Announcement: version r3116 is a major upgrade for routing

There have been almost no changes to how mkgmap deals with routing for several years now. So I am very happy to announce that the latest version of mkgmap now saves much improved routing information to the map. This allows better routes to be calculated and over longer distances in many cases.

Although there are no deliberate backward incompatibilities, if you have a heavily customised style, you should carefully examine any workarounds to force particular routing behaviour as it may no longer be necessary or may work differently now.

Also the new version improves the fidelity of features on the map, such as roundabouts and parallel lines. It happens that positions can only be represented to within 1-2 meters in a Garmin map, whereas positions are recorded much more accurately than that within OSM. So some approximation is necessary, however this was made worse since mkgmap would reduce the precision right at the beginning, allowing errors to build up as the data was manipulated. Now the extra accuracy is kept throughout all processing until the map data is written and care is taken to preserve angles so that lines that are meant to be parallel are more likely to stay that way and are less likely to cross or appear to cross.

Both these improvements were added by Gerd.

[ Updated: modified to say that roundabouts and parallel lines are a better example of improvement than buildings. Buildings will be improved in a subsequent update ]