges that never existed and so on. it's a mess...
One time, I even made a map with Google Sat view. It was of some use to locate the sometime rare remote forests for camping ... those forest did not appeared on the other maps.
(Mind you, a sattelite photo map is about 10 time the size of a normal map).

yip

Once again Yip, you have been a huge help. I have a couple of new questions.

1. We are currently in Beijing. One of my friends is telling me that if we download maps in Beijing, the Chinese servers will mess with the map so its slightly off. Do you think I should instruct a friend in the US to download the maps for me on the US server? or do you think its fine for us to download it ourselves while in China?

2. You mentioned for Russia, you used maps from Yandex or Nivetel. For China, there is a localized map I can used called Baidu Maps. How am I able to download Baidu maps on MOBAC

3. For some reason, when I click create atlas, a message will pop up and say Atlas Download prohibited. It says Mobile Atlas Creator has detected you are trying to download an extra ordinary large atlas with a very high number of tiles. Please reduce the selected areas on the high zoom levels and try again. Whats frustrating with that message is that I will substantially reduce the zoom levels so its only 700 tiles and it will still give me the same message. Are their any tricks to fix this problem?

I got another error when downloading the map. Read Below:

An unexpected exception occurred (IOException)
Please report a ticket in the bug tracker on SourceForge.net Please include a detailed description of your performed actions before the error occurred.
Be sure to include the following information:
(The following text has already been copied to your clipboard.)

Version: Mobile Atlas Creator 1.8
Platform: Windows 7 (6.1) (windows)
Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (1.6.0_34-b04)
Mapsources rev: 1312

Error hierarchy:
IOException: null

#############################################################

java.io.IOException
at mobac.program.atlascreators.OruxMapsSqlite.initLayerCreation(OruxMapsSqlite.java:96)
at mobac.program.AtlasThread.createAtlas(AtlasThread.java:166)
at mobac.program.AtlasThread.run(AtlasThread.java:106)

#############################################################

About the error you report, see this post by orux :
https://oruxmaps.forumotion.com/t902-porque-ha-dejado-de-funcionarme-el-mobile-atlas-creator

also, you may want to use the latest MOBAC, 1.9.10, on the official website.
To keep your current maps sources, before upgrading, save the "mapsources" subdirectory in a safe place, and restore it.

1. It seems Google Map China (ditu) have servers located in china, and google maps straight are US ones. both seems to provide the same data, but in mandarin for the "ditu" server, in plain english for the normal server. so it depends on what you want.
see wikipedia page about the differences: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#Google_Ditu
I would say, beeing in Beijing or US won't change anything beside connection speed/blockade issues... What's may matters here is which service you choose: Gmap classic or Gmap Ditu. Where you are is not important (I think).

2. Baidu use a weird mapping scheme. I fear it is not compatible with mobac. As I'm also interested for a future trip, I will post in the "GPS&Datums" forum the work in progress, if any.

3. How large is the area it concerns (half of china, tenth of china ...)? with which zoomlevels ? 700 tiles is few. it should work.
try to update MOBAC (see above) or check the mapsize is set to max (menu Settings->MapSize->1049575)
Last resort, try to create a "Rmaps sqlite" instead of "oruxmaps sqlite", like I said, it's compatible with oruxmaps.

Heh, I've plenty of time on my hands these days, , so it's a pleasure

Hey Yip,

So I downloaded the the most recent version 1.9.10, but now for the map source, there is barely any options. There are no google map options. All I see is chartbundle and openstreet, more or less. I downloaded MOBAC from the sourceforge website. I didn't understand what you meant by restore the map sources from the previous version. I checked the folders and didn't see anything that would lead me to restoring the map

Sorry I wasn't explaining well
in other words, to restore your previous map sources :

Go to your old mobac directory, the 1.8 version.
copy the sub-directory "mapsources"
Go to the new mobac directory, 1.9.10.
Paste . confirm & replaces all files.

It's a "windows" step.That's basic copy&paste.

If you do not have anymore the old mobac lying around, you're in trouble (but all is not lost!).

edit: oops my fault. I forgot. mobac 1.8 didn't had a mapsources directory. wait a min, I am sending you the needed stuff.

yip wrote:press New in Atlas Content and select Oruxmaps Sqlite, or Rmaps SQLite, both format should work with oruxmaps.

yip wrote:Last resort, try to create a "Rmaps sqlite" instead of "oruxmaps sqlite", like I said, it's compatible with oruxmaps.

Hi yip, I tried the Rmaps sqlite but it didn't work in Oruxmaps. Rmaps sqlite is a single file with .sqlitedb extension, and the table structure is different, and the data stored in table 'tile' is also different.

I use MobAC to create oruxmaps sqlite, it's much slower than creating rmaps sqlite db (for example, 2 minutes vs a few seconds). And the final oruxmaps sqlite db file is around double size of rmaps sqlite.
Maybe something wrong with MobAC? or because oruxmaps format need much more time to combine image files?

Glepkoff127:

Awsome plan - When will you be in/around Guangzhou? A friend of me and I cycle quite often and did some longer trips in Guangdong/Guangxi as well.
Get in touch if you want to meet up or get some advices.

About the slightly off maps:
I needed to use Locus (other software) with the add on for defining an "map offset" so get my position right.
Accoring to Chinese law or similar, there are no correct maps that could be viewed online of China. So you'll notice the offset at the borders.

Chris80 wrote:Glepkoff127:
Accoring to Chinese law or similar, there are no correct maps that could be viewed online of China. So you'll notice the offset at the borders.

You may try the google satellite/hybrid, it's accurate in China.
For google maps, there is an offset, different from place to place, usually a few hundred meters.