Customise Limits of "Colour By Slope"

[Dollarius]

I find the new "colour by slope" feature for routes to be very useful! However, the colourscale is fixed (by default) to the range -25% and +100%. While this choice works (reasonably) well for hiking, I find it very limiting for road cycling. When cycling on the road, I would like to fix the range to something like -10% -> +20%, as paved roads above 20% gradient are very rare. Also, a gradient of even 2-3% is rather important and it would be nice to see it on the map.

Would it be possible to allow to manually set the range of the colourscale for each route? Thank you very much for the help! Giordano

[tradavyvy]

I think the same goes for car routes. At least for my (35 year old) motorhome, wich is severely speed-limited on gradients over +10% and simply stalls at +20%. Davy

[scaidermern]

There is a new coloring scheme suggested in #11775 / #12336. It makes slope changes in the lower range more clear. Maybe there is additional room for improvement.

[letypequividelespoubelles]

Suggested in #11975 too, but for the whole slope overlay (very usefull for planning ski trip to avoid avalanche). Maybe both could be done at the same time?

[anastasiia936]

Request from user: Please make the "customize route line" gradient option more relevant to heavy vehicles by showing more colors to differentiate down hill slope at, say, 4%, 8%, 12%, 16% 20% and 25%. Anything greater than 25% slope is meaningless to any motor vehicle. White is the worst color for zero gradient since it blends in with white streets, and becomes completely unreadable when the map switches to night viewing mode.

[michaelblyons]

I think there's a good case for customizations per routing profile. There may be trouble making a useful UI for it on a phone screen, though. 😉 To bring together some of the use cases mentioned:

• Car
• Vehicle with towing/caravan
• Skis
• Road bicycle
• Mountain bike
• Hiking
• Walking
• Snowmobile
• ATV/Motocross motorcycle

And different people will have different thresholds for each activity.

[letypequividelespoubelles]

There may be trouble making a useful UI for it on a phone screen, though.

What about UI proposed in #11975 ? I think it's very easy to customize the slope display for each profile with it !

[michaelblyons]

What about UI proposed in https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/11975 ?

Good question. I don't think it's sufficient. The slope underlay/overlay limits are 0% to 60% (or something like that), where routes with directionality could be -100% to +100% or pretty close.

• You'd need the extra color spectrum to cover more space. For routing, it's currently -25% 🟢 ⚪ 🟡 🟠 🔴 🟣 100%.
• I'm not sure how much color variation you need for negative slopes, but 🟢 to ⚪ seems insufficient. Presumably at least some level of steep downhill needs a "warning" color. Outdoor sports and towing probably all need this. Maybe walking, too.
  • See #12336 for one suggestion.
  • There could be a single spectrum, a couple selectable options, or a whole builder.
  • 🟣 🔵 🟢 ⚪ 🟡 🟠 🔴 symmetrical
  • ⚫ 🟢 ⚪ 🟡 🟠 🔴 🟣 up-focused
  • ⚫ 🔴 🟠 🟡 🟢 ⚪ 🔵 🟣 down-focused
• The midpoint might also need to be adjustable. This is a skiing thing that I'm less sure about. Does a skier want ⚪ to be 0% or some other baseline like -3%?
• Some activities might like more color compression at the extremes versus a straight expansion of the color spectrum onto 0%-X%. (This is like in your mockup, there is the same distance between 0% and 3% as 3% to 10%.)
• With these considerations, is the small axis of a phone screen enough room to drag the color bars from -100 to +100? Maybe instead text entry for Minimum, (optionally) Midpoint, and Maximum slope would be better, with a preview underneath.

[Aambro]

Is there a temporary solution to override default values in xml file?

[vshcherb]

@Aambro Unfortunately no :-( It's hardcoded https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/blob/master/OsmAnd-java/src/main/java/net/osmand/router/RouteColorize.java#L47. Probably it could be free customized or some different styles to select generated. Not sure if rendering style is a good place for that. GPX itself might be better

[Jon-Murray]

The main issue I am facing with this, as someone else has mentioned earlier, is that white just doesn't work well at all for navigation in practise. What michaelblyons has suggested would work well, but for me there's simply too much variation. In a "normal" setting for cycling, the majority of roads would be somewhere between 0, +-3% gradient. Currently, this means the majority of my ride I'd end up looking at a white line. With the default osmand map, this makes it really hard to read.

I've attached two screenshots, one using the white "slope" and the other using the green "elevation":

The slope is hard to see here, albeit a bit contrived to illustrate my point. However, trying to birds-eye navigate this when my phone is out in front of me on a sunny day makes it extremely difficult (white on white/light grey surroundings). Basically, i'm just trying to write a really longwinded request to not make white the default, but instead go for green (or blue/grey/configurable). Purple being a negative gradient is a great idea, as it would free up the "green". I'd just remove white as an option altogether if it were up to me.

Cheers

[michaelblyons]

Jon's point is well-taken. May I suggest this spectrum without white:

• ⚫ 🟣 🔵 🟢 🟡 🟠 🔴 ⚫

Assuming that black is "too steep to use" on both ends, you can still have a symmetrical color spectrum.

[ferpg81]

Hi. I came to github to propose a feature like that for a gpx trace on the map, when selecting color by slope. @Jon-Murray explained it perfectly, when you ride a bike on the road, normal values for slopes are < 5%, and when climbing, maybe a 10-20%, that are very hard to do. You will never (or rarely) ride more than that. The effect is that during all your ride, you always see a white colour or maybe a slight yellow... It would be much appreciated if we could adjust colours limiting max and min values, like the screenshots on #11975, and/or having a default values for each profile (hiking, riding, etc.), and the possibility to select different palettes, as @michaelblyons said. Thanks a lot.

[anastasiia936]

Please add the ability to make the gradient line transparent so that you can see the street name on the map.

[michaelblyons]

In case you are only subscribed to this issue and not #12336, Victor has indicated that they're working on this! 🥳

[vshcherb]

Probably instead of special UI (which would take quite some time & efforts) we could use colorization plugin similar to approach here https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/issues/6636

[vshcherb]

Today we've introduced color palette for user defined (https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd-resources/tree/master/color-palette). Task is not complete yet but should be ready to try. Files from color palette will be available in user folder (for export / import and editing). For example:

1. slope_default.txt is responsible for colors for Slope Terrain
2. slope_avalanche.txt is responsible for colors for Terrain Avalanche (new item will be added to the list)
3. route_slope_default.txt is responsible for colors for route in slope
4. height_altitude_0_200.txt is a new file which will color Terrain with colors of absolute altitude (so it should be a range of files that could be applicable for different regions) - dynamic scale is not planned yet.

We plan to improve selection for user palettes in settings and create plugins with some predefined palettes. Though we don't plan for now to create editor for the palette itself, probably later

[vshcherb]

Now it's possible to update existing palettes using import / export palette (and manually editing txt files). We're going to introduce inline palette editor later in the app