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WorldMaps202608v3 released: fixes for Nasser/Assuan Lake as well as for parts of Norway coast and islands (65N/12E area)

It's been quite a while since last OAM World Maps update – for a reason: to establish a backup for and share work between Christian and I, implementation on my environment that differs from Christian's had to be done. WSL 2 on my end instead of Windows 10, WSL instabilities, and – worst of all – Intel CPU instabilities with random errors (13th Gen excess voltage issue) took many weeks of work; to understand the root causes, then fix. Once the system proved stable I was able to create a full set of OAM vector maps (the published ones are produced by Christian, with very few exceptions). I also added a few OAM vector maps (Nunavut, Greenland and Antarctica), to eliminate previous map source inconsistencies. So, here we are with the OAM World Maps:
– Their base maps are OAM vector maps built on the new WLS 2 system.
– Nunavut, Greenland and Antarctica are additional OAM vector maps now (not yet published).
– Now Tobias' Elements theme is used for the Arctic and Antarctica
– The world maps from zoom level 3 to 8 now use GEBCO bathymetry data for ocean depth shading. From downloading the data at https://www.gebco.net/data-products/gridded-bathymetry-data to the finished maps, it took only a few hours with the help of Claude Sonnet.

Any findings pls. report in the OAM forum. Thank you.
Michael

Nightly copies from staging to the public OAM page are running again!

v2 update:
- Thanks to Igor Brejc's help about Maperitive (he's the developer), truncated or omitted names are now a thing of the past; initially implemented for capital cities and other cities and settlements.
- The two Asia ZL12 maps now extend to 60 North, covering more major Siberian cities and Kamchatka peninsula.

!! currently only the torrents have the January update, the website is providing the Oct 2025 release (transfer process to public site broken for now) !!

These are the news:
- The complete OAM background for ZL 8 and above is now based on Christian's January 2026 OAM vector maps release.
- While more (100/200km) isolated peaks are getting OSM entries over time, also the algorithm for finding the missing ones needed some fixes and optimizations. In particular as the initial grid needed to be much denser than in my initial approach. Now, after months of computing the results are available in the world and regional maps, with 200 more peaks missing in OSM that have 100 resp. 200 km of isolation.
Enjoy
Michael

These are the news:
- The complete OAM background for ZL 8 and above is now based on Christian's October 2025 OAM vector maps release.
- After one and a half years, the selection and prioritization of settlements (cities, towns, villages, etc.) was recalculated once again.
  As settlements are increasingly defined as relations in OSM, but in an inconsistent manner (even inside one country, let alone between different countries ...), an extension of the algorithm was necessary ("Why is Grävenwiesbach missing in ZL 9?" was my eye-opener for the problem). And there were many more to be fixed.
- In summer 2025 Vietnam changed its province structure - the capital layer has been adapted accordingly.

Release notes 202507-V1

- The complete OAM background for ZL 8 and above is now based on Christian's June 2025 OAM vector maps release.
- After one and a half years, the selection and prioritization of settlements (cities, towns, villages, etc.) was recalculated once again.
Settlements are increasingly defined as relations in OSM, but in an inconsistent manner. Thus, an extension of the algorithm was necessary (,,Why is Grävenwiesbach missing in ZL 9?" was my eye-opener to the problem).

Enjoy!
Cheers
Michael

May update: Release notes 202501-V6
- OAM background for Europe now from Christian's new (May) maps
- motorway labels horizontal again

April update: Release notes 202501-V4
- OAM background for Europe now from Christian's new (April) maps
- Restricted areas are now visible from ZL 8 for Europe, too

March update: Release notes 202501-V2
- The complete OAM background for ZL 8 and above is now based on Christian's March 2025 OAM vector maps release.
- Restricted areas (shoot first, ask later - they can be bigger than small states in some places) are now included from ZL 8 onwards (in Europe from ZL 10 for now, waiting for next round of vector map generation).

Happy to announce that the new set of maps is available on the OAM web site https://www.openandromaps.org/en/downloads/general-maps.

These are the major news:
- The complete OAM background for ZL 8 and above is now based on Christian's January 2025 OAM vector maps release.
- Ferry lines and curated energy sources (wind, solar etc.) are now based on January 2025 OSM data, too.
  As the solar boom in residential areas has flooded the maps in some places with "S" signs, I heavily restricted that display to larger solar installations.
  A look behind the scenes:
   - from early 2024 the OSM solar entries rose from a bit more than 2m to nearly 3.5m, i.e. nearly doubling in less than a year.
   - the newly introduced clip level (no points at all, larger panel areas only) took out nearly 2.5m entities from display.
- MBTiles maps have a map center set (again); for the world maps this is near Antarctica to keep them out of "nearest map" lists. The map center for regional maps is (about) central to the respective region.
- Also peaks with high isolation are computed based on the January OSM data.
  Doing some QA by comparing to results from August 2024 I found quite a number of peaks that sit on places of earlier "virtual" peaks (based on Copernicus data). Not claiming influence by the world maps here; it's just nice to see.

Enjoy!

Release notes 202406-1.0

The OAM background from ZL 8 and up now is rendered from May/June 2024 edition of Christian's OAM vector maps (incl. Near East, for which the OSM vandalism repair seems completed).

In less densely populated areas, not every – even significant – peak has a name, and even if it does, such a peak is far from being in OSM. Based on the 30m Copernicus DEM, I have identified peaks with a dominance of 100km or 200km for all continents except Antarctica. If one of these peaks does not have a known peak in its vicinity in OSM, it is displayed in these new world maps as 'Loc.HP' (for 200 km isolation) or as 'loc.HP' (for 100 km isolation), in each case with the coordinate (2 decimals) and its altitude. There are a bit more than 1000 of these.

So if a user knows a name for such a 'local high point', please enter it in the OSM database so that I can replace the (virtual) auxiliary summit with the real OSM summit in the next release of the maps. I expect that in the vastness of northern Canada, Alaska and Siberia as well as the tropical rainforests, many of them will remain nameless. But they are still relatively high and isolated 🙂

Those are the changes:
- The OAM background from ZL 8 up now is rendered from the July 2023 edition of Christian's OAM vector maps (YES, OAM goes on - thank you, Christian!).
- Increased and earlier visibility of offshore energy and power sources for ZL 4 to 8, while reducing visibility of the land based installations for those low zoom levels.
Have a good time
Michael

Those are the changes since summer:
- The OAM background from ZL 8 up now is rendered from the Oct edition of the OAM vector maps.
- Wind turbines could overcrowd and hide streets and other useful information in ZL 9 - 11. Now a grid based grouping into "WP" is used, substituting all turbines in the respective tile (~4km for ZL 9-10, ~2km for ZL 11). Offshore farms show all turbines as available in OSM.
Enjoy - maybe only couch surfing this time of the year :-)
Cheers
Michael

https://www.openandromaps.org/en/downloads/general-maps

Release notes 202207-1.3
- The OAM background from ZL 8 up now is rendered from the July edition of the OAM vector maps.
- Locus download script for ZL 11 World map corrected.

Release notes 202207-1.2
- Explanation of map categories and download options added before the download table.
Release notes 202207-1.1
- Multiple identical labels for some solar and wind farms are combined to one for each. Corrected label multiple instances to one. Only 6 maps that contain Europe ZL 11 are affected.

Those are the news from version 202207-1.0:
- OAM base maps updated to May 2022 for Europe and to April 2022 version for the rest of the world.
- After a longer break the ferry connections for ZL 6 and 7 are updated as well as the energy productions (following respective lists from Wikipedia).
- The regional addon and overlay maps are unified: OAM-W1-7-EP8-12-J80.mbtiles (as an example) contains the world up to +/- 85 latitude and ZL 7 as well as a large chunk of Europe from ZL 8 to 12 consecutively. Hence those maps can be used independantly as well as an overlay. Also, now it's only 21 maps and 70 GBs (instead of 110 GB).
- Up to ZL 12 all maps consist of tiles in JPG 80% quality, a real progress compared to the former 60% of the addon maps and somewhat better than the 70% of the earlier world maps. File sizes increase reasonably, wich in over-compensated by the storage capacity increases of recent years. For ZL 13 a quality of 70% is used.
- The maps can be grouped as:
     - world maps ZL 8 to 11; JPG 80%; MBTiles
     - world maps ZL 10 and 11; PNG format; sqlitedb (for apps that cannot handle MBTiles)
     - regional maps up to ZL 11 (all continents), 12 (large parts of Europe) and 13 (smaller segments of Europe); JPG 80% resp. 70%; MBTiles
     The MBTiles world maps are available as direct downloads for Locus and Orux apps; all groups can be downloaded manually, too.
   
Enjoy - and feel free to comment.

Michael